Riding Rockets

From Mt. Home I was directed to Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. I would be flying with the 16th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron from Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Donna and the babies would wait out my tour in a Kirtland AFB house in Albuquerque. During my Christmas leave before departure we were initiated into the reality of war. A sobbing Jackie Greenalch called to tell us her pilot husband, a close friend from Mt. Home, had been shot down and killed while flying his RF-4C. He had been in-country only a few weeks. With this grim news hanging over us Donna drove me to the airport. We stopped for coffee at a doughnut shop and she cried while a teenage server gawked. The good-bye was made even more painful by the strains of “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane” coming from a back room radio. But there were no ultimatums or threats or pleading that I abandon the air force upon my return. She would give her all for me and my career, wherever it took us.

I returned from Vietnam in November 1969, and was transferred to RAF Alconbury in England, where I crewed RF-4Cs, now as part of the NATO forces confronting the Soviet Union. I continued to press air force HQ for entry into pilot training, but my requests were denied. Not only were my eyes a problem, but now I was too old. “Give it up, Lieutenant Mullane. Pilot training is out. It’s not going to happen for you” had been the personnel officer’s unvarnished assessment. Except for a handful of civilian scientists selected for the Apollo program, every NASA astronaut had been a test pilot. They had never selected a GIB—or guy in back—in fighter jets. At age twenty-six my dream of spaceflight had ended. When I told Donna of this final rejection, she was unbowed in her faith. “It will all work out for the best.”

England was a bittersweet four years for us. Every several months there were training accidents, some of which were deadly. We attended memorial services for Jim Humphrey and Tom Carr, killed in their takeoff crash. Another crew disappeared over the sea on a night mission. A pilot died when his Phantom caught fire.

But there was also the fun of traveling through Europe on our vacations. We left the kids with a nanny and rented a sailboat with two other couples and sailed the Aegean Sea for two weeks. We sipped wine while watching the rays of a setting sun pierce colonnaded ruins, and we swam in water as clear as space. While anchored in deserted coves and cloaked in nights so black we couldn’t see each other even while kissing, Donna and I made love as quietly as a prayer. We walked the streets of Rome and Edinburgh and Florence. We played in the snow in the Austrian Alps and watched London stage plays. On a visit to the coast of Spain, Donna became pregnant with our third child, daughter Laura. On this same trip I volunteered to take up a cape and fight a one-ton bull at an organized tourist function. Alcohol was involved in both moments.

Our European assignment was the first time Donna and I had enough long-term stability in our lives to really get to know each other. And two more different people have rarely been pledged in the banns of matrimony. Donna was a lady. She was polite, sober, and soft-spoken. I, on the other hand, was as coarse as a convict. The all-male experiences of West Point, the air force, and Vietnam made it impossible for me to form a sentence without the F word in it. I was loud, frequently obnoxious, and an out-of-control joker. On our sixth anniversary, at a squadron party, I presented Donna with a gift-wrapped painting. She was certain of the contents. For a year she had been hinting at how much she wanted an oil portrait done of her in her wedding dress. Not one to disappoint, I found an English artist, gave him a photo from our wedding, and asked him to capture Donna. But I also included a Polaroid photo of a topless Donna I had taken in our bedroom. I requested a watercolor of that shot too. It was the latter painting I first presented her at our anniversary party. She ripped into the wrapping, breathless to see herself in bridal splendor. When she peeled away the last paper and found two nipples staring her in the face, she nearly fainted. She clutched the painting to her body while the bewildered audience asked, “What did Mike give you?”