Mrs. Lieutenant” -- Memories of Viet Nam and 1970

“Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel”, by Phyllis Zimbler Miller. Publisher: BookSurge, 2008. Available in paperback and Kindle editions.  ISBN-10: 1419686291, ISBN-13: 978-1419686290.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s “Mrs. Lieutenant” is one of those stellar reads that keep you engaged from the first word to the last and how long or how short the book is doesn’t concern you at all. Keep a box of tissues handy, because you’ll need it; I certainly did, and more than once.

If you are a military wife, have been one, or know one or more, then this will tell a story that you are intimately familiar with. If you’re not, it doesn’t matter; it’s the people and their stories that bring you in, keep you there, then linger in your memory for a long time after.

Four newly-married women from different backgrounds meet at Fort Knox, Kentucky where their husbands are enrolled in nine weeks of Army Officers Basic. Sharon and Robert, Kim and Tim, Wendy and Nelson and Donna and Jerry, each from very different backgrounds, each fearing that they could lose their husband before the year is out, each expected to conform to the strict formal rules of the Mrs. Lieutenant booklet each is given. As it says in the booklet, “when a man acquires a commission, the government has gained not one, but two – the officer and his wife.”

The day that Sharon and Robert God leave Chicago to drive south through Indiana to Fort Knox, members of Ohio’s National Guard fired sixty-seven rounds in thirteen seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. A few days earlier, on April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia.

And in only nine short weeks, each woman’s husband could be send to Vietnam, where 2^nd lieutenants had the highest death rate of any combat soldier. Remember, these are newly married women on their way to a world that, except for Donna who grew up an “Army brat”, is like living in another world. Not only that, the racial and ethnic prejudices of the day were obvious, very uncomfortable and lead to one tragedy.

Though 1970 is forty-one years ago, with two wars going on I imagine the worries today’s military wives have are not all that different from the ones these four young women had back then.

Sharon and Rob, Kim and Jim, Wendy and Nelson, Donna and Jerry. Because of the year and their differences, each one stands out. Sharon and Rob are Jewish, Wendy and Nelson blacks from the South, Kim and Jim Southern Baptists, Donna Puerto Rican, and Jerry an Anglo. Back in 1970 when, even in central Illinois where I lived, some of the towns (like the one I lived in from 1964-1966) were “sundown towns”; blacks could go fishin’ there, but they daren’t be in or near the town after sundown. The very thought still makes me cringe, but that was the reality then.

Mrs. Lieutenant is more than a novel about the challenges of being an Army officer’s wife in a time of war; it’s about friendships that develop when people see each other as people and their differences as minor. And therein lies its appeal. Go to Amazon.com, pick up a copy, and settle in for a special read.

Mrs. Lieutenant is a book that, in my book, has a very wide appeal. I hope the subtitle “A Sharon Gold Novel” means that we can expect more from this remarkable writer.

An easy *****