Dear Reader,
In Fighter Pilot’s Daughter you’ll find the story of my life as I could tell it best. As we all know, a life is too complicated, too disorganized to arrange in a narrative without cutting and elaborating, forgetting and remembering things in ways others who were there wouldn’t remember them. My story organizes the chaos and sticks to the truth in spirit.
Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school). When my sisters and I were young, this was very exciting. We would read about the places where we were moving and look forward to actually seeing them, to being in a new house, with a new bedroom—and to meeting new friends. As we got older, the moves became more difficult. Leaving friends and boyfriends behind was painful. We felt awkward in our new neighborhoods and especially in our new schools.
Like other Army fathers, ours was away often. He would write our mother regularly, but then his letters would dwindle. Flying missions took up most of his time and left him too exhausted to take care of other things he should’ve been doing, like communicating with us. We would wonder if he was alright. I often had nightmares. When he was in Vietnam, I remember being terribly afraid that he’d been shot down or that engine failure had forced him to make his way back to safety across enemy lines. He’d been captured, imprisoned…
And then we’d hear from him. All was well. He’d been busy. We’d be relieved but, I think, a little angry too.
And then he would come home. It was so exciting, my sisters and I would feel like screaming, but we didn’t. Our hearts pounded as we watched him climb out of the plane and onto the tarmac where we were waiting. Or we’d be at the window at home, on the look-out for an olive green Army vehicle to pull up in front of the house. There he’d be, taller than we remembered, his eyes bluer, further seeing. In spite of the fact that we’d missed him fiercely, that far-away look was strange and a little frightening. He’d give his big smile and hug us. I remember his flight suit smelling like canvas and fuel from the airplane. Everybody was excited. Then the stories, the presents, the games, started up, and we’d all be so happy.
But Dad’s homecomings were never all that easy. He’d been in a very different world from what he faced at home. He’d been surrounded by men. There were no women in the field in those days. Violence was part of his everyday life. My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through—and not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been doing was secret. Places he’d been, things he’d done, were kept under wraps. Then and always. I still wonder where he was during some of those months when he didn’t write. On some secret mission to a zone where the US wasn’t supposed to have troops? Or had he flown into territory where he hadn’t meant to go?
And I still wonder how long it took him to get used to being home.
We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home. The Army didn’t have psychologists or social workers on hand to help out with the traumas of war like it does now. Dads just came home and were expected to be happy, adjust, sit down at the dinner table and act like they’d never been away.
Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air feelings that had troubled me for a long time. Some of those 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, these questions intensified. It was difficult to reconcile the way I felt about my Dad—I loved him very much—with the way I felt about some of the things he did as a fighter pilot. Dropping bombs. Killing people. 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. This put a strain on my relationship with my mother too. Much later, after my Dad retired, I got very close to both of my parents again. I’m deeply grateful for that.
For the sake of the story I had to treat my parents, sisters, and myself as characters. For the sake of readers like you who would want a clear picture of everthing, I drew portraits, gave a sense of personalities and shaped dialogue from memory. But picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult thing to do. We’re more complicated than literary characters. A reader needs a character to have more shape and continuity than most of us have. The truth was my first priority, but the truth can be messy. My sisters, my mother and father and I ended up more defined in the book than we actually are, but these portraits are true to my understanding of us all.
The armed services do many things for America, but they can have hard effects on sthe spouses and kids. But for all the difficulties, life as a military kid can be wildly interesting. I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows you this. I hope you learn something from it, but more than anything I hope you enjoy the story.
Mary Lawlor is author of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter (Rowman & Littlefield 2013, paper 2015), Public Native America (Rutgers Univ. Press 2006), and Recalling the Wild (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Big Bridge and Politics/Letters. She studied the American University in Paris and earned a Ph.D. from New York University. She divides her time between an old farmhouse in Easton, Pennsylvania, and a cabin in the mountains of southern Spain.
You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/ or connect with her on Twitter or Facebook.
FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER tells the story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family. Her father, an aviator in the Marines and later the Army, was transferred more than a dozen times to posts from Miami to California to Germany as the government demanded. For her mother and sisters, each move meant a complete upheaval of ordinary life. The car was sold, bank accounts closed, and of course one school after another was left behind. Friends and later boyfriends lined up in memory as a series of temporary attachments. The story highlights the tensions of personalities inside this traveling household and the pressures American foreign policy placed on the Lawlors’ fragile domestic universe.
The climax happens when the author’s father, stationed in southeast Asia while she’s attending college in Paris, gets word that she’s caught up in political demonstrations in the streets of the Left Bank. It turns out her strict upbringing had not gone deep enough to keep her anchored to her parents’ world. Her father gets emergency leave and comes to Paris to find her. The book narrates their dramatically contentious meeting and the journey to the family’s home-of-the-moment in the American military community of Heidelberg, Germany. The book concludes many years later, after decades of tension that had made communication all but impossible. Finally, the pilot and his daughter reunite. When he died a few years later, the hard edge between them had become a distant memory.
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