A Time Past, Or What Might Have Been . . . The Odyssey of Norman Lane [Print Replica] Kindle Edition

On the morning of Friday, April 5, 1968, Norman Lane, a recent casualty of the Vietnam War, lay in repose in a government-issued casket at the Brownsville (Tennessee) Funeral Home. On the same morning, at the R.S. Lewis Funeral Home in Memphis, 60 miles away, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lay in repose in a temporary bronze casket. The world knows the story of Dr. King's life and his legacy. This is the story of Norman Lane's life. Referred to in his youth as "brilliant," "a deep thinker," and an "instigator," one colleague from his 1966-1967 Officer Candidates School class at Quantico wondered what had attracted Norman, "in some ways a fish out of water," to the Marine Corps. Through many of Norman's own letters, written over the last three years of his life, through interviews with many of his friends and colleagues, and aided by archival materials, we follow the journey of the Vanderbilt University English major who joined the Marines and went to war. At its conclusion, we discover that like Dr. King, Norman Lane left his own lasting legacy. Read more