It’s 1973 and the Pentagon needs more Reserve Officers. The Vietnam War has created chaos in the ranks of the country’s military. Many young and talented Americans want to avoid the draft.
The storied Huntington Tech Corps of Cadets (HTCC) is struggling to survive, so they take a big step – adding women to the Corps. The first women ROTC cadets arrive on campus to form Company L – several years prior to the Air Force Academy, West Point, and Annapolis admitting women.
The women are not welcomed or acknowledged by everyone in the previously all-male Corps.
Cadets Shirley Wellstone and Lia Han are tasked to command the unit. But they are also tasked as undercover agents to inform the Pentagon of the ongoing problems within the Corps – discoveries to be shared only with the Pentagon. What Wellstone and Han find is a dysfunctional organization guided by questionable traditions involving secrecy, unnecessary harassment and hazing, and a lack of true leadership training. Both males and females suffer under a system run by poorly trained upperclassmen and a university command structure that looks the other way.
Incoming freshmen cadets of both sexes are harassed. A female cadet is murdered.
Is the Corps made up of a group of immature fraternities, or is it designed to make scholars into good officers and leaders? Will it survive even if women are admitted?
A group of solid and moral male cadets, a specially assigned female cadre from the active U.S. Armed Forces, and two women on a mission begin to change this historic Corps – building on the positive aspects of the past and introducing modern changes that will ensure its survival.
Years later Wellstone and Han seek to turn their story into a manuscript ghostwritten by a brilliant young female reporter from the “Army Times.” She has a vested interest in doing a good job – her father is an HTCC graduate.
This as an historical novel involving the rights of women in the military, national security, and the tried and true traditions of our country’s Senior Military Schools.
