Matt Tillet, an F-8 Crusader pilot, is shot down over North Vietnam in 1966, just one week before his ship would be heading home after his second back-to-back six-month tour. Escaping from his spiraling out-of-control jet with only seconds to spare, and evading for all of three minutes, he becomes a Prisoner of War. Surviving torture, months of solitary confinement and the infamous Hanoi March, the dream of returning home to his wife and two children keeps him going. Repatriated in 1973, he returns to find his dream shattered.
Code of Conduct takes place in the middle of a war; however, it is not so much a blood and guts war novel as it is the emotional tale of a family torn apart by war, more than seven years of separation, and the long journey to reconstruct their lives.
While many POWs came home to broken marriages, the personal relationship portion of the book is purely fictional. The prison scenes are based on actual events that happened to the POWs in Vietnam. The story was inspired by many years of listening to the recollections of the author's husband and several of his Vietnam ex-POW buddies. Time does not seem to have faded their memories of what they went through (although they can now joke about it) and each reunion or get together provided a new tidbit.
The author's goal is to present the horrendous prisoner-of-war experience and the resulting shattered personal lives in the format of a novel.
Karen Black is a certified estate planning, trust and probate attorney as well as a certified Elder Law Attorney. She practices in Escondido, CA. Karen is married to Cole Black, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for almost seven years. Prior to practicing law, Karen had a varied work history, including working as a legal secretary in Kansas starting at age 14 and continuing in that field for about fifteen years. In her late 20s, divorced with four children to support, she looked for "non-traditional" jobs that would pay enough to support her family, and settled on becoming a Suzuki motorcycle dealer. Despite having never ridden a bike before, Southwest Cycle Sales of Shawnee, Kansas, was the largest Suzuki dealer in the midwest region for four of the five years she was in business. After the sale of the motorcycle business, Karen moved to San Diego, where she became a truck bumper salesperson, covering Southern California and Baja CA, Mexico. That prompted her to learn to speak Spanish at the local junior college, which in turn prompted her to continue with the college degree she had always wanted. After graduation from San Diego State with a degree in Business Administration, she entered law school in her early 40s. While in Mexico City in the 1980s, where her husband was the Naval Attache for three years, she found herself not working outside the home for the first time since she was 14, so she started writing the story that eventually became Code of Conduct. She is currently working on her second novel.
