The story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family…
Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.
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✎แฐ.๐๐Memoirs
=✪=Military Family
๐️Life as a Military Brat
๐บ️⁀เช✈︎Travel
✌️The Sixties and the Cold War
✈️Fighter Pilots
The pilot’s house where I grew up was mostly a women’s world. There were five of us. We had the place to ourselves most of the time. My mother made the big decisions—where we went to school, which bank to keep our money in. She had to decide these things often because we moved every couple of years. The house is thus a figure of speech, a way of thinking about a long series of small, cement dwellings we occupied as one fictional home.
It was my father, however, who turned the wheel, his job that rotated us to so many different places. He was an aviator, first in the Marines, later in the Army. When he came home from his extended absences—missions, they were called—the rooms shrank around him. There wasn’t enough air. We didn’t breathe as freely as we did when he was gone, not because he was mean or demanding but because we worshipped him. Like satellites my sisters and I orbited him at a distance, waiting for the chance to come closer, to show him things we’d made, accept gifts, hear his stories. My mother wasn’t at the center of things anymore. She hovered, maneuvered, arranged, corrected. She was first lady, the dame in waiting. He was the center point of our circle, a flier, a winged sentry who spent most of his time far up over our heads. When he was home, the house was definitely his.
These were the early years of the Cold War. It was a time of vivid fears, pictured nowadays in photos of kids hunkered under their school desks. My sisters and I did that. The phrase “air raid drill” rang hard—the double-A sound a cold, metallic twang, ending with ill. It meant rehearsal for a time when you might get burnt by the air you breathed.
Every day we heard practice rounds of artillery fire and ordinance on the near horizon. We knew what all this training was for. It was to keep the world from ending. Our father was one of many dads who sweat at soldierly labor, part of an arsenal kept at the ready to scare off nuclear annihilation of life on earth. When we lived on post, my sisters and I saw uniformed men marching in straight lines everywhere. This was readiness, the soldiers rehearsing against Armageddon. The rectangular buildings where the commissary, the PX, the bowling alley, and beauty shop were housed had fallout shelters in the basements, marked with black and yellow wheels, the civil defense insignia. Our dad would often leave home for several days on maneuvers, readiness exercises in which he and other men played war games designed to match the visions of big generals and political men. Visions of how a Russian air and ground attack would happen. They had to be ready for it.
A clipped, nervous rhythm kept time on military bases. It was as if you needed to move efficiently to keep up with things, to be ready yourself, even if you were just a kid. We were chased by the feeling that life as we knew it could change in an hour.
This was the posture. On your mark, get set. But there was no go. It was a policy of meaningful waiting. Meaningful because it was the waiting itself that counted—where you did it, how many of the necessities you had, how long you could keep it up. Imagining long, sunless days with nothing to do but wait for an all-clear sign or for the threatening, consonant-heavy sounds of a foreign language overhead, I taught myself to pray hard.
– Excerpted from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Reprinted with permission.
The Inspiration Behind Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor
Fighter Pilot’s
Daughter was
one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken. It was also
probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself. Putting the
book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing
effect that stays with me now. Part of this came with the clear account
the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.
Like most military
families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high
school). And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often. My
mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was
flying in war zones. He would write my mother fairly regularly for a
while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more
pressing matters close at hand. This would leave us wondering how he was,
and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…
In spite of the fact
that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected
them to be. Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his
blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening. After
a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get
used to being home. He’d been in such a different, all-male world where
violence reigned. At home, there were only women. My mother and
sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we
were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.
We never talked
about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came
home. Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for
bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and
other effects of prolonged exposure to violence. I guess we’re starting
to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given
to soldiers and marines returning from war. But in the sixties there
wasn’t anything like it. Dads just came home, still warriors, and now
being asked not to be.
The story of Fighter
Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the
dramas that accompanied them. It was difficult enough getting all my
father’s military records so I could see the the crazy chain of our moves from
one place to another. It was even harder to go back into memories that
reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new
all the time. All those scenes where I was a stranger and everybody else
belonged still stung.
Making a story out
my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were
characters. I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and
make us say things. The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth
can be messy. These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make
sense of who I was talking about. I think human character is, in the end,
more complex than any literary character. Picturing human beings in their
ordinary rawness is very difficult. A reader needs a writer to give their
literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually
have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the
next. In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to
be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising ticks
of real human beings. So my family members and me ended up appearing in
the book in more definitive shape than we actually had. Still, these
descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.
Writing Fighter
Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running
in my brain and heart from those days long ago. Some of these feelings
had to do with the work my father did. As a teenager, I had a hard time
understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a
warrior. When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made
friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War
movement. In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations
against, among other things, the war my father was fighting At the time, he was
posted outside Saigon. When I saw him again, the tension between us was
almost too much. We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t
speak. Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply
grateful for that. Being retired from military life, Dad had changed
dramatically.
I wanted to write
about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with
me. I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other
military kids. And I hope it gives readers in general a better
understanding of what military kids go through. When I tell people I grew
up in an Army family, they often say Was it like “The Great Santini”?
It’s surprising how often people ask that. The answer is no.
Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally
familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them.
Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini tells a great story, but as he
says himself it’s his story, not a representative account of military
family life. His book is is one of the few that features a Marine Corps
pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken
as a model of military family life.
I hope readers of Fighter
Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life
for service families. Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and
children are built into the structures of everyday life in military
environments. I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated
it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re having to
move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on
deployments. For all the good or ill the armed services might do for
America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids.
And they can make make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter
Pilot’s Daughter shows.
Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cรกdiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.
╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.
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╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/
