Fighter Pilot's Daughter

Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War

Mary Lawlor

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2013
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781442222014
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War details author and Professor Mary Lawlor's unconventional upbringing in Cold War America. Memories of her early life—as the daughter of a Marine Corps and then Army father—reveal the personal costs of tensions that once gripped the entire world, and illustrate the ways in which bold foreign policy decisions shaped an entire generation of Americans, defining not just the ways they were raised, but who they would ultimately become. As a kid on the move she was constantly in search of something to hold on to, a longing that led her toward rebellion, to college in Paris, and to the kind of self-discovery only possible in the late 1960s.

A personal narrative braided with scholarly, retrospective reflections as to what that narrative means, Fighter Pilot's Daughter zooms in on a little girl with a childhood full of instability, frustration and unanswered questions such that her struggles in growth, her struggles, her yearnings and eventual successes exemplify those of her entire generation.

From California to Georgia to Germany, Lawlor's family was stationed in parts of the world that few are able to experience at so young an age, but being a child of military parents has never been easy. She neatly outlines the unique challenges an upbringing without roots presents someone struggling to come to terms with a world at war, and a home in constant turnover and turmoil. This book is for anyone seeking a finer awareness of the tolls that war takes not just on a nation, but on that nation's sons and daughters, in whose hearts and minds deeper battles continue to rage long after the soldiers have come home.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Pilot’s House
• Learning to Fly
• Frannie’s Days of Yore
• The Coming of the Cold War
• Waiting Out Korea
• Camping Out in Miami and Topsail
• School Pains and Home Wars
• Trouble with the Army
• Strange Days in the Deep South
• Coming of Age in California
• Cold War Catholicism, JFK, and Cuba
• The Discipline of Synchronized Swimming
• Saint Brigit/Bardot
• Back to the Swamps
• Transition Out of America
• Germany in the 1960s
• At Play in the Fields of Empire
• Following European Politics
• Making a Home in Paris
• New Constellations
• An Immoveable Feast
• Our Friends the Draft Resisters
• Showdown with Frannie
• May 1968
• Showdown with Jack
• Lost Days
• Heidelberg Redux
• A Beaker of the Warm South
• The End of the Cold War
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author