Love, War, and Betrayal
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Love, War, and Betrayal is a romantic historical novel about Ernie Tennyson, a South Georgia boy who is drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. Basic training at Fort Banning, Georgia is no piece of cake, but Vietnam is even worse. He finds that life in Vietnam is very different from the life he is used to, and he has trouble adjusting. He hates the rigorous military training as well as his new environment. He is homesick and afraid of dying in battle, but his friend, Private Hatcher, from Alabama, helps him through this terrible time by giving him moral support and advice. Letters from his mother also give him hope for better days to come.
On Ernie’s first mission in the dense jungle near Lat Village, the Viet Cong attack him and leave him to die. Chee, a pet monkey who plays with the village children in Lat village leads Anna Ming into the jungle where Ernie lies dying. She hides Ernie in the rice hut near her home and nurses him back to health, but she reminds him daily that her father dislikes Americans and he must not be seen in the village, because her father will kill him.
In spite of their different religious beliefs, choice of foods, environments, and cultural traditions, Anna Ming and Ernie fall in love and can’t stay away from each other. However, Anna’s grandmother and father are strictly against her relationship with an American and forbid her to see Ernie again. Throughout Ernie’s tour of duty, he and Anna Ming must keep their meetings a secret. Her father has arranged her marriage to a wealthy South Vietnam man and is determined for her to marry the man of his choice. After her grandmother catches them together, she tells Anna’s father, and they both constantly complain about her going out with an American. Her father threatens to harm him if he tries to see Anna again.
Ernie meets other girls at the bars in Dalat and Saigon, and one girl in particular tries to get him to marry her. He explains to the girl that he is going with someone else. He loves Anna and only went out with the girl for a good time.
Then Anna’s world crashes when she he suddenly quits writing. She doesn’t know that he has been captured by the North Vietnamese and taken to a prison camp. After several months, he is shipped back home with post traumatic stress and he loses his memory of all things in the past. Unaware of his memory loss, Anna Ming calls his home, but he does not remember her and will not talk to her on the phone. She wants to tell him she is carrying his child and she does not want to tell her father. None the less, Dong Lee finds out she is pregnant and sends her to China to live with her aunt. Anna wants to keep her baby, but after her full term pregnancy, the doctor tells her that her baby was still born. She thinks her father put her baby up for adoption, but there is nothing she can do, since she is an unwed mother and dependent on her father to support her child. She returns to Lat Village to live with her grandmother and father.
At the same time, Ernie is adjusting well to his new life. Then a woman from Vietnam named Laquan shows up at his home and announces that she is his wife. He hates her seductive advances and intrusion in his life, but she refuses to leave. His mother thinks she is lying about being Ernie's wife; she thinks the woman wants American citizen ship. Ernie hires a private detective to check the woman out, but he can not disprove her claims. When the shock of a tragic accident brings Ernie’s memory back, he remembers that Laquan is the woman he met in Saigon. He puts Laquan back on the road to Vietnam, and tries to find Anna Ming. When he calls her home, Dong Lee tells him that Anna is dead. A few weeks later, Dong Lee Ming is found murdered at his beach house in Saigon. The authorities investigating the case come to America and question Ernie as a suspect in the murder. Grandmother Ming knows the secret to her son's death, but she says nothing. She has had a sudden change of heart and allows Ernie to come back into Anna life. Ernie does not tell Anna about the woman, Laquan, who claimed to be his wife, because he does not want her to know that he cheated on her in a bar in Saigon. Anna goes back with Ernie to America and leaves her Grandmother all alone, but her grandmother attends their wedding the following June.
The unsolved murder of Dong Lee Ming leaves questions in the readers' mind as to who the real killer might be. Grandmother knows that Dong Lee has betrayed his daughter. His daughter had reason to hate her father, since she believes he took her child and put it up for adoption without her knowledge. Ernie Tennyson had reason to hate Dong Lee because he forbids him to have a relationship with Anna. Dong Lee also told Ernie that his daughter was dead, and this made Ernie hate him even more.
Who murdered Dong Lee? Grandmother's flashback at the end of the last chapter reveals the killer of Anna's father and the reason he was killed.
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About the Book
Ernie Tennyson, a southern Georgia farm boy, is on the verge of becoming a man—a dangerous time for a teenager in 1967. Before he knows it, he has been drafted and is on his way to serve his country in Vietnam.
On his first mission, he is brutally stabbed by the Viet Cong and left to die in the jungle, where a young woman named Anna Ming finds him and rescues him. Despite her best efforts to conceal his presence and their growing love from her father, Ernie is captured by the North Vietnamese and imprisoned. His time in the camp is so traumatic that he returns home to the United States a profoundly wounded man. Stripped of his memory, the soldier fights to readjust to civilian life.
Promised to another man, Anna Ming must now conceal another secret: the baby she carries. Her enraged father sends her to China, where she gives birth to a stillborn baby girl. When Anna finally reaches Ernie by phone, he doesn’t know who she is. Ernie is further confused when a Vietnamese woman named Laquan shows up and claims she is his wife, forming an unwelcome presence in his life. After a tragic accident brings his memory back, he sends the romantic imposter back to Vietnam and tries to find Anna. Shortly after Anna’s father tells Ernie that she is dead, the old man is murdered.
With the help of Anna’s grandmother, can Ernie solve the murder and finally marry the woman he loves?
About the Author
Margaret McCulloch grew up on a small farm near Milan, Georgia. She earned her master’s degree in education from Georgia Southwestern State University and taught for more than thirty years at Dodge Elementary and in the Telfair County School System in McRae, Georgia. She is the author of Campbell Farm and the Migrant Murders.