Riding Rockets (25 page)

Donna’s moment arrived in the summer of 1964. When the baby came there were no exclamations of joy, no rush to take photos for grandparents, no happy tears. Instead, the child was immediately taken away.

Yeah. I had it tough at West Point.

Donna returned home to distrustful parents who watched her like wardens. She had no future but what her mom and dad would allow.

Meanwhile, I had become adept at shooting an M-14 with laserlike precision, getting across a ten-foot-deep pool in full combat gear, and enduring the shit being pounded out of me in boxing class. But none of it helped in my quest to attract a girl. I retained the romantic IQ of a snail. On second thought, snails have no problem being attractive to other snails. I was something else, maybe an evolutionary dead end. My genes would never go forward. I was alone and unwanted.

On January 3, 1965, destiny decided to reintroduce Mike Mullane and Donna Sei. We were partying with family and friends at Donna’s cousin’s home. My yearling (sophomore) Christmas leave was ending and I had a plane to catch back to West Point. There is nothing more depressing than returning to West Point from a leave, particularly a Christmas leave. It’s akin to going back to prison or perhaps dying and going to hell, except this hell is cold and gray and more depressing than anything Beelzebub could ever dream up. To top it off, my girlfriend had dumped me earlier that day. When I say “girlfriend,” I exaggerate. I met her in my senior year of high school and throughout plebe year had pined for her. It was a one-way infatuation. To be “dumped” implies there was something that ended. There was not. It was more like she threatened to get a restraining order.

In my despair, I resorted to that cure of the ages, alcohol. There was plenty at the party and I drank to forget…to forget being alone and to forget a flight back into the ninth circle of hell. As the moment of departure approached, I walked outside to get away from the fun. I wasn’t having any and it was depressing to be around people who were. Donna observed my exit and minutes later followed me. We walked for a while making small talk about our friends and our new lives. Romance was nowhere on my mind—it was Donna who took the lead. She leaned into me and kissed me…on the lips, no less. And it was all her doing! I didn’t have to beg or plot. It was as if the sun had risen, West Point had slid into the Hudson River, and I was on infinite leave! I was in love…well, lust maybe, but it would do. Never in my young life had a girl shown any romantic interest in me. Never. I found heaven in Donna. She was a life preserver in the sea of my muddled adolescence and I grabbed her and held on for dear life.

Donna drove me to the airport, as I was in no condition to do so myself. As we parted, she kissed me again. It was all I could do not to propose marriage. She asked me for something to write her address on. SHE ASKED ME! Again, I didn’t have to beg. She
wanted
me to write. It was truly a night of firsts. I fumbled in my wallet for a piece of paper and found my Army Code of Conduct card, a card that detailed how a soldier was to act if captured by the enemy: “If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape, etc., etc.” Why I was carrying this, I have no idea, but if there was ever a signature of what a nerd I was, this was it—giving an Army Code of Conduct card to a girl to write her address on. Donna should have known right then and there what a doofus she was hooking up with.

How quickly one’s heart can change. Now I couldn’t wait to get back to West Point. I couldn’t wait to send a letter. I flew to Colorado Springs, where I connected with an Air National Guard flight to a field near West Point. The plane was filled with returning cadets who were slumped in their seats in near suicidal depression. But not me. As the C-97 droned eastward, I wore a permanent smile, the dopey smile of young love. Other cadets stared at me, certain I had lost it, certain at any moment I would rush the door and leap to my death. No sane cadet smiled while returning to the granite asylum.

I penned my first letter within an hour of arriving in my room. As I sealed the envelope, I stared at the photo of my imaginary girlfriend. I thought of how long I had defined happiness as getting this girl to love me, how long I had prayed she would send me letters (none ever came). As Garth Brooks sings, some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. I tossed the photo in the garbage.

Donna’s and my relationship continued through the mail. I sent out more letters than Publishers Clearing House. I needed continual assurance she was still there, that she wasn’t as imaginary as my prior girlfriend. Her letters arrived by the truckload. We had “known” each other for a total of two hours, yet in our correspondence, we each professed our everlasting love.

Donna’s entry into my life probably saved me from expulsion from the academy. While my academic grades were satisfactory, my “military bearing” was seriously lacking. I had loathed the hazing of plebe year, never understanding how it could possibly contribute to the development of a leader. (I still don’t.) Upperclassmen sensed my contempt for the tradition and I was rewarded with a steady stream of demerits for various infractions, such as scuffed shoes, unpolished brass, and failure to satisfactorily render plebe knowledge. As a yearling I was rated near the bottom of my class in leadership skills by senior cadets. I was certain some of those cadets interpreted my lack of zeal at enforcing the plebe system on the latest class as further evidence of my disdain for it. Before Christmas leave, I was warned by my tactical officer that I could be terminated if my attitude didn’t improve. My parents received a letter from that same officer, saying that I was floundering, and my dad called in an attempt to rally me. But I remained indifferent to the warnings. I was rudderless, not sure I even wanted to stay at West Point. Then Donna stepped into my life. In her I found clarity and focus. I had to succeed—not for myself, but for her. Almost overnight my attitude and behavior changed. While I’m certain my superiors thought it was their great leadership that had turned me around, it was really Donna. I still had discipline relapses, such as when I was caught skipping a senior class’s graduation ceremony, a transgression that earned me another tactical officer rebuke and forty-four hours of “walking the area” with a shouldered rifle, plus a two-month confinement to my barracks. But I was on the road to graduation, guided unerringly by a star two thousand miles away—Donna.

In February 1965, I sent her an “A-pin” (A for
Army
), which was West Point’s version of a fraternity pin. It was another blitzkrieg escalation of our relationship.

In March 1965, I flew home for a three-day spring leave. Donna and I were inseparable. We grew more emotionally—and physically—intimate. At age nineteen, at the Silver Dollar drive-in theater in the backseat of a 1954 Chevy Bel Air, I finally got to second base with a girl. It was also in this passion pit that Donna told me of her dark secret, that she had had a baby. I didn’t care. It didn’t change anything between us, I said. This might sound mature and noble except, at the time, I had my hand in her bra. She could have told me she was a whorehouse madam and it wouldn’t have mattered.

Then, as the dialogue of some forgotten film squealed and popped through the window-mounted speaker, I proposed marriage and Donna accepted. There was no ring, no romantic dinner, no months of wonderful anticipation. It was as spontaneous as a heartbeat. I was mad to legitimize my claim to this woman and
mad
was the correct word.

Much later in life Donna and I would recount a PG-13 version of this story to our teenage children and warn them that if they ever did what we did, we would kill them. It was insanity. We were engaged to be married after knowing each other for a total of three days and a hundred letters. I was marrying for sex. Donna was marrying to escape her parents.
Oh, yeah. This is gonna last.

For her birthday in 1965 I mailed Donna an engagement ring. That’s correct…I
mailed
it. I couldn’t wait until we were together again. This woman had become my life. I couldn’t let her escape. But marriage was going to have to wait until after my graduation, two long years away. West Point cadets were forbidden to be married.

We were able to wait for marriage, but not the honeymoon. On my summer leave of 1966—in my twentieth year of life—I finally slid into home plate with a girl. It happened in Donna’s bedroom. Her parents were away for a few hours, which established opportunity. Motive had long been raging. Two hours later Donna and I were in the confessional admitting our sin to the tobacco-breath shadow behind the curtain. The priest reminded me that having premarital sex was a violation of the temple of God (our bodies) and I would burn in everlasting fire if I didn’t change my ways. (I guess it was okay to smoke in God’s temple.) Donna and I shared the same kneeler as we prayed our penance and promised God that in the future we’d keep our hands and the rest of our bodies to ourselves. Even under penalty of losing our immortal souls, we couldn’t keep that promise. On every leave we’d end up in that Chevy, parked in a drive-in theater or the wilds of the desert, the windows steamed over and our sacred “temples” in rhythmic collision. The next day we’d be in the confessional hearing more dire warnings of hell-fire ahead. I have no doubt we frustrated that priest into a three-pack-a-day habit.

At my graduation from West Point I took a commission in the USAF, something I was permitted to do because my dad was a retired USAF NCO. But I was not released to the commissioning ceremony until my tactical officer made one last effort to get me to pledge my life to the U.S. Army. “Mr. Mullane, going into the air force is the dumbest thing you could ever do. Your background is all army. You’ll never get far in the air force.” Thank God I tuned him out.

Donna and I married one week later in the Kirtland AFB chapel in Albuquerque. She made a lovely bride. In high school she had never worn the tiara of the homecoming queen or the uniform of a cheerleader or played the lead in the senior class play. She didn’t possess the beauty of girls who typically captured those honors. But seen through the lens of my young love, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

Three of my West Point classmates served as groomsmen. We were all in uniform—they in their army dress blues and I in my black-tie air force livery. Military weddings are timeless. With the carefree smiles of youth and the lights glistening from our polished brass, the scene could have been lifted from WWII, or even a Civil War daguerreotype. We were still too intoxicated by our recent release from West Point to hear the guns of our war…Vietnam. But they were waiting for us. Mike Parr, one of my groomsmen, would be killed in action seventeen months later.

Donna and I took a honeymoon to someplace. I hardly recall where. We never left the sheets. I only remember that the rented room had hardwood floors and the bed was on castors. If there had been an odometer on the bed frame, the instrument would have recorded a couple thousand miles during our short stay. By the time we returned to Albuquerque, Donna was already morning sick, pregnant with twins. (This was before the days of ultrasound. We wouldn’t know she was carrying twins until two weeks prior to her delivery.) As we had done everything else, we had children spontaneously. There had been no real thought or discussion. We were Catholic. You got married and had kids. What was there to discuss?

In July 1967, we drove from Albuquerque to begin our life as military nomads. In that car was a social retard…me. It is true what cadets say about West Point: “It takes eighteen-year-old men and turns them into twenty-one-year-old boys.” Did it ever. I had learned to drive tanks and fire a howitzer and field-strip a machine gun, but I had never used a Laundromat or cooked a meal. I couldn’t dance. I had never written a check. I had never made a stock investment or shopped for a car or clothes or groceries. I had no clue about home ownership.

God only knew what this woman at my side saw in me. But throughout my journey toward the prize of spaceflight, Donna never wavered in her support. Even ten minutes into that drive from Albuquerque, she was there for me. I was still trying to come to grips with the fact that my bad eyesight had blocked me from pilot training and thrown me into navigator training instead. To be an astronaut I would have to be a test pilot and that wasn’t going to happen if I couldn’t get into pilot training. Donna knew how bitterly disappointed I was and gave me her shoulder to cry on. “It’ll all work out for the best, Mike. God has a plan. You’ll see.” That was Donna’s hallmark, the faith of the pope. She would turn every house we would ever occupy into a mini-Lourdes, with wall-mounted crucifixes and Virgin Mary statuary everywhere. In our bedroom she always had candles burning for one saint or another. She would send cash gifts to various orders of nuns and ask them to pray for us. Priests would get checks asking that they say Masses on our behalf. If the Mike Mullane family had a connection to God, it was certainly through Donna, not me.

A small cinder-block house on Mather AFB in Sacramento, California, was our first home. While we waited for our few possessions to catch up, we enjoyed Uncle Sam’s furniture. We sat on metal folding chairs and ate our meals off a card table and made love on a one-man canvas cot. It was the richest we’ve ever been. We had each other and that was all we needed.

My immediate goal was to graduate from navigator training into the backseat of F-4 Phantoms, so I worked like a Trojan to finish high in my class. It wasn’t going to be easy. Flight assignments were given in order of class rank, and the group was filled with Air Force Academy wizards who had been through much of the coursework during their academy years. But Donna was there for me. I would hang a sextant from a neighbor’s child’s swing and practice shooting three-star “fixes.” She would be at my side, teeth chattering in the cold night air, holding a flashlight to illuminate the instrument bubble chamber and recording my observations on a clipboard. When the twins were born on March 5, 1968, she assumed full parental duties to allow me to continue to focus on my studies. Never once did she hound me to get up for a 2
A.M
. feeding or wash the diapers or prepare formula. No new father of a single child, much less twins, had it as easy as I did.