Fighter Pilot's Daughter

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.

Mary Lawlor is professor of English and the Director of American Studies at Muhlenberg College. She is the author of Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West, and Public Native America: Tribal Self Representation in Casinos, Museums and Powwows.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Pilot's House
Chapter One: Learning to Fly
Chapter Two: Frannie's Days of Yore
Chapter Three: The Coming of the Cold War
Chapter Four: Waiting Out Korea
Chapter Five: Camping Out in Miami and Topsail
Chapter Six: School Pains and Home Wars
Chapter Seven: Trouble With the Army
Chapter Eight: Strange Days in the Deep South
Chapter Nine: Coming of Age in California
Chapter Ten: Cold War Catholicism, JFK, and Cuba
Chapter Eleven: The Discipline of
Synchronized Swimming
Chapter Twelve: Saint Brigit/Bardot
Chapter Thirteen: Back to the Swamps
Chapter Fourteen: Transition out of America
Chapter Fifteen: Germany in the Sixties
Chapter Sixteen: At Play in the Fields of Empire
Chapter Seventeen: Following European Politics
Chapter Eighteen: Making a Home in Paris
Chapter Nineteen: New Constellations
Chapter Twenty: An Immoveable Feast
Chapter Twenty-One: Our Friends the Draft Resisters
Chapter Twenty-Two: Show Down With Frannie
Chapter Twenty-Three: May '68
Chapter Twenty-Four: Show Down With Jack
Chapter Twenty-Five: Lost Days
Chapter Twenty-Six: Heidelberg Redux
Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Beaker of the Warm South
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The End of the Cold War
Notes