Long Way Home: A World War II Novel

Georgette Lillian Newton has a predictable future. She will work on the family farm, marry her high school sweetheart and continue the tradition of raising kids and crops in rural North Carolina. But, she yearns to see the exciting places she reads about in Look magazine and infuriates her parents and boyfriend when she joins the exclusive U.S. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps also known as the WAACS.

LeRoy Dowdell’s sensitive nature makes him a misfit in his family and his community. A brilliant musician, he longs to play in a big band like that of Tommy Dorsey or Duke Ellington. He lies about his age to enlist in the army and escape his disapproving father and the rumors of a small town. He hopes a soldier’s uniform will be his ticket to travel overseas where he can play music and find a place where he feels he belongs.

It is 1943 and America’s involvement in World War II is at its height. The paths of these two young dreamers cross at Fort Huachuca a segregated army base near Tucson, Arizona where they fall in love, fight personal battles and complete their journeys of self discovery. Along the way they interact with an array of dynamic characters.

~PFC Jerome "Pit" Turner is a gregarious Georgia boy and ladies man who becomes LeRoy's best friend. Pit wants to be a war hero, and he would make a good one, but his disillusionment with the army grows as he finds himself stuck stateside carrying a shovel rather than a rifle.

~Sergeant Robert Moses is a spit-and-polish career soldier, disappointed by the second-class treatment of his troops but also tough on his inexperienced and undisciplined recruits--like the flamboyant Pit. When Moses is asked to 'babysit' the Negro members of the symbolic, mixed-race All American Freedom Band rather than train soldiers for combat, Moses begins to question his commitment to the army. And when a secret he carries is revealed, it puts him directly at odds with the army he loves and leads to a violent altercation with Pit.

~Lieutenant Charity Zanjeck is an army brat commanding a division of women soldiers who have a lot to prove to the army and the country. She believes the military is better as a result of the changes World War II forces upon it, and leverages her late father's war hero status to advocate for opportunities for both the WAACS and Negro soldiers.

~Bonaparte Giles is a classically-trained pianist with a big-city persona. When he returns to his small hometown to care for his ailing mother he takes a job as a high school music teacher. There he recognizes LeRoy's tremendous talent and vows to support him in music and in life.

~Captain Hurley is commander at Fort Huachuca and resents his assignment in the remote Arizona desert where half his command includes Negro soldiers and women. He is determined that growing racial tensions on base will not jeopardize his career ambitions but he cannot hide his intolerance for the "colored" soldier.

~Boone Mack is the boy Georgette leaves behind. But when he is drafted as a mechanic for the famous Tuskegee Airmen he arrives-unexpected and uninvited--in Arizona to propose to the girl he calls "Lil".

Nearly a million black soldiers served in WWII but the majority never faced combat. Long Way Home imagines the daily lives of these men and women on the front lines of social change but far away from the battlefield.

Told in first-person narrative by each character, Long Way Home is foremost a love story framed by the culture of 1940's America on the homefront and in the military.