Book 5, "Antecedents to the Man" Summary

John Paul Vann began life as an illegitimate child. His mother, Myrtle Lee Tripp, was the child of a strong-willed woman nicknamed Queenie and a weak-minded farmer named William Tripp. Queenie left her husband after twelve years of marriage and five children. She moved to Norfolk, Virginia with her children and opened a boarding house during World War I. After the war, Queenie quit her boardinghouse and began a job as a ship stewardess on board an overnight passenger steamer that moved between Norfolk and New York.

Myrtle, just short of her eighteenth birthday, ran off to Elizabeth City, North Carolina to marry a merchant marine sailor named Victor LeGay. Their marriage lasted six months, until he left her after she began an affair with a trolley driver named John Paul Spry. Spry...