Photo credit:
Click! of Mountain Home
Author: Karen W. Waggoner
Karen W. Waggoner is a retired high school English teacher from Connecticut. She attended Christian College for Women (now Columbia College) in Columbia, Missouri, the University of Cincinnati, Butler University in Indianapolis, and received her degree in English from Stetson University in Florida. After her adventure in Japan and Guam, she settled long enough to finish her MA at the University of Connecticut as well as a number of courses in writing and secondary education at the University of Hartford. Since 1985 she has been a fellow of the Connecticut Writing Project, working as a consultant to teachers of writing. She has published essays in
The Hartford Courant and in professional journals. Several of her short stories, excerpts from
On My Honor and other essays have won prizes in contests, and she has written two other books, one a novel and the other a biography. In 1994 she retired and ran away to the far northern reaches of Arkansas with the same man who appears in
On My Honor as Ben. They spend summers in the Ontario home she dreamed of so often while in Japan. Their older son, a printing consultant, remained in Connecticut with his wife and two children while their younger son is a busy bachelor engineer in Denver.
Description:
Pat Morgan's chronicle of four years in VQ-1 is the Vietnam war reduced to its most human dimension: a husband, a wife, two children and a dog named Toby.
Synopsis:
In April, 1969, Navy Chief Ben Morgan, his wife Pat, and their two young sons are living in a Japanese village when PR-21, a VQ-1 EC-121, is shot down in the Sea of Japan. The headlines are small, the thirty-one crewmen die quietly, and the pundits shake their heads.
Pat suspects her husband and the crew of PR-23 are flying regularly out of DaNang to locate and help destroy enemy radar and missile sites in North Vietnam, but she soon learns that when he is "at home" in Japan, his responsibilities include the same unarmed reconnaissance missions. Because squadron operations are super-secret, she learns to live in silence, waiting and prepared for the worst. At the same time, Pat and her children adjust to living miles away from the conveniences Americans expect. They create a community from scattered families, sharing their struggle to provide security and normality under abnormal circumstances.
Recent Publications:
"Eulalia at Sea" in Echoes of the Ozarks, vol 1 (2005)
"Catfish at Floyds" in Echoes of the Ozarks, vol 2 (2006)
"Missile Guidance 1971" in Bombshells, Tales of Women of Homefront. (2007)
