Mrs. Lieutenant: A Novel

They had their own lives to look forward to — if only their husbands could survive Vietnam.

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Buy MRS. LIEUTENANT: A WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIP NOVEL as a paperback.

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MRS. LIEUTENANT is told from the point-of-view of four new officers’ wives in the spring of 1970 during the Vietnam War.

Each of these four women has her own cultural and geographic identity, and to become a proper officer’s wife she must learn to accept and get along with the other new Mrs. Lieutenants.

In the spring of 1970 — right after the Kent State National Guard shootings and President Nixon’s two-month incursion into Cambodia – four newly married young women come together at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, when their husbands go on active duty as officers in the U.S. Army.

Different as these four women are, they have one thing in common: Their overwhelming fear that, right after these nine weeks of training, their husbands could be shipped out to Vietnam — and they could become war widows.

Sharon is a Northern Jewish anti-war protester who fell in love with an ROTC cadet; Kim is a Southern Baptist whose husband is intensely jealous; Donna is a Puerto Rican who grew up in an enlisted man’s family; and Wendy is a Southern black whose parents have sheltered her from the brutal reality of racism in America.

Read MRS. LIEUTENANT to discover what happens as these women overcome their prejudices, reveal their darkest secrets, and are initiated into their new lives as army officers’ wives during the turbulent Vietnam War period.

And click here for a high school Vietnam war lesson plan.

“Mrs. Lieutenant was a wonderful way for me to connect with what my daughter’s going through — congratulations on capturing the intensity of that experience with such great characters!”
— Bob Niemack, father of a daughter married to a brigade surgeon serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, April 2010