A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Sheehan Neil

Author:Sheehan, Neil [Sheehan, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

They met in Critic’s ice cream parlor on the Sunday before Christmas, 1943. It was around 3:00 in the afternoon. Mary Jane and her girlfriend, Nancy, always went there for a sundae after the matinee at the movies. Being well-bred young women, they sat in a booth for two. He was sitting in the booth opposite with five other Air Corps cadets. She overheard him ask the waitress for apple pie, which Critic’s did not serve but which her mother made well, before he turned and started a conversation with her. He said he had noticed her standing on the sidewalk during a Saturday-afternoon parade the previous weekend when he had been marching at the head of his group of cadets.

Although she remembered him right away, because she had noticed him too, she didn’t answer at first. She had never replied to a sally from a strange young man before. She was sixteen years old and in the middle of her senior year at West High School. His Virginia twang, which had strength to it and was not unpleasant to her ear, was not the only thing that made him different from any of the boys she had dated at school. His hair, still blondish then, was combed up high on his forehead in a wave that was the fashion of the day. His dark green cadet uniform was attractive with its small silver wings at the jacket lapels and the round wing-and-propeller badge of an aspiring aviator sewn on the lower left sleeve. He smiled and leaned forward as he spoke. She got a feeling that he knew a lot more about women than she did about men. He was what she and her girlfriends would call a “wolf.” Everything she had been told to beware of in a young man, she liked about him. So she broke the rule her mother had sworn her to and answered him by acknowledging that she had been standing on the sidewalk and that she did recognize him now. The rest of the conversation passed from memory over the years, except that he ended it by asking her for a date. She refused. Her mother, she told him, did not permit her to go out with strangers.

The next afternoon he appeared in the picture-frame section of Sibley’s department store at the corner of Main Street and Clinton, where she was working part time as a sales clerk after school. He used the purchase of a frame for a photograph as a pretext to ask her again for a date. She couldn’t accept, she said, but her mother might let her date him if he came to her house and met her parents. Why didn’t he come for Christmas Eve dinner and bring another cadet for her girlfriend? She saw that smile she liked so much. Where did she live and what time should he come?

He arrived promptly with a friend and impressed her parents with his politeness and the fact that he

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.