About the Project The March, 1968, Command Chronology for 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, reported: At 291405H, C-3 received six rounds
of estimated 120mm mortar fire from YD 096623 resulting
in one KIA, three WIA's med-evac and one WIA non-evac. C-3 was a Marine Corps installation that was part of the "McNamara Line," almost 8 miles south of the DMZ in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam. The Marine KIA in this mortar attack was 1stLt. Norman E. Lane Jr., age 27. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, where he had majored in English and had been an outstanding student in the inaugural term of the Vanderbilt-in-France program, Lt. Lane's home of record was Brownsville, Tennessee, a small town sixty miles northeast of Memphis, where I grew up. I can only say that I remember Norman, and we did meet at least a few times—but I was not old enough to have been his close friend. In life—and in death—the story of Norman Lane is like a prism. But unlike an ordinary prism, which disperses light into the colors of the spectrum, this prism transforms a dramatic period in American history—the years 1960-1968—into individual pictographs that tell of the exploits of those who passed by. . . .
Other echoes —T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" Al ClaiborneWinston-Salem, North Carolina February, 2019 |