DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO BE FIFTEEN? MARTHA TOD DUDMAN DOES.It starts with a blue hash pipe in a shabby field and a hot, tight dance at the Mayflower Hotel, and rapidly accelerates against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the Sixties.Describing a time weirdly similar to today, Expecting to Fly recalls a conservative government embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war, racial tensions, and a generation of disillusioned young people looking for something meaningful to believe in -- teenagers who, like Dudman, hurled themselves into a sea of drugs and sex they weren't really ready for.With the same passion and brutal honesty that she brought to her first book, Augusta, Gone -- the story of her daughter's troubled adolescence -- Dudman re-creates her own wild ride through the turbulent Sixties, vividly recounting scenes you probably experienced yourself.From the prim tradition of a posh girls' school and debutante parties of Washington, D.C., to the snows of New Hampshire and the campaign for Eugene McCarthy, from living out of a knapsack in Spain to getting stoned on acid in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Expecting to Fly takes us on a blistering trip to a time when the only thing you couldn't be was shocked.Now, years later, Dudman reflects on that time and what it means: "Which was it -- triumph, exploration, some important journey, or just a big stupid mistake, a total waste of time?"You decide.

Chapter 5: Eugene McCarthy & The Red Leather Wallet Back when I was at Alice Deal Junior High School, I got a huge crush on a boy with perfect features. One day he came up to me in the hall."I heard you were in a protest march," he told me.Bunches of us from Cleveland Park would go down in station wagons, trudge up and down in front of the White House in the cold dark night. On Saturdays Bishop Moore led us to Lafayette Park where we stood hand in hand with people we didn't know under the cloudy, moody Washington autumn skies."Are you against the war in Vietnam?" he asked me."Yeah."We got permission to leave homeroom and go out and argue in the stairwell. Our teachers let us because it was current events. His father was in the government. A general or something.I got my ammunition from my father."There's this boy at school who says we have to fight to keep the Communists from taking over the world."My father looked up from his evening paper. He was always reading the newspaper -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Post-Dispatch. At night he'd bring home the Evening Star and the Washington Daily News. The inky stacks piled up beside his Danish modern chair. His fingers dark with reading."Well, it's a bum war, Martha," my father told me.My father was a foreign correspondent for The St. Louis Post Dispatch. He'd been over there tons of times -- to Vietnam, to Laos, Cambodia. He said the war in Vietnam was a mistake from the start."How come?" I asked him. I was against it because it was a war. But he had real reasons."Martha," he told me, "people think there's a Communist conspiracy like an evil octopus trying to take over the world. They think the Russians and the Chinese are working together. That there's a Sino-Soviet conspiracy. They're all wet. Ho Chi Minh has used their help, but he's fighting for freedom and independence."And there's another thing -- because of what happened in World War II, people think you've got to stop an aggressor in his tracks. But we're not dealing with Hitler here."We can't win this war. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong are fighting for independence and for the unity of their country that's been colonized and split in half by outsiders. They've got a powerful incentive. But most of our soldiers don't want to be there -- they're just hoping to get home alive. Our morale is low, but the other side is fighting for survival."I wasn't sure exactly what he meant by all that Sino-Soviet stuff, but I knew he was right. He'd been there. Everything I knew was about emotion and cute little Vietnamese babies getting shot and children aflame with napalm running down the street, but there was also a logic behind the peace movement -- a series of ponderous arguments and explanations that grown-ups used to bolster truth.I went back the next day and repeated my father's arguments to the boy in the stairwell.He'd been talking to his father, too. And he had a new set of arguments of his own.That night I told my father what the boy had said."He says I must be a Communist if I'm against the war. He says we have to support our troops."My father thought for a minute, looking at me seriously."Ask him," he said, "if he thinks you should always support any war your country undertakes. Tell him that if he says yes, then there's no reason for further conversation. Because if he thinks we ought to unquestioningly follow our country into war, then there's nothing more to discuss."I thought about that. It made good sense. But I didn't want to ask the boy that question. Because if he said yes -- and he might have -- then our morning arguments during homeroom would be over, and I liked the arguing, I liked the feeling of passionate indignation. And I liked his handsome, alien face.February 1968. The war was still on and Eugene McCarthy was running for president. My parents