Peacetime War Games

About the Book

Morgan McComb is an average everyday American girl, sort of. Peacetime War Games is her true story. Her name and the names of others have been changed for protection.

In the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three, Morgan graduates from high school in Santa Maria, California. After dreaming around her parents’ house for a year, her mother makes plans. She wants the second oldest of her seven children out on her own and it is arranged. Morgan wonders if her father was consulted.

To her great pleasure, Morgan is sent away. She begins a working career that she hopes will pay her way to a lifestyle to which she is accustomed. She lived well in her upper-middle class upbringing and doesn’t ever want to be needy.

Morgan’s first stop from home is in Arizona, her birth state. She finds work and is fired soon thereafter. At the time, the drinking age is nineteen and she is shy one year. A lie about her age does not live long.

She goes to Warner Robins, Georgia, where she and her friend acquire jobs at a hotel cocktail lounge. The two don’t spend much time in their hot pants and go-go boots before they choose to part ways. Morgan’s mother arranges for her to head south to Florida. Morgan doesn’t know it, but this is where her parents halt support.

She moves in with her aunt, uncle and two younger boy cousins. Her intent is to get a job and pay her own way back to Santa Maria, but, Clearwater, Florida is paradise, and the beach seduces her. She falls in love with a man she meets on the sand and her young-adult life begins to harden.

They marry and she gets pregnant. His construction workload ceases in the Tampa Bay area and they go to Houston to get in on the building boom of the seventies. Morgan gives birth to Josephine, a beloved daughter. Two and a half years later, her husband shows up at her office parking lot at the insurance company. He tells her he is leaving and taking their toddler with him.

Morgan’s mother refuses her call for help in snatching back “Joey”, and that leads Morgan up hills of loaded life lessons.

Morgan’s husband divorces her by mail and gains control of their daughter.

For years, Morgan struggles not to become a wasted girl in a sedated world. She works job after job, hoping to keep a home to bring her child back to. Her daughter continues to grow at the kidnapper’s parents’ house and Morgan becomes stiffened in her attitude. She doesn’t deal well with the demons that clutter her mind and the weight of her personal baggage gets heavier.

Just prior to turning twenty-seven years old, she makes the decision to join the United States Army and hopes to profoundly change her life.

Physically and mentally prepared, Morgan goes through the Military Enlistment Program then enters basic training. She has placed her hatred for the kidnapper far back in her mind. She is in great shape and works hard at training, although learns early on just how naïve she is. She begins to argue her rights. She is booted from her platoon and is sent to an “adjustment” unit that simply means more marching.

Morgan’s manner takes her along a path of tension and trouble. Relying on her strong personality, she questions racism, regulations and rights of a soldier. Inside the barracks and at work, she meets life-changing characters that dictate her military stint and the one that brings song to her strife.

About the Author

Noël E. Franklin is published in the International Library of Poetry’s Anthology, Shades of Autumn, 1999, and was presented the Editor’s Choice Award for her work. She was awarded the Army Achievement Medal by the Department of the Army for “exceptionally meritorious achievement…” She is currently working on a fiction novel titled Grace, The Matriarch. Using the marvelous framework of her wealthy paternal grandmother’s life, she tells the story of a tremendous tuberculosis scourge and a romance that was not an ordinary love.