BEFORE HE COULD venture to the moon, Frank Borman would first have to master the flying machines he’d loved since he was a little boy.
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 ear 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 war in which air power 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. The only problem was, by the time he decided he wanted to go to the military academy, it was technically too late for him to apply. But by a stroke of luck, and more than a little finagling, he managed to get on the waiting list and was then accepted. Borman, to his own amazement, was to take his place as a shaven-headed plebe, the military academy word for freshman, in the class of 1950.
As he’d suspected he would, Borman loved every single thing about West Point. He was a hard worker and relished 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 with his back perfectly straight and in a full-brace position, or complying uncomplainingly when an upperclassman would unmake a perfectly made bed and have him remake it.
Ultimately, the young cadet became so assimilated to the military life that when his four years at West Point were done, he graduated eighth in his class of 670 people, 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 southeastern Nevada, where he would train to fly the F-80 fighter jet, before shipping out sometime in 1951 to combat in the Korean War.
Before he headed to Nellis, he wanted to make sure one very special person would come with him. He asked his longtime love Susan to marry him, and she agreed to become his wife. Borman had achieved precisely the trajectory he had planned for himself. It was all going so right, that maybe he was too cocky or too blind to see how one foolish risk could send it all crashing down.
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 the fliers on the base that their skills would be needed soon.
The men at Nellis were anxious to get into combat in the Korean War, 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.
At the top of a climb, just as Borman was beginning a dive, his head exploded, or felt as if it had. A lightning bolt of pain erupted from somewhere deep between his ears, one that defied the natural response to pain, which is to grab the thing that hurts. But grabbing your head when you’re flying an F-80 at six hundred 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 was thinking when he chose 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 the worst you could possibly hear.
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, the unit 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.
Borman’s prognosis and his grounding persisted for close to a year as he was shipped out to a peaceable posting in the Philippines. It was so peaceable, in fact, that he was able to bring along his wife 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. He tried every which way to get out of there, but was rejected at every turn.
After one layer of his eardrum finally healed, Borman appealed directly to the squadron commander, Major Charles McGee, an African American pilot who had flown and fought extensively in World War II when the military was racially segregated. A man who had fought for his country despite enduring racial discrimination, Borman thought, 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. The problem was, the air force was refusing to give him the chance to go up and find out for sure. If he flew and the eardrum blew again, he understood that he would have to accept a permanent grounding. But if it didn’t blow, he could be back in the sky.
McGee agreed it was worth finding out, so he took Borman flying. 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 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 dismissed Borman and called McGee, who told him that yes, what 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 after, 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 flying 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 US as the needs of the military demanded. By 1961, he and his family were living at Edwards Air Force Base in California and he had at last become the highly accomplished flier he had long wanted to be. But one piece 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 young children, he knew that his chances of engaging in the combat he’d been training for his entire adult life were rapidly diminishing. If the call to arms against the Soviets 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.
For nearly two decades, since the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union—Russia and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia—had been locked in a competition for world domination. The Americans feared the Russians were an immediate threat to their way of life and the Russians felt the same way about the Americans. Both countries began forging separate alliances with countries on the global chessboard and building up their arsenal of nuclear weapons. Nukes are not run-of-the-mill battlefield bombs, but weapons that could burn up entire cities in a flash. While neither side wanted to actually use the nukes, the threat they posed put any potential for diplomacy on ice, creating a need for this new type of soldier: the cold warrior. Cold warriors drew up the plans and trained the soldiers who might have to fight if the Soviets attacked.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit around the Earth. This beach-ball-size uncrewed device set off alarm bells in the halls of power and around kitchen tables all over the United States. Could future satellites spy on us or drop bombs on unsuspecting Americans anywhere? The fear of a Soviet nuclear attack, which had already been instilled in American schoolkids as they practiced hiding under their classroom desks or running to the nearest bomb shelter, suddenly felt terrifyingly closer. The Cold War battlefield moved beyond the clouds and absolute supremacy in the space race became a life-or-death matter. Its heroes—the astronauts who would lead expeditions into space—would be real-life supermen—and at first only men were permitted to apply.
Russia did send the first woman into space in 1963. And at NASA, women scientists and mathematicians were involved in some of the complex number crunching to design these missions. Women had even taken the tests to be astronauts for NASA and proved exceptionally resilient—tougher than some of the men, in fact—but since they were barred from the air force, NASA refused to allow them into space, either.
The seven Cold Warriors everyone knew best 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. Now, even before all 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 spacecraft—and the Apollos were the ships that would go to the moon.
The air force was aggressively encouraging its men to volunteer. In case there was any doubt about that, General Curtis LeMay, the air force chief of staff himself—a short, solid 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 his 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. His single-layer eardrum might have been good enough for jets, but 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 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 received a phone call 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 in the door, she could tell from his face that something very good had happened.
“Well, look,” Borman said, suddenly feeling more modest about his news than he expected. “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.