Marilyn Dudley’s journey through her sixty-four years was an American
journey, and also a Martian journey. The eldest child of a small-town
working-class family in South Carolina in the 1950s, she was the first
in her family to go to college. As significant an achievement as that
was for her family, this was only the beginning of her journey.
Although she now had a bachelor’s degree from Winthrop College, she
chose to enlist in the United States Army toward the end of the Vietnam
War, hoping to be selected to attend Officer Candidate School later.
After training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, she was assigned to the
172nd Light Infantry Brigade at Fort Richardson, Alaska, where she came
to the notice of then Lieutenant Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the
brigade’s deputy commander. LtCol Schwarzkopf selected Private Dudley to
participate in what was then a daring experiment: to train her as an
arctic and mountain combat infantry soldier. Marilyn was one of the
original “GI Janes,” and she wore the blue infantry rope with great
pride.
Marilyn cut short her enlistment to raise a family;
however, her only child had multiple birth defects and lived only a few
days. These are the sorrows which only a woman can know and bear.
Following this personal tragedy, she resumed her education, earning two
master’s degrees from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where she
pioneered the use of aerial and satellite imagery to discover
archaeological sites in Alaska and also developed public policy for the
rational management of the state’s vast energy lands.
Marilyn
returned to South Carolina in the late 1980s to enter the doctoral
program in sociology at the University of South Carolina. Once again,
she was a pioneer, developing an objective, quantitative coding method
to study the incidence of social deviance in polar expeditions and space
missions. Her work verified the “Third Quarter Phenomenon,” the
hypothesis that acts of social deviance within a small, isolated group
tend to spike just after the midpoint of an expedition. Her data also
showed that the more diverse a crew was--in professional background,
age, and gender--the better it got along, and the fewer and less intense
the acts of social deviance the crew experienced. It was Marilyn’s
belief that her findings had important implications for future
long-duration expeditions into deep space, including to Mars and to
asteroids.
In the late 1990s, Marilyn was selected as the primary
North American female candidate to participate in a long-duration space
mission simulation at the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow.
Dues to a scheduling conflict, she was obliged to rotate to the backup
assignment in favor of a Canadian researcher. In any case, during her
work on this project, she co-authored a technical note on feminine
hygiene procedures aboard the Russian space station simulator, for
despite having launched the first woman in to space, the Soviet/Russian
space program actually had very little experience with women in space.
I met Marilyn just as she was competing her work on her PhD. We
happened to be on the initial design team for a Mars surface habitat
simulator, which, although the design later changed significantly,
versions were deployed in the Canadian arctic and in the Great Basin of
the American West. Together we worked on many symposium papers to
increase the knowledge base for sending humans to Mars someday, a day
which we both hoped to live to see. We were a Martian couple, not in the
sense of being space aliens, of course, but in the sense that we were
among a relatively small but international community working for the day
when humans would not simply walk on Mars and return to Earth, but
transform Mars into a new planetary home for humankind.
Yet, in
another sense, and perhaps more real, Marilyn was a Martian. In Italian,
marziana means not only a stranger, but the ultimate outsider. Marilyn
was all of that. Even in the 21st century, to be a brilliant and
well-educated woman is to be despised as a witch and to be feared, most
especially by male colleagues. I have no doubt that as much as she was
able to achieve in her life, she would have accomplished even more had
she been a man. She could be rather mannish in her handling of
confrontations, never backing down; she was scarcely a shrinking violet,
and this was something that neither men nor women could easily accept.
She suffered more than a few professional setbacks due to this. It was
this mannish woman which I did dearly come to love, and moreover, to
respect.
Emblematic of her strength of character and courage,
Marilyn deployed to Afghanistan as a civilian contractor to the United
States Army as an intelligence asset in 2008 at the age of 55. Here she
stepped directly into the culture clash not only of being an academic in
a combat zone, but also into the culture clash of being an intelligent,
middle-aged woman in a quintessentially young man’s world, in which
post-adolescent testosterone only valued women if they were Barbie
dolls. The outcome of this combined culture clash was not only
unfortunate, it poorly served the interests of the United States of
America in its struggle against terrorism, for whatever our ages, our
genders, or our professional backgrounds, we must be one team, one fight
if we are to prevail. But young reservists called to active duty
derided her as a fat old woman, unable to believe that she had once worn
the same blue infantry rope, oblivious to her experience and to her
wisdom. Yet again, Marilyn was the Martian, the unwelcome outsider. She
had lived so long that her youthful accomplishments were denied by
foolish young men who had no sense of history. As I drove to Fort
Leavenworth through the “Martian weather” of mid-western winter to
receive her return from the theater of operations, mindful that she
might not return at all, in my mind, Sheryl Crow’s “On Borrowed Time”
became our theme song.
When I met Marilyn, I had stagnated for
twenty years, going nowhere in particular in my life. Simply meeting
her, seeing her example, hearing and reading her ideas, inspired me to
retool and to better myself. I returned to school in my late forties,
earning first a master’s degree and then a doctorate. During these years
we often bounced ideas off each other, sparking each other’s intellects
and putting those results to text, presenting our jointly-authored
papers at aerospace symposia. Marilyn was no less a valuable sounding
board to me during my pursuit of these two degrees.
During the
past eight years, Marilyn and I had settled in the Kingdom of Tonga in
the South Pacific. We had come to teach at first, and later we had
settled into semi-retirement as I continued my schooling. I sometimes
referred to her as “my dearest partner of greatness,” as Shakespeare’s
Macbeth saluted his lady, for whatever small greatness we might achieve,
we would achieve together, even were it a barren throne which we must
bequeath to others not our biological progeny. She fell ill with several
mosquito-borne tropical diseases, one after another, contending with
their aftereffects for three years. A few months after earning my
doctorate in juridical sciences in space, cyber, and telecommunications
law at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, I returned to Tonga to
reunite with Marilyn. Now that I had completed the solo work of my
dissertation which had consumed my efforts for two years, I was looking
forward to the many works we would write together as two doctors and two
Martians. As I traveled to her, on my mind was “On Borrowed Time.”
Our borrowed time had come to an end. I came home from the airport to
find Marilyn sleeping, or so I thought. Having been gone for eight
months, I had no idea how ill she had become during my long absence. I
had spoken to her by telephone several times during my stay in the
United States, but she had always assured me that her health was
improving. I lay down beside her that evening, aching from a full day’s
travel a quarter of the way around the world, trekking through airports
on knees long past their warranty. I was determined to argue the next
morning that Marilyn should go to the United States for medical care
while I remained in Tonga to care for our dogs and cats, so that when
she recovered her health and returned to Tonga, we could resume our work
together. I had made the same suggestion by telephone several times
during the past eight months, but I was now prepared to be more forceful
in person. She slipped away quietly next to me that very night. We
never exchanged a single word. As Macbeth said of his lady’s untimely
demise, “She should have died hereafter. There would have come a time
for such a word… tomorrow....”
I will continue Marilyn’s work,
the work into which she initiated me, the work of all our yesterdays,
and of all our tomorrows which should have been. I will continue the
mission alone to the best of my ability, while this brief candle yet
flickers. I owe her my life, and only in this way can I give it to her.
While I was away in America for eight months, I completed work on a
novel which I so much looked forward to sharing with Marilyn, her having
had both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English literature, as
well as having been an avid fan of the science fiction genre. In that
way we both lived in the future more than in the present. Set two and
half centuries in the future, one of the principle characters in my
novel is a man who recently has been brought back to life in
interstellar space after 266 years of hibernation, to find that twelve
of his companions have perished during that long sleep. The soliloquy I
wrote for my fictional character a few months ago is fitting to include
herein:
“My comrades, my friends, my brothers and sisters, have I
come too late to mourn you? Do you excuse this tardy funeral and its
pitiful attendance? I was in a timeless sleep while your last breaths
slipped away only a few meters from my heedless serenity, and then I
awakened light-years away to find that you had departed centuries ago
for that eternal state which awaits us all, a state whose frontier is
unmarked, yet which we all know is much closer than we would like. How
lost in time we all are in our different ways. I would ask you now, do
we ever find our way? Shall we be together again? Is there some rescue
as we sink into the blackness? Is there any answer? But if you know now
what you did not know when you could speak, your knowledge is a silent
one, incommunicable to those who are most desperate to know it. And so
here in the firmament our ancestors once imagined was the abode of gods,
we have become the masters of many worlds, yet we are as ignorant as
the first ape who realized that his time on Earth would someday end.
This is all we understand even now: that it ends. What is the purpose of
knowing this? How is it useful in any way? What unjust gods would
freely impart to us this unhappy lesson and deny us learning more?”
Marilyn would have understood had she but lived to read these poor
words. Born on Earth in a land where old times are not forgotten and now
being laid to rest in the land where time begins, born in the twentieth
and living though the early part of the twenty-first, Marilyn was a
woman of centuries we have yet to see, and of worlds upon which we have
yet to set foot.
