On My Honor

By Karen W. Waggoner

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592868045
• ISBN13: 9781592868049
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Publishamerica Inc
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

A strikingly true account

Karen Waggoner does an excellent job of telling the life of a Navy family finding themselves in a totally unfamiliar culture and lifestyle. I know of what she speaks - I was stationed there too as a Navy Chief living in Minami-Rinkan assigned to a local Navy command. I was attached to the force commander of her husband's command, VQ-1. While reading the acknowledgements in a bookstore, the name of Minami-Rinkan caught my eye which obliged me to buy it for later reading. That didn't happen until the summer of 2008. For me it was truly a "Can't put it down" book. My wife and I lived those experiences from temporary living in the whore house Takashima, to the open sewers outside our front door, to the robbery of our things, to all the local land marks. Though we lived two blocks from her Police Box Road, we shopped and socialized in the same places. The extreme heat and dust of the summers, smells of Chicken Farm Road, the cold and drafty winters, the unsafe fuchinobe heater, lousy plumbing in the Japanese house, all made for a truly memorable and reminiscing read. My only word of caution for the unsuspecting reader is that you probably won't understand the deep impact of her writing. If you were not in the military living overseas, and especially if you weren't in the Navy living as an enlisted person in Japan, you will have trouble appreciating the living conditions found by unsuspecting Americans thrust into the typical Japanese lifestyle. No indoctrination and no guidance were provided those people entering the country during the 60s and 70s. If you really want to know what our life was like back then, this book is a must read. Thank you Karen for bringing our life to words.

In Praise of Karen W. Waggoner

This is in praise of Karen Waggoner's fine novel, "On My Honor, A Navy Wife's Vietnam War." I am a navy veteran with 30 years of enlisted and commissioned service and her book is the best novel about navy family life that I've ever read. It's the best because it is absolutely real, giving a marvelous account of the "other side" of navy life - the flipside of wartime deployments. In vivid detail, it relates the true adventures of navy spouses who endure, and fight the good fight at home (even when that home must be established and maintained on foreign soil); proving once again that wars are fought, and won, on many fronts. Is the home front the most important one? Karen Waggoner makes a compelling case that it should at least be given equal billing. "Old salts" and young ones alike could and should learn from this book. I did. For spouses who raise the kids and stoke the home fires while their husband or wife serves on, under or above the sea, it will serve as an invaluable source of encouragement and inspiration. And, on top of everything else, it's a fast and entertaining read. Anyone who has ever made a navy deployment, inside or outside the lifelines, will relate. I truly loved this book and I give it my strongest possible endorsement. David G. McCullough, Commander, USN (ret.)

The families also serve

A traditional view of women's activities during war is that of tending the home hearth and knitting warm socks. In Karen Waggoner's book, "On My Honor", we are shown a different role for the wife and family of a Vietnam War participant. Pat, the wife of a naval technician, arrives in Japan with two young children to try to live a daily life. Periodically, her husband leaves suddenly for undisclosed destinations to perform top secret missions. While Ben is away fighting a war, Pat battles a foreign society, loneliness, fear, caring for children without a support system, even a spy in her house.Filled with details of daily life, some frightening, some quite funny, this book offers a fresh perspective on the immediate and long term impact that war has on military families, even after they return to civilian life in the United States. "On My Honor" raises some questions that are important for us to answer as the veterans now return from Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the families at home wait for news and understanding of how war has changed their loved ones in battle. This is a book to show everyone, military and civilian, the wider meaning of a government's decision to go to war, especially when the war is controversial.

A new chapter on the Vietnam War is revealed

Karen Waggoner deserves a medal for brave and insightful storytelling -- this novel intimately explores the range of emotions set in motion by the Vietnam war through a less-familiar perspective, that of a Navy Chief's wife. With tender detail, Waggoner sketches the details of daily life for the young American woman, Pat Morgan, who struggles to raise her two young sons in a Japanese village while her husband is stationed at the nearby American air base. At different stages of this honest and sometimes heart-breaking novel, it seems Morgan's character is revealed to be as steady as a house on shifting sand - she professes pride for her husband's sense of duty to country, anxiety for their uncertain future, and outrage for the lack of support evidenced by the protest efforts back at home. Ultimately, we are assured of Morgan's safe passage into acceptance of her family's ordeal as she learns to confront her past and displays enormous courage in her own convictions. While these themes may be familiar to many families that served during the Vietnam war, Waggoner supplies so many rich details that a very personal story unfolds.And as someone who was born during the time when Waggoner and her family were actually living their own version of this story, this novel helped me relate to the Vietnam experience on a whole new level because it is draws upon many other timeless themes -- especially the incredible mix of love and frustration women face in their role of wife and mother as they struggle to better the world around them.