edgar-mitchell

Sea of Grass 27
disheveled. I had just begun my pilot school training, a process that would
begin with aircraft driven by propeller, then the jet, and finally the rocket.
And through it all Louise generally quieted her concerns; either that, or I
was too wrapped up in what was happening outside the realm of home
and family to notice.
From the very beginning I was drawn to the cutting edge of flight
technology as though by some mysterious force. And I was welcomed there.
I suppose this was, in part, because I was naturally good at it; I could feel
my way in the seat of an aircraft. There was a special sense in flying, as
though the aircraft were an extension of my body, which made me stand
out as a pilot. It lent me the perception that there was some larger purpose
that I was fulfilling, which was of course immensely satisfying. But for a
pilot’s wife, the lifestyle can be uneasy if not terrifying.
I began my Navy career in the seat of an AT-6, which was then the
Navy’s standard trainer. Not for some time would I climb into the cockpit
of my first jet aircraft. Looking back on it now, the country seemed young
and new then, with the advent of nuclear technology, the jet engine, and
rocketry. The world itself seemed bright and colorful, poised for the
extraordinary. Spaceflight was still only the dream of a handful of scientists.
But when I did fly that first Navy jet, I knew this was where I was
supposed to be.
After my training in Pensacola, Louise, Karlyn, and I were again on the
road, first to an advanced Navy training program, and then to the West
Coast, where I’d be flying a large propeller aircraft, the P2V, for the next
18 months. We purchased our first home on the rocky fog-shrouded slopes
of Whidby Island, Washington, and settled in for our three-year stay. At
the time, military life suited me insofar that it allowed me to fly. And I
knew that aircraft and spacecraft would be the next medium of man’s
exploration, just as the horse and ship had been in the past. Even as a
young man in my early 20s I suppose I secretly held the dream of being one
of those explorers.
For three years in the Pacific I flew various aircraft that would play
small roles in the Korean conflict and the Cold War. It was a tense time,
not only for Americans in general, but for those young men and women
sent off to that rather obscure corner of the globe. Toward the very end of
my first overseas assignment, our plane was attacked by interceptors while
on a routine night patrol near the city of Shanghai. The radar operator on
my aircraft informed us that two jets were fast approaching in attack position.
Somehow I anticipated what was about to happen—perhaps by some
sense of intuition—because just as I thrust the controls forward, sending
the P2V into a dive, my copilot and I saw the incandescent tracer bullets
from one of the jets arc overhead. To call it a close call would be to minimize
the threat. But that’s how it was for many of the men around me in their