I had four years of perfect attendance records I hadn’t even taken a sick day. We had made plans for me to spend the summer with Uncle F red and A unt Jean in the States, “reacclimating, ” before the star t of my fall ter m at college in Pennsylvani a. She didn’t have very many friends at Ramstein- real friends, I mean, close f riends- and in a few weeks she wouldn’ t have me. Wives were rich or college educated or both, especially the intelligence oﬃcers’ wives, and Mom was a farm kid from central Ohio who had worked a factory job during the war. But the thing that really mattered about that morning was that it was the last Monday of the school year, the last full day of classes before graduation, and Mom had oﬀered to let me ditch and go shopping with her in Mannheim instead. I would have remembered about D- Day anywa y because I was writing about Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent and the only woman to go ashore with the invasion force, for my ﬁnal paper in Mr. It was the eleventh anniversary of D- Day, the day we stormed the beac hes at Nor mandy- though of course Dad didn’t storm any beaches he was ﬂying sorties with Bomber Command, smashing German coastal defenses from the air. It was raining I remembered because I came downstairs in sandals and had to go back up for diﬀerent shoes. Everything after the crash- everything in the four weeks be twee n Ra ms te in an d New Y or k Ci ty - was just a blur in my head, but I remembered that morning very clearly. Ju ne 6, 19 55, about half an hour after she dropped me off at school in Kaiserslautern.

I'll Tell You No Lies by Amanda McCrina