The Initiated

It’s 1968, San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury is an ideal home for twenty-one-year-old, anti-war activist and newlywed, Maggie Finn... and “headquarters” for the Flower children, protesters and topless girls. Free love is everywhere. Then, on a bitter early morning, Maggie’s three-day honeymoon dramatically sinks into a violent swamp. She fights her way out of the abusive control by her husband, Michael. Her world of smoking pot and attending free concerts in Golden Gate Park abruptly ends. Fortunately, Maggie has secured a position, on a dare, as a flight attendant transporting American troops to and from the Vietnam war. After her training, she steps onto her first flight, escorting 250 soldiers into the war zone. She soon recognizes how the men she takes over to Vietnam contrast from the ones she brings home, writing to her mother, “As with so many of the guys I escort from Vietnam, their eyes have changed from when I take them in-country.”