Do you have family members who fought in wars? Today, Memorial Day, is the perfect opportunity for us to honor those who gave their lives. But what about those who were reported MIA? Well, that’s one of the possibilities that inspired Felicia Ferguson’s new book. Read on to find out more.
My latest release, The Ties that Loose, is a military family women’s fiction book set in the mid-1990s during the Bosnian War. Chris and Dani Kirkland are newlyweds in their thirties. He’s an F-15 instructor pilot and she’s a contract nurse practitioner at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, near Destin.
While the F-35s are now stationed at that base, in the 90s, the F-15s were king of the Florida skies. Living in the panhandle means residents and tourists are treated to an informal air show almost daily. Pensacola Naval Air Station, Eglin, and Hurlburt Field down in Panama City are almost in a straight line from each other along the coast and Ospreys, Black Hawks, bombers, and fighter jets regularly fly sorties in the Gulf’s skies. Active-duty military fatigues and haircuts outfit a good percentage of local shoppers, and the Destin area is also a popular Air Force retirement location.
I based Dani on my across-the-street neighbor at the time, who had been a contract nurse practitioner at Eglin. Chris was inspired by several pilots I encountered in my daily life. But the most interesting detail came from a meeting of my chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
We had monthly meetings and each committee chair would give a five-to-ten minute presentation during the business meeting before we introduced the scheduled speaker. On one particular Tuesday morning, the Armed Forces chair presented about the POW/MIA bracelets that were created during the Vietnam War. Born three years after that conflict ended and not into a military family, I’d never heard of the bracelets and the founders’ mission for them. I listened to her personal connection to a POW through the bracelet and then studied her posters with supporting documentation at the end of the meeting. The bracelets and their importance intrigued me. Over the next months, the idea would not let go.
When I was plotting out my character arcs for the new project, I wanted to use what I’d learned about the POW/MIA bracelets. So I set up Dani to battle a family history of her father being shot down behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War and declared MIA.
I wanted her to be triggered by Chris’s being shot down behind enemy lines and question if she would follow her mother’s path into alcoholism to cope or rely on her faith to help her through the pain. But then, I also wanted her to be in her thirties and feeling the ticking fertility clock as a subplot.
Since Vietnam ended in 1973 and Dani is in her thirties, I had to find a conflict where the US was involved in the 90s. Talk about a challenge. Korea was over. The Iraq wars were still a few years away and to write Chris flying in them would impact his rank, which would kill the believability.
I was in my late teens during the Bosnian War, so I had some familiarity with the conflict in the Balkans. Although the US wasn’t an active combatant, we participated in NATO’s Deny Flight operation. The timing of the war fit with my characters’ age, Dani’s Vietnam War-serving father, and Chris’s rank and flying career.
As I researched the Bosnian War to make sure it would fit, I found Captain Scott O’Grady’s memoir, Return with Honor, about his time behind enemy lines in Bosnia after he’d been shot down. The book was a gold mine of details, especially with pilots’ SERE training for survival. As I researched, the Bosnian War became the perfect conflict for Chris to fly and crash in, and The Ties That Loose began.
Do you remember the Bosnian War?
Felicia achieved master’s degrees in Healthcare Administration and Speech-Language Pathology, but has written since childhood and dreamed of authoring books that teach and inspire others. An award-winning fiction and non-fiction freelance writer, she has published several devotions and sweet romance short stories. Her passion, however, is writing women’s fiction and romantic suspense with strong female characters who work through their traumas and tragedies using biblical principles and counseling techniques. As a child, Felicia lived in Kansas, Texas, and Louisiana before her family settled on a horse and cattle farm in Kentucky. As an adult, she lived in Tennessee for two years and later spent ten years in the Florida panhandle soaking up the sand and sun. But then God moved her once again. This time out of the South and into the mountains of Colorado. When she’s not glued to her laptop, Felicia enjoys hiking, hanging with Béchamel the Boy Prince, Bible studies, and looking forward to the next story.