Ever since my husband finished two years of active army duty in the spring of 1972, I've wanted to tell the story of our two years in the army during the Vietnam War. I say "our time" because the army considers an officer's wife also in the military.
Over the years I've told pieces of the story to people, and many of them have said "that's a movie" or "that's a book." And over those same years I've been working on crafting a fiction story that would reveal what life was like in that distant past of a universal draft for all American men.
Ultimately I've divided the story up -- with the first part being a fictional telling of my first nine weeks as a new army officer's wife in the spring of 1970 at Ft. Knox, Kentucky. And this "Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel" will be available on Amazon in two or three weeks. Plus the novel was a semi-finalist in the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.
In order to market this novel, I've been visiting military websites. Some of the postings from spouses of men and women deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan bring tears to my eyes. It's as if we're back in the 1970s seeing the nightly news reports of the dead and wounded.
Except I think that because today we have an all-volunteer army, less Americans think about those far-off men and women fighting in the name of our country. And I hope my novel will get more people thinking about the role of the military in the past and the present.
Do you have any stories to share from then or now about the military life?
Oh, yes, and when the book is available on Amazon, my website www.mrslieutenant.com will be live.
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