Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 18 Donna

A month prior to our June 25, 1984, launch date another milestone was passed. It wasn’t noted in any press release but it was significant all the same. At a crew dinner the wives selected two astronauts to be their family escorts. The expanded training hours in the homestretch to launch made all prime crewmembers absentee spouses and parents, so the astronaut office had created the family escort role to take some of the load off the families. They helped spouses deal with the logistics of traveling to KSC and the landing site. They helped with airline, rental car, and condo reservations and, in general, served as 24/7 contacts for spouses seeking help on any mission issue. Some of NASA’s rules on family travel necessitated this escort help. While NASA carried the spouses to launch and landing at government expense aboard the agency’s Gulfstream jets, children were not allowed on those aircraft. Their travel arrangements (and expenses) were the responsibility of the families. So, as they departed for the most stressful week of their lives, spouses had to pass their children to grandparents or other family members serving as travel escorts and deal with the coordination of getting them from the Orlando airport to their condos. The spouses were also required to arrange their own lodging. This could be a big headache if the mission slipped, particularly during the prime Florida tourist season. Some spouses of earlier missions had found themselves begging with condo reservationists not to be evicted. The escorts could be an enormous help.

There were no formal criteria for selection of family escorts. Crew spouses usually threw out a few names to consider and quickly settled on two. Our spouses picked TFNG Dick Covey and Bryan O’Connor (class of 1980) as their escorts. Unspoken in their deliberations was another duty for which the family escorts were being selected: If Discovery killed us, they would become casualty assistance officers. I suspected every wife knew this. Even if their husbands were negligent in not telling them, they probably heard from other wives. I had told Donna years earlier. NASA required her and the kids to watch my launches with the family escorts from the roof of the Launch Control Center. It wasn’t the view NASA had in mind: NASA wanted to isolate the families from the press in the event of disaster. In that case the family escorts, turned casualty assistance officers, would drive them to KSC flight operations, where a NASA jet would whisk them back to Houston.

That evening, on the ride back from the party, Donna turned to me and said, “This is a strange business when you have to preselect an escort into widowhood.” She was enduring a lot for my dream.

I was selfishly consumed by the flight, and it weighed on the entire family. Why Donna didn’t just walk away from me in the final weeks was a miracle. On one occasion I arrived home to news that Pat had strep throat. “The flight surgeon wants you to come in for a throat swab, too.” It was no surprise that Donna had sought medical help at the surgeon’s office. The doctors also served as astronaut family physicians. But I was furious with her. Though I was feeling fine, I had no idea what a throat culture would reveal. Visions of Apollo 13 and Ken Mattingly’s removal from that mission because of an exposure to German measles aroused my paranoia to insane levels. I raged at her, “Goddammit, Donna, I’m ten days from leaving for KSC! This could screw me!” I made no inquiry of Pat’s condition. Donna had never met the man who was now in her face. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I ordered her, “Until I launch, don’t go back to the surgeon’s office for anything! Nothing! Find a civilian doctor.” I would later apologize to her, but I will always carry the memory of this failure as a husband and father. There are some things you can’t take back. I ignored the flight surgeon’s request, but he badgered me at my office until I finally submitted. The swab results were negative.

At T-7 days to launch I moved into the temporary trailer complex that served as the JSC crew quarters. This was a requirement of flight medicine’s mandatory health quarantine, a program designed to minimize the chances of an ill family member infecting a Prime Crew astronaut in the homestretch to a mission—just what I had feared in the case of Pat’s strep throat. From this point onward, everybody, including our wives and all NASA employees whose duties put them in contact with us, would have to first be checked by the flight surgeon before they could be in our company. School-age children were forbidden any contact.

I said good-bye to the kids. Pat and Amy were now sixteen, Laura thirteen. I had always been open with them about the dangers of spaceflight, so they understood the significance of this parting, that it might be the last time they would ever see me. Pat and Laura were composed and quiet, while I detected a nervous intensity in Amy’s eyes and voice.

I invited Donna to every crew quarters’ supper and, after a quick exam by the surgeon, she was allowed to attend. On the last evening before our departure to Florida, we went to my room and slowly and quietly enjoyed ourselves under the sheets (very slowly and very quietly, for it was a trailer). In the dark I whispered in her ear, “The next time we do this, I’ll be radioactive.” Neither of us mentioned the other possibility…that there might not be a next time.

On June 22, 1984, “Zoo Crew” departed for Florida in a flight of four T-38s. In a routine that had long been perfected by NASA PR, our wives had preceded us. The press liked this human touch of the women waiting to greet their men and NASA was happy to oblige them. As we entered KSC airspace we took a turn around Discovery, then slipped into a fingertip formation and entered the “break” over the shuttle landing facility. Hank waited until every plane was landed and we taxied to the apron together. We cut the engines, popped our canopies, and climbed from our jets. Our spousal embraces were captured by a clutch of news photographers. It was a Life magazine moment. We were the heroic knights, come to joust with the forces of death…fire and speed and altitude…and our fair maidens were there to bid us adieu.

The final two days before a launch were designed to be relaxing. There were no simulations. We studied our checklists, flew in T-38s, and enjoyed suppers with our wives. But relaxed? Not a chance. I was hours from achieving a lifelong dream. Pure adrenaline was surging in my veins. Sleep was a struggle. The night terrors were ready to awaken me at the instant of unconsciousness.

We said the final good-bye to our wives at an L–1 luncheon at the astronaut beach house.[2] The last time I had been there was with Judy. As Donna stepped from the van, I was glad I had no regrets about that night. The NASA-catered lunch was attended by our wives, the family escorts, and key launch personnel. The gathering was informal. There were no speeches, no toasts. Everyone helped themselves from a table set with sandwich fixings and chips. We filled our plates, found a place to park a beer, and enjoyed ourselves.

After lunch, all but our significant others departed and we were left alone to say farewell. Diane Coats took it hard. She was a naval aviator’s wife. She knew the danger. Hank’s wife, Fran, seemed composed. This was her second time through the drama and that probably helped. Or maybe she was dying inside but hid it for the benefit of the younger wives. After all, she was the commander’s spouse and had to set the example. Our payload specialist, Charlie Walker, and his wife were struggling. Judy was spared the spouse separation issue. If Sally Ride, Steve Hawley’s wife, was experiencing any fear, it wasn’t on display.

Donna and I walked to the beach and turned north. The day was a furnace and the surf splashing on our legs was welcome. Just a few miles away was Pad 39A and Discovery. In our stroll we joined the end of a line of astronauts and their spouses, stretching two decades into the past, who had made this same walk in the shadow of their machines: Redstones, Atlases, Titans, and Saturns. A river of tears had been shed on these sands as couples struggled to come to grips with their tomorrows and the potential for glory or death. Now it was our turn.

I was ill-equipped to deal with this moment. When it came to emotions, I was my mother’s son. I once teased Mom about her seeming lack of emotion and she replied, “You’ll never know what a Pettigrew [her maiden name] is feeling. It’s just the way God made us. We keep it all inside.” At the DNA exchange of my conception I had been stamped a Pettigrew. It’s not that I don’t deeply feel things or that I’m afraid of unmanly labels if I reveal them. It’s that I can’t. What I feel in my soul and how those feelings are verbalized are two entirely different things.

The good-bye could not be delayed and Donna finally brought it to the surface. I could hear her sniffling. She stopped and embraced me. “Mike, hold me.” As I had always done in poignant moments in my life, I now tried to hide behind humor. “We could go back to the beach house bedroom and do more than hold each other.” Always the joker, that was me.

“Just shut up, Mike, and hold me. It’s not funny.”

She sobbed into my neck and I felt like shit. I tried to calm her with comments about the shuttle’s critical component redundancy, but that went over about as well as my “Let’s make whoopee” comment. I wasn’t going to talk her out of her fear. This was a woman who knew the cost of high-performance flight. She had held the decomposed hand of a friend at an aircraft crash site. She had seen the squadron commander and chaplain step from a car and walk to the door of a neighbor to deliver the “Your husband is dead” message. She had comforted the widows and children of how many friends? I could not guess. She was the woman who had seen through the NASA euphemisms to identify the astronaut family escorts as “escorts into widowhood.” Nothing I could say was going to bury Donna’s fears.

We sat for a while and just listened to the waves and watched pelicans kamikazeing after their meals. Donna broke the silence. “It’s been a lot of water under the bridge to get here.”

“Yes, it has.”

“I can see you right now as a teenager launching your rockets from the desert. It’s amazing where it led.”

“I’ve got a rocket right here you can launch.” There it was again, my shield of crude humor.

“Mike, can’t you be serious?”

I forced myself to be the man she wanted at this moment. “Okay. I’m sorry. I will be serious. Whatever happens tomorrow,” I felt her tense at the implication of the wordwhatever, “I’ll be living a dream. It wouldn’t have happened without you.” It sounded corny but it was the truth.

We embraced and kissed. It wasn’t From Here to Eternity passion but it was sufficient for the moment. It was easier for me to convey my feelings in this physical contact than it was through words. I could taste the salt on her cheeks…tears, not ocean.

I thought of how many random, seemingly inconsequential events steered me through life. If my mom and dad hadn’t ignored those “Danger, Unimproved Road” signs, where would life have taken me? If they hadn’t settled in Albuquerque, where the sky had captured me, what path would I have journeyed? If I had married a different woman seventeen years before, would I now be sitting on this beach?

In a remarkable coincidence, Donna was born on the identical day and year of my own birth, September 10, 1945, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was just a few hours older than me. (In her childhood, my youngest daughter was convinced that men and women had to marry someone who shared their birth date.) Donna’s mom and dad, Amy Franchini and Joseph Sei, were first-generation Americans, born of Italian immigrants. Both spoke fluent Italian, argued incessantly, and smoked like forest fires. When Donna was born, the couple already had one child, a boy, ten years old. They had been trying to have a second child for nearly a decade, praying to a pantheon of saints for a daughter. Amy Sei was thirty-five years old when she finally conceived. In their minds Donna was a miracle and she quickly became the center of the couple’s existence.

Donna’s life was the polar opposite of mine, root-bound. She never moved. Throughout her youth she lived in the same home, only a few blocks from one of the major pathways of adventure for the Mullane clan, fabled Route 66. As a little boy, I had passed within a few hundred yards of the little girl I would one day marry.

We were high school students when we first met. She attended the downtown Catholic high school, St. Mary’s, while I was a student at the uptown school, St. Pius X. Her cousin was my classmate, and through this family connection, Donna and I were introduced in 1961 in our sophomore year. This was a horribly insecure time in my life. My blemished face would have repulsed the Elephant Man. It looked as if I had lost a paint ball game in which the other side had been using Clearasil bullets. And, of course, there were my radar-dish ears to horrify the ladies. I could not imagine any girl finding anything attractive about me. When Donna was introduced I said “hi” and ran to hang with the guys. Destiny would have to wait for another four years.

I continued my tortured journey through high school, occasionally running into Donna at various teen functions, but never talking to her, much less asking her on a date. She wasn’t beautiful. Attractive, with a bubbly personality, would be an honest description.

In May 1963, I graduated from St. Pius and several weeks later departed for the hellish rigors of West Point. Donna was now two thousand miles away and nowhere in my mind. I was fighting to survive. Upperclassmen were taking numbers to get in line to scream in my face. Even after putting plebe year and its hazing behind me, the pressure did not diminish. The academic workload was overwhelming. I couldn’t imagine any other nineteen-year-old in America having it worse than I did. I was wrong.

In faraway Albuquerque, Donna was ill, suffering periodic bouts of nausea and vomiting. Since she had previously experienced a kidney infection, her mother assumed a reoccurrence and took her to the doctor. The blood test results came. With her mom sitting primly at her side the doctor delivered the diagnosis…pregnancy. The father was another teenager.

Donna’s parents were destroyed. This was 1964 and it was a minor scandal for even a Hollywood starlet to be pregnant and unwed. For a traditional Italian-Catholic family to have a pregnant, unwed daughter was worse than a diagnosis of a terminal disease. For the first time in her life, Donna got to see her father cry.

It was her brother who organized a face-saving escape. Donna would stay in Albuquerque as long as possible. Before her belly could betray her, she would travel to an out-of-state Catholic home for unwed mothers. The baby would be given up for adoption. Extended family and friends would be fed the lie she had left town for college, but few would believe it. The daughters of traditional Italian-Catholic families did not leave home until they were married. But a priest, who was a family friend, taught at a nearby Catholic university so he willingly joined the conspiracy, prepared to cover for Donna if anybody inquired after her.

While I was thinking my life had ended at West Point, Donna was certain hers was also over. She had far greater reasons to feel condemned. She was making the first trip of her life away from her parents…as a social and family outcast. Joe and Amy made it clear she had shamed them. “Don’t you dare look at that baby when it’s born” had been her mother’s send-off warning. “I don’t want you getting attached to it.”

For months Donna cried herself to sleep in a Catholic geriatric-care center operated by the Sisters of Charity. A portion of one floor of the facility had been converted into a dormitory that Donna shared with two dozen other scarlet-lettered women. In exchange for their room and board, the girls helped the nuns with the care and feeding of the aged. They carried trays through rooms and hallways scented with urine, feces, and death. Depression hung on them like a shroud. The mother superior proved to be the quintessential witch, treating them as morally flawed beings. There was no counseling, no trips, and few phone calls to or from loved ones. Donna wrote letters home, putting coded notes on the envelope to designate which mail could be shared with the extended family. In those she created a life at college. In the others she begged for forgiveness.

The girls found comfort only among themselves, but even that succor was transient. As quickly as friendships blossomed, they would end. Girls would give birth and move on to uncertain futures. Unlike other traumatic events that bond people for life, living in a home for unwed mothers was naturally terminal for friendship. None of the girls wanted continued communication for fear of discovery of their sinful secret.

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. Shewanted 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.

I graduated first in my class and took an assignment to the backseat of RF-4C Phantoms, the reconnaissance version of that fabled fighter. I had never finished first in anything in my life and it wouldn’t have happened without Donna.

Meanwhile, I continued to make calls to air force HQ begging for a pilot training position, but the requests were repeatedly denied. At my annual flight physical I hounded the surgeon about ways I might improve my eyesight. He said there were none. “Mike, your astigmatism is caused by a physical defect in the lens of your eye. There’s nothing that will correct that defect.” I refused to believe him and searched the library for a miracle…and thought I had found it in a book titled Sight Without Glasses. But after practicing the recommended eye exercises for months, my visual acuity did not change. I remained physically unqualified for pilot training. As I cursed my bad luck, Donna continued to preach patience. “God has a plan.”

From Mather AFB we were transferred to Mt. Home AFB, Idaho, for my transition training to F-4s. It was here I had my first aviation near-death experience, not from an engine fire or hydraulic failure, but from airsickness. I was dying in the cockpit. I couldn’t complete a flight without my head in a barf bag. I would come home and collapse in depression. The writing was on the wall: The squadron commander was going to eliminate me from training, if I didn’t barf up my duodenum and die first. But Donna was there for me. Her shrine blazed like a sunspot. She circled her rosary like a Tibetan monk on a prayer wheel. But my situation was so perilous she wasn’t going to leave it just to heaven to deliver a fix. Having suffered months of morning sickness while carrying the twins, she was an expert on puking and was convinced I could be cured with the right breakfast. The specifics of the meal she cooked for me have long left my memory, but it worked. No doubt it was just a placebo effect, but I didn’t care. I got through a flight without seeing that breakfast again. And then another. And another. My self-confidence roared back. My flying career was saved by Donna.

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?”

We had vastly different senses of humor and decorum. But these were merely the veneer of our personalities. At the most fundamental levels we were also light-years apart. Donna was rule-oriented, risk-adverse, inflexible, and easily stressed. When I tore the warning label from a new mattress, she was certain a SWAT team would come bursting through the door. Just missing an exit on a freeway would virtually paralyze her. Any time the gas gauge on the car dropped below one-half she became as nervous as a fighter pilot sweating out a midocean aerial refueling. She was obsessive-compulsive to an extreme even I couldn’t touch. All in all she had a personality ill suited for a woman married into the nomadic and dangerous world of military aviation. It had to have been torture for her to kiss me off to work, particularly after the plane crash that claimed our neighbor, but I never heard a complaint. My career had become her career.

In 1974 we transferred to Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, where I entered the Air Force Institute of Technology in pursuit of a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. We had barely unpacked before we were once again on the move to Edwards AFB, California, where I entered the Flight Test Engineer School. In both places, Donna became sole parent as my studies consumed me.

In 1976, while I was finishing my Edwards assignment, NASA announced it would begin accepting applications for the first group of space shuttle astronauts. For the first time in the agency’s history there would be an astronaut position, mission specialist, that did not require pilot wings. It was astounding news. I was now eligible to apply to be an astronaut. Not only was I eligible but my flying background, master’s degree, and flight test engineering credentials made me a strong candidate. When I rushed home to tell Donna the news she smiled and said, “I told you. Everything works out for the best. God has His plan,” and then she went to her shrine and lit another bonfire, this one of thanksgiving.

How much of my curriculum vitae did I owe to Donna? All of it. Every step in my career set me up to meet the challenges of the next step. If I had stumbled at any point, there would have been a hole in my life that would have put my astronaut application in the “nice try” pile. But I hadn’t stumbled. Donna had provided me with the one thing I needed more than anything else…the opportunity to focus. Unlike many of my air force peers and nearly all of the TFNGs, I wasn’t a gifted person. I couldn’t get ahead on innate brainpower. I was more like the Forrest Gump of MS astronaut applicants. For me to have passed through the wickets of navigator training, combat flying, graduate school, and flight test engineer training required the intense focus of a dung beetle. And it was Donna who provided me the freedom to focus—to pour my heart and soul into the task at hand, to volunteer for extra flights, to take on additional squadron duties, to stay late in the grad school labs. I was spared the major distractions of married-with-children life.

Countless twists and turns in my life had put me on a Florida beach on June 24, 1984, only hours from my first space mission—but none as significant as the night a teenage girl stepped out from a party to kiss me.