This book is a little more lighthearted than my first with elements of mystery and political intrigue in a road-trip adventure story that was a great fun to write. Second Fiddle (Random House, 2011) is not about deployment but touches on the other cornerstone of a military child’s life-frequent moves and leaving friends behind. 900,000 of them have had a parent on multiple deployments. It’s easy not to think of our long-term engagement in the Middle East, but 1.7 million American children have deployed parents.
It was both an honor and a terrific responsibility to try to depict the life of a reservist’s son struggling to keep the family ranch afloat while he was deployed to Iraq in Heart of a Shepherd (Random House, 2009). There is a unique camaraderie to the military life and a heightened sense of family unity that comes from having your sole long-term friendships with your own siblings. The very real possibility of violent death or permanent disability is a strain that children of business traveling parents don’t share in the same way. The sense of mission and sacrifice casts those absences in a positive light. There were stories about absent parents, but the military is so much more encompassing than the experience of a parent absent from home.
I spent considerable effort looking for books that would reflect the unique experience of being a military family and found very little at the time. Years ago, when I taught at the elementary school on the base at Fort Huachuca, Arizona it became clear to me that although my class was the most racially diverse I had ever taught, my students, all the children of soldiers, had much more in common than they had in difference.
That “mirror and window” function of a good book is always in my mind as I write, One of the reasons I chose to write about military families in my first two novels is that the military functions as its own culture, and up until recently, there were very few books about the military family experience.
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