Mid-1961
Frank Borman wasn’t fearless—no good pilot was. But most of the fear he had started out with was shaken out of him on the day in 1961 when he nearly died in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base, in southern California. Death while flying was not Borman’s plan, any more than it was the plan of the pilots who did die that way in that place at around that time. But in the business of test-flying jets, it was inevitable that every now and then one of them would fly straight into disaster, tumble out of the sky, and, to use the no-big-deal phrasing preferred by test pilots, make a hole in the ground.
Borman knew the odds as well as anyone, but he had been angling for Edwards for a long time, ever since his West Point graduation in 1950. Like most of the men flying here, he had not traveled a direct route to the skillet of the California desert. He had jumped from post to post—Nevada, Georgia, Ohio, the Philippines—all with his young wife, Susan, by his side. She had agreed to marry him straight out of the military academy and had known in advance the peripatetic life of a young Air Force pilot, though she hadn’t fully understood that it would be quite that peripatetic.
Still, Edwards was what Borman wanted, and so Edwards was what Susan wanted. When he had applied for the transfer from the Philippines to California in 1960, he’d known he would be up against ferocious competition, with no guarantee that he’d even make it to the top tier of applicants, much less become one of the fliers selected. When he did get the transfer, he was thrilled at the news, though it wouldn’t serve him well to look thrilled when he arrived in California. The man who made the Edwards flight assignments was Chuck Yeager, the thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel and World War II fighter pilot who had long caused military fliers to feel equal measures of inspiration and terror.
Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, in a Bell X-1 rocket plane in 1947, had been famous even before achieving that long-elusive feat. Shot down over France in 1944 during his eighth combat mission, he was taken prisoner and placed in a POW camp. He escaped just two months later, quickly rejoined his squadron in England, and, six months after that, scored the fighter pilot’s coveted ace-in-a-day distinction, shooting down five enemy planes in a single mission. There wasn’t much the young hot dogs he had brought to Edwards could do to impress him.
“There’s no such thing as a natural-born pilot,” he would tell the men who believed they were exactly that. “If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you can use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.” Keep it simple, Yeager told them, and you may stay alive.
Borman reckoned he could do more than that. In the years before getting to Edwards, he had flown the F-89 and the T-33 and the T-6 and the F-84 and even the F-104. He had flown just about every plane he could get his hands on, and not one of them had been too much for him.
One morning soon after getting to Edwards, Borman hopped into an F-104, intent on trying out a maneuver of his own invention. He called it a zoom flight, a nod to the extreme altitude and trajectory the exercise would involve. Both the plane and the new maneuver were their own kinds of trouble. Together, they were a two-headed beast.
The F-104 was a relatively new plane; test-flown for the first time just five years earlier, it had been certified fit to fly only three years back. The jet was designed to be extremely lightweight and to fly at extremely high speeds. Just fifty-five feet long, it had a wingspan of less than twenty-one feet and an airframe made of such light aluminum that, for practical purposes, the whole assembly was little more than an engine with a chair on the front. The F-104’s wings were positioned so far back on the body that the man in the cockpit could not see them without a rearview mirror. And the leading edges of the wings were so fine—just .016 of an inch thick, or about the same as a razor blade—that ground crews took to covering them with protective strips lest they brush past one and cut themselves.
All of these innovations made it possible for the plane to achieve a reliable speed of Mach 2.2—or more than twice the speed of sound—with the right altitude and wind conditions. The aircraft’s design, however, did not deliver much in the way of maneuverability. Supersonic speed means a wide turning radius, and a streaking jet is a little like an ocean liner that swings hard to port but doesn’t actually complete its turn until miles later. One pilot who had flown the F-104 and not cared for its handling described steering the plane as “banking with intent to turn.” That was funny enough in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base, but the humor would be lost in a dogfight with a Soviet MiG. You might win the fight if it was merely a chase in the flat, though it would turn ugly once the MiG began to weave.
There were no MiGs over California, however, and Borman’s zoom flight didn’t call for any weaving. Instead, it would begin as an ordinary climb to 40,000 feet, nearly eight miles above the desert floor. At that point, he would light the afterburner, which would slam him back into his seat and punch the plane up to 90,000 feet.
That kind of altitude presents very particular challenges. Once you get there, neither the afterburner nor the engine work anymore, both of them strangled by the thin atmosphere. Even if you could light your engine, it would be a very risky move. The F-104’s engine was air-cooled, and with little air available, an engine that was lit up might also blow up.
So now you are seventeen miles above the desert with no working form of propulsion. Climb any higher and those stubby wings on your plane are going to become useless too, since the few wisps of effective atmosphere that remained at 90,000 feet would be gone. Instead, you arc over, plunge back down, relight your engine at 70,000 feet, and come on in.
The zoom flight was a fine way to test the mettle of both the plane and the pilot. And if you had the guts to try it, it was an awful lot of fun.
Borman had flown the zoom several times before, always without incident. But this morning would be different. No sooner had he reached 40,000 feet on his upward climb than the engine did what engines are never supposed to do: it exploded. The bang was audible, the jolt was considerable, and the red fire light on the instrument panel confirmed that both the aircraft and the pilot were in mortal trouble.
What the book called for at a moment like this was cutting the engine—or whatever was left of it—to reduce the risk of fire. What the book definitely did not call for was ejecting. Yes, staying in the plane might be deadly, but hitting the air when ejecting at supersonic speeds would be akin to hitting the side of a building. Dead-sticking, or gliding without power down to the runway, was a theoretical possibility, but dead-sticking from 40,000 feet while traveling at Mach velocity was not even worth attempting.
With no even remotely good options, Borman was left to choose the least awful course of action, which was to try to restart the engine. The plane’s half-wrecked piece of machinery might or might not have the wherewithal to function as it should; it most surely, however, had the power to explode again, pulling the plane apart entirely this time.
His decision made, Borman hit the ignition. The engine banged but burned. The fire light came back on, and the plane clanged and shook. Still, the engine ran for three full minutes, enough to bring the dry lake bed into view. At this point, Borman could have ejected—indeed, he knew he should have ejected—but he had brought the plane this far, and by now it was a matter of principle to land it on the runway in one sorry, faithless piece. Maybe the engineers could take it apart and see how and why it had gone wrong.
Borman did land the smoldering aircraft, and then, as soon as he quit taxiing, he hopped from the cockpit and abided by one more iron rule of piloting: he ran as fast and as far as he could from the plane. The fire trucks, which were already converging, would deal with the rest.
Once he was safely out of harm’s way and in the base office, Borman picked up the phone and, fulfilling his part of the flier’s marital bargain, called his wife. Susan was well aware of how risky her husband’s work was; recently, in fact, she had witnessed a collision over Edwards between an F-89 and a T-33. She knew that Frank flew both planes, so she had dashed to the scene of the wreck to see if he was one of the pilots. She was stopped well before she got there by a military sentry, who told her she had to go home. She went instead to the home of a neighbor, a woman married to an officer and someone who had been through this terror before. The neighbor took her in and calmed her down and explained the Edwards rules to her. “That isn’t how it’s done,” she said. “You have to sit and wait.”
Frank had not been in either plane that time, but absorbing the lesson of that morning had not been easy for Susan. So he had promised her that in the future, whenever an accident happened, he would contact her as fast as he possibly could, and he did so today.
“You’re going to hear about a problem, and you might have seen the fire trucks go out,” he told her as soon as she answered the phone. “It was me. And I’m fine.”
Susan, now practiced in the protocols, said that she was relieved to hear it, that she always trusted that he would bring his planes in safely, and that she was very glad to know he was all right. What she didn’t do was give voice to the words that usually came into the minds of test pilots’ wives in such moments: “This time.”
* * *
Borman’s abiding love of flight began in childhood, but his career in the air almost came to an early end. And it was his well-loved Air Force that tried to ground him.
Born in 1928, the only child of Edwin and Marjorie Borman, Frank was supposed to grow up in Gary, Indiana, where his father ran a successful garage business, a point of pride in the early years of the Great Depression, when so many other families were struggling. But the trick to living happily in Gary was overlooking the persistent chill and leaden dampness that often settled on the area. Though most Indianans could tolerate the weather, young Frank couldn’t. Sinus problems, repeated colds, and mastoid infections kept him out of school so regularly that the family’s doctor warned his parents that if the boy didn’t get somewhere dry and warm fast, he might grow up with no hearing at all.
So the family abandoned their life in Gary and moved to Tucson, Arizona. Frank promptly got well, thrived in school, and took to building and flying model airplanes, then more model airplanes, and then many more still. When he was a senior in high school, the year after the end of World War II—a conflict in which airpower played a major role—he decided that flying real airplanes was what he wanted to do with his life. The best route to the best planes, he knew, was to get himself accepted to West Point, and from there to make his way to the Air Force.
By the time Borman decided to apply to the military academy, however, it was too late in the year to submit his application and get the necessary recommendation to West Point from his congressman. While trying to decide what to do next, he was approached by a local judge who knew him from the neighborhood. The judge had a son younger than Borman who was turning out to be something of a wild child, always on the brink of getting into trouble with the law. Impressed by Borman’s straight-arrow ways, the judge wondered if he might teach his son a wholesome hobby like model-airplane building, and get him interested enough to keep him off the streets.
“I’ll try, sir,” Borman said simply.
“That’s all I can ask,” the judge responded. “It’ll be to your credit if you succeed, but no one will blame you if you don’t.”
As it turned out, he did succeed—love of flight being a pretty easy disease to catch in 1946, and Borman being a very infectious carrier. He and the judge’s son spent most of their after-school and weekend hours working together on their planes, which slowly brought the younger boy to heel.
The judge, who knew of Borman’s West Point ambitions, offered to show his appreciation by contacting the local congressman himself—a veteran politician named Dick Harless—and asking him to write the needed letter of recommendation. Harless agreed, but no congressman could change the fact that it was now very late in the West Point application process, and the best the military academy could offer Borman was a third-alternate slot: three boys who had already been accepted would have to decline the academy’s offer. Improbably, the long shot came in, as, one after another, the potential cadets decided that maybe they weren’t West Point material after all. Borman, to his own amazement, took his place as a shaven-headed plebe in the class of 1950.
As he’d suspected he would, Borman loved every single thing about West Point. His family’s survival during the Depression had depended on his father’s inexhaustible dedication to his work; Borman had absorbed that lesson, applied it in high school, and now did so again at the academy. He loved West Point’s head-cracking academics and ferocious discipline and the deep camaraderie that came from standing on the lowest rung of an exceedingly hierarchical system.
Unlike a lot of the other plebes, Borman even learned to appreciate the self-control that came from tolerating the hazing at the hands of more senior cadets, though that part was not easy. There was the business of eating in silence in a full-brace, straight-backed, eyes-ahead position, and complying uncomplainingly when an upperclassman would unmake a perfectly made bed and have him remake it. And he learned, too, a subversive secret about West Point: occasionally there were moments—well considered, precisely chosen—when it paid greater dividends not to comply.
Early in his first year, as Borman stood in ranks, an upperclassman known as a relentless bully was inspecting the plebes, paying particular attention to their shined shoes. When he reached Borman, he stopped. “Mr. Borman, those shoes don’t look good,” he declared.
“Yes, sir,” Borman answered, staring straight ahead and, as he’d been trained, avoiding eye contact.
“But now they’re going to look worse.”
With that, he lifted his foot and slammed the heel of his own shoe on top of Borman’s.
Borman remained standing, ignoring the blaze of pain that ran through the fine bones on the top of his foot. Then he hissed quietly, “You son of a bitch. If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you.”
Silence came from the upperclassman, as well as from the plebes nearby, who had heard what Borman said but dared not acknowledge it. Such insubordination could wreck a West Point career before it even got started, and everyone knew it. The upperclassman stood and glared—and then moved on. Borman’s defiant bet paid off; as best he was ever able to piece it together, his tormentor already had a reputation for abusive hazing and could no more afford a reported incident than could Borman himself.
Borman’s rise at the military academy was swift in every respect save one: sports, specifically football, which at West Point was pretty much the only sport that counted. He might have had the grit for the game, but at just five foot seven and 155 pounds, he definitely did not have the size. Bantamweight was good for a pilot, not a lineman. Nevertheless, Borman joined the team anyway, in the only capacity in which they would have him—as manager, which effectively meant equipment boy, albeit with some organizational and scheduling responsibilities.
All the same, he thrived in the job. Partly that was because he got to work with the likes of head coach Earl Blaik—equal parts man and monument in college football—and a young offensive-line coach named Vince Lombardi. Both were tactically brilliant, though Blaik maintained a rigorous cool while Lombardi was a man of raw emotion. Borman saw himself in Blaik, but he also admired the happy madness that was Lombardi. Most of all, however, he liked the simple yet vital work the job of manager required him to do. Although he could not contribute on the field, he could bring a necessary order to the entire enterprise, without which everything else would come to ruin.
Ultimately, the young cadet became so assimilated to military life that when his four years at West Point were done, he graduated eighth in his class of 670 students, an accomplishment impressive enough to earn him his longed-for assignment to the Air Force. Upon graduation, he received orders to report to Nellis Air Force Base, in southern Nevada, where he would train to fly the F-80 fighter jet, before shipping out sometime in 1951 to combat in Korea.
Borman had achieved precisely the trajectory he had planned for himself, with one critical exception. Unlike many of his classmates, he had not had a serious girlfriend for most of the time he’d been at West Point; thus he had no wife now that he’d graduated. And for that he had no one to blame but himself.
Back in high school, Borman had fallen in love with a blond-haired girl named Susan Bugby. At first he had been too nervous to approach her, but once he did, she returned his interest, and before long he had little doubt that he’d met the girl he wanted to marry. He was new to romance, though not to good sense: if you loved a girl and she loved you, why would you go looking for someone else? Before Borman left for West Point, he and Susan informally agreed that they would marry upon his graduation. In his first year at the military academy, however, Borman got full of himself—or at least full of the challenging academics and the monastic life that seemed fitting for a cadet—and he broke off their relationship. The way he saw it, a cadet had time for West Point or for love, but not both.
Almost immediately, he regretted his decision, and he missed Susan keenly throughout the rest of his time at the military academy. Shortly before he graduated, he wrote to her at the University of Pennsylvania, where she had gone to study dental hygiene. In his letter, he asked whether they might set things right now that his time at West Point was ending. She wrote back, saying that while she still cared for the soon-to-be lieutenant, her circumstances had changed. She was involved with a boy back home, someone who did not seem inclined to put her aside if his career became too interesting.
Borman was crestfallen, but thanks to a combination of competiveness, stubbornness, and at least a little youthful conceit, he didn’t accept her answer as final. He continued to write Susan letters in the months that followed, and to his delight and surprise, she continued to write back. He asked after Susan’s family and her education; she asked after his parents and his West Point experiences. He told her—just in case she was wondering, though of course he understood that she wasn’t—that he had dated no one else seriously in all the time he’d been away. She wrote back to say that that was fine, but reminded him that she couldn’t say the same.
And then, after a time, she wrote to say that in case Frank was interested, her circumstances had changed again and it seemed that she didn’t care for the other boy as much as she’d thought and they had parted. Borman wrote back immediately to say that he was very, very happy to hear that. He also told her that he would be coming home to Tucson for a visit before he had to ship out to Nellis, and suggested that perhaps they might get together for dinner. Susan agreed.
Borman chose a quiet but elegant place in the desert about fifteen miles outside of the city. It was a hideaway with an Italian restaurant and a swimming pool where married—and, no doubt, unmarried—couples could go to be alone. There was also, Borman knew, dance music.
Over the dinner and during the dancing he talked about his plans for the future and his hopes for a family—and how none of that would be complete with anyone else but her. He told her how foolish he had been to toss aside what they had shared. He swore that if he had it to do a million times over he would never, ever make the same mistake again. She seemed moved and admitted that she felt the same about him as she always had. Borman breathed easier. He felt certain that now there was only one thing left to do, which was to ask Susan to marry him—although he wasn’t certain just how and he wasn’t certain just when.
They left the restaurant together and began the drive back to Tucson. At some point along the way, Borman decided that this was the proper moment and that this otherwise unremarkable spot on the road somewhere between the desert and the city was the proper place. So he pulled over and said, in as straightforward a way as he could muster, “Let’s get married.”
With equal directness, Susan responded with a single word: “Wonderful.”
Frank beamed, reached into his jacket pocket, and produced the ring he had bought recently against the chance that tonight might be his opportunity to undo the terrible mistake he had made a few years before. She accepted it.
And so—twenty-two, love-drunk, and cussedly stubborn—Lieutenant Borman found himself engaged.
* * *
Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base was exactly what Borman expected it to be: a passable enough place for a young military officer and his new bride to make a home, and an extraordinary place to learn combat flying. And it was clear to all of the fliers on the base that their skills would be needed soon.
Just that June, at about the same time Borman and his classmates were graduating, the Soviet-backed North Korean army had launched a massive offensive across the 38th parallel, the ostensible no-go zone that separated the two halves of the Korean Peninsula. Within three days, the 75,000-man onslaught swept aside the American-backed South Korean defenses and arrived in Seoul.
The men at Nellis were anxious to get into that fight, and their training was intensified so that they would be battle-ready in as short a time as possible. Borman, whose star had shone so brightly at West Point, was determined to make his mark as an aviator as well. And that led him to do a very dumb thing.
One afternoon, several months after arriving at Nellis, Borman hopped into an F-80 to run some dive-bombing drills, just to sharpen the skills he would need once he got into combat. It was a fine way to spend a free hour or two, except on a day when a pilot had a bad head cold. Borman’s ears and sinuses had given him little trouble since his family quit Gary so long ago, and if he had suffered any lasting damage from his early years of chronic infections, it hadn’t shown itself. So Borman—with head congestion familiar enough to him after his afflicted childhood that he didn’t even notice it—went off flying.
At the top of a climb, just as Borman was beginning a dive, his head exploded, or felt as if it did. A lightning bolt of pain erupted from somewhere deep between his ears; he managed to defy the natural response to pain, which is to grab the thing that hurts—grabbing your head when you’re flying an F-80 at 600 miles per hour is simply not an option.
Instead Borman gritted his teeth, nursed the plane and himself down to the ground, and immediately went to see the doctor on the base. The pain now seemed to be localized in one ear; peering inside that ear, the doctor made the lethal little tsking noise doctors make when they suspect that something is seriously wrong and then discover that the situation is even worse than they’d feared.
“The eardrum,” he explained to the young lieutenant, “is made of three separate layers. You’ve ruptured them all.”
Whatever Borman had been thinking when he’d chosen to fly on a day when his head was badly clogged was his own affair, the doctor said, but the damage he had done was serious. The ear might or might not heal; either way, the doctor couldn’t offer a meaningful prognosis until Borman came back for a follow-up visit in about six weeks. In the meantime, his file would be stamped DNIF, or “duty not involving flying.” For a pilot on the rise, those four letters were as good as an epitaph.
Borman protested, but the doctor held fast. The young aviator explained that his unit would be shipping out for Korea in less than six weeks; that may well be true, the doctor said, but if so, his fellow fliers would be going without him. Ultimately, Borman was indeed left behind, and when he returned to see the doctor six weeks later, the three ruptured layers were still blown.
Not long after, Lieutenant Borman—certified jet pilot, graduate of West Point—did ship out for the Pacific, but it was to a peaceable billet in the Philippines. The post was so peaceable, in fact, that he was able to bring along his wife, Susan, and their infant son, Frederick, born just weeks before. They would all be assigned a spot in base housing just right for a young family. His new assignment would be director of roads and grounds; effectively, he would be the base’s chief of maintenance. There might be a more humiliating title for a grounded flier than one that actually included the word “grounds,” but Borman did not care to try to come up with one.
* * *
Life in the Philippines was not merely as bad as Borman had feared it would be, it was vastly worse. His hangar had been replaced by a garage; his F-80 had been replaced by road graders and steamrollers. After allowing a decent interval to go by, he applied for a return to flight status, eardrum notwithstanding. His application was rejected. He applied for a transfer to Korea, so that he could at least work as a forward air traffic controller. That was bounced back at him, too. He applied to quit the Air Force altogether and transfer back to the regular Army; at least he would still have his West Point diploma and his lieutenant’s commission. Again the answer was no.
Now desperate, Borman visited a doctor on his base in the Philippines; he, too, looked in the ear and made the same sympathetic clucking noise every other doctor had made over the last year. This doctor, however, also told him about a woman he’d heard of in Manila, a specialist in otolaryngology, who had developed a technique for fixing ruptures in the ear. She would deposit pellets of radium in the eustachian tube, and the radium, through a mechanism she could not explain, seemed to speed healing. Borman took the bus to Manila, submitted to the procedure, and waited the prescribed time before returning to the base doctor, who told him that one layer of his eardrum had healed and even developed a thick layer of protective tissue. But that still left two layers wrecked. And that, in turn, left the DNIF in place.
Finally Borman appealed directly to the squadron commander, Major Charles McGee, a Tuskegee airman who had flown and fought extensively in World War II. Being an airman was hard; being a black man in midcentury America was, Borman assumed, at least as hard. A man who had met both challenges with as much aplomb as McGee was someone to be respected—and someone Borman assumed would play straight with him. He approached McGee and explained that he was absolutely certain that his one-layer eardrum was up to the job of flying, at all altitudes, in all conditions, with the cockpit either pressurized or unpressurized. The problem was, the Air Force was refusing to give him the chance to go up and find out for sure. He understood that if he flew and the eardrum blew again, he would have to accept a permanent grounding. But if it didn’t blow, he could be back in the sky.
McGee agreed that it was worth finding out, so he took Borman flying. First they went up in a T-6, then in a higher-altitude T-33. McGee put both his passenger and his passenger’s battered ear through as challenging a ride as a pilot could bear. Borman tolerated the changing pressures and the dizzying swoops with no difficulty and no pain. When they landed, McGee smiled at Borman and told him, “Better go see the doctor again.” Before Borman could dart off and do just that, McGee added a warning: “And tell him the truth.”
The doctor inspected Borman’s ear and offered the usual unremarkable diagnosis: the one healed layer of the eardrum was still intact, but otherwise there had been no improvement. Borman cut him off before he could finish.
“Doc, you might as well know I’ve been flying with McGee,” he said. The doctor looked both surprised and displeased, and Borman came out with the rest of it: “Even in a T-33,” he said, with no small bit of pride.
“I’ll need to get McGee to confirm that—especially that T-33 ride,” the doctor said.
He then dismissed Borman and called McGee, who told him that yes, everything the eager young lieutenant had said was true. The doctor was skeptical—he was the medical man, after all. But McGee was a flier, and he had spent a good part of a grueling day with another flier, and a fine one. Perhaps, the squadron commander suggested, a man who so badly wanted to serve his country and had now proven his fitness to do so ought to have his wings returned to him.
The doctor evidently agreed. Shortly afterward, the official notification arrived in the Borman home. “In the case of First Lieutenant Frank Borman,” the document read, “subject has been returned to flying status.”
* * *
In the decade that followed, Borman pursued his love of flight with a near-consuming fever. He and Susan and their now two young sons—Edwin arrived just nineteen months after Frederick—moved from base to base, hopscotching the United States as the needs of the military demanded. By the time he was practicing zoom flights at Edwards Air Force Base in 1961, as enviable a billet as a pilot could hope for, he had at last become the highly accomplished flier he had long wanted to be. One piece, however, was still missing.
Borman had been too young to fight in World War II and had been grounded before he ever got a chance to get to Korea; now, as a thirty-three-year-old pilot with a wife and family, he knew that his chances of engaging in the combat he’d been training for his entire adult life were rapidly diminishing. A shooting war with the Soviets, which had barely been averted in 1956 when Moscow sent tanks to crush a short-lived democracy uprising in Hungary, still seemed to be a real possibility. Yet if the call to arms came, it would likely not go out to him. There were younger fliers who would surely be sent first. Borman had missed his window.
But if there were hot warriors, as there had been throughout all of humanity’s bloody history, there were now Cold Warriors, too. This was a whole new kind of fighting. The Cold Warriors drew up the plans and trained the soldiers who might have to fight if the Soviets tried a stunt like Hungary again. They manned the Atlas and Titan and Minuteman missile silos all over the American West, ready to respond if Soviet missiles started flying. They flew the Strategic Air Command’s B-52s and sailed the ballistic missile submarines, keeping America’s nuclear assets mobile twenty-four hours a day.
And then there were the seven Cold Warriors everyone knew best, the ones who had been hand-selected from the military in 1959, dressed in silver pressure suits, and taught to fly not jets but rockets. These were the soldiers sent off to beat the Soviets in the highest, fastest combat of all: the competition for space. They were the first fighters in a different kind of war, and if you thought that flying rockets didn’t count as real combat—that climbing on top of a ninety-five-foot Atlas booster full of explosive fuel was not at least as big a risk as flying into battle—well, you didn’t know much about calculating odds.
The country’s first astronauts had become famous and, by pilots’ standards, rich, with the magazine contracts and the free Corvettes people kept giving them. But the individual glory accorded to these warriors didn’t mean a lot to Borman. The collective glory of the Air Force did, however, and in 1961 the branch of the military he loved best was underperforming. Of the first seven astronauts, only three, Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton, and Gordon Cooper, were Air Force. That might be good enough for the Navy or the Marines, but the Air Force was the only branch of the service that had flying in its very name. In Borman’s view, three out of seven simply did not cut it. Now, even before all of the original astronauts had flown, the call was going out for a second class of recruits. This time nine of them would be selected, and they would be flying not the little one-man Mercury spacecraft but the two-man Gemini and later the three-man Apollo—and the Apollos were the ships that would go to the moon.
At Edwards Air Force Base in California and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Maryland, pilots were quietly submitting their applications to NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Borman did the same. The other branches of the military sent mixed signals to their men about whether it was right—or even loyal—to walk out on their current assignments, which was why so many of the applications were submitted so discreetly. The Air Force, by contrast, aggressively encouraged its men to volunteer. In case there was any doubt about that, General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff himself—a concrete bollard of a man who had flown bombing missions in both Europe and the Pacific during World War II—summoned the officers who had submitted their applications to NASA for a sit-down in Washington. Borman was among them.
“I’m hearing that some of you think you’ll be deserting the Air Force,” he said in that signature growl that could seem unfriendly, mostly because it was. “You’re not deserting the Air Force, and you’re not ducking combat. The Cold War is real, real as any war. Go fight it—and make the Air Force look good.”
That was all the invitation and forgiveness Borman needed. Not long after his application went out, he was called in for weeks of grueling physicals and other trials demanded by the space program. He had no fear of passing the flight tests and skills tests and intelligence tests, but the medical tests were another matter. While his single-layer eardrum might have been good enough for jets, he had no idea whether it would be deemed suitable for space. He lived in dread of the moment when the first NASA doctor would examine his ears.
The day for his medical examination arrived, and as soon as one of the NASA doctors stuck a scope inside the damaged ear, he emitted a low whistle of disbelief.
“Get a look at this,” he called to another doctor, who came over, took the scope, and made the whistling noise, too. This little scene was repeated two or three times, until at last the man who appeared to be the head doctor looked through the scope.
“Young man,” he asked Borman, “does that ear bother you?”
“No sir it doesn’t bother me it doesn’t bother me at all,” Borman answered with no audible pause between any of his words.
“Well,” the head doctor replied after a thoughtful moment, “if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.”
And that, to Borman’s utter amazement, was that.
Borman went back to Edwards, where he could do nothing but wait for NASA’s decision. He did not have to wait long. One morning in the spring of 1962, he was on-base and received a phone call from Slayton, who was now the head of the astronaut office, and learned that the decision had been made: yes, he was going to become an astronaut. He hung up the phone, pumped his fist in triumph, and drove straight home to Susan. The moment he walked through the door, she could tell from his face that something very good had happened. She inclined her head in that “out with it” way of a wife who knows her husband well.
“Well, look,” Borman said, suddenly feeling more modest about his news than he’d expected to. “I was selected.”
Susan did not have to ask for any more information. She threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly. It was one more reassignment in the life of an Air Force officer’s family—but an assignment like no other.
Borman knew that the next thing—the decidedly more awkward thing—he had to do was go tell Chuck Yeager. He marched over to Yeager’s office and waited until the great man called him in.
“Colonel, I just got some good news,” Borman said.
“What’s that?” Yeager said, looking up from his desk with little interest.
“I was just selected to go to NASA and join the astronaut corps.”
Yeager nodded; for a moment or two he was silent. “Well, Borman,” he said finally, “you can kiss your Air Force career good-bye.”
Then he looked back down at the papers on his desk. Borman did not need to be told that he had been dismissed.