What’s the Big Deal About Honor?

I decided a couple of years ago that the titles of the three Captain McBee Civil War novels would share a theme. It wasn’t hard to settle on the term “honor” to be the commonality: Tangled Honor; Redeeeming Honor; and Something-to-be-Determined Honor for the last book I just started writing. So, why “honor”? Why not some other word?

Remember Faulkner? “The past is not dead; it’s not even past.” Bear with me.

When I was twelve I made a pact with myself. I really did. If I’ve broken that pact in the fifty-four years since then, I’ve blotted out the memory. That means I still take my personal covenant seriously. Here it is. Please don’t laugh.

I was a year into Boy Scouts and we opened our weekly troop meetings by standing at attention in our khaki uniforms. We folded one finger down and held three fingers straight up in the Scout Hand Sign, and recited the Scout Oath: “On my Honor, I will…”

On my honor. Honor. What the hell? Just what is honor? The online thesaurus tosses out four synonyms: Integrity; Respect; Dignity; Reputation. Good enough, I can work with those.

Honor matters. I think the Boy Scouts have had it right since 1910 by prefacing every recitation of the organization’s belief statement with “On my Honor.”

The aforementioned pact I made with myself as a twelve-year old is that if ever I say “Scout’s Honor” when asked a tough question, whether about my behavior, or something else, I would tell the truth.

My rabbit hole to personal safety has been that before today I’ve never told anyone else about that secret pact with myself, my internal promise not to lie if confronted and asked, “Scout’s Honor?”

But, if someone like my big brother knew me well enough to add “Scout’s Honor?” when talking with me, I’d be confined to the truth. “Did you scratch my new record? Scout's Honor, was it you?” Or, whatever, I was honor-bound to tell the truth.

Of course, my secret pact with myself also gave me an out to lie like a big dog to a teacher or whoever didn’t include the magic code “Scout’s Honor” in any interrogation.

I hope I haven’t overplayed my “out,” because I do really try to stick with the truth and not mislead or lie, even without “Scout’s Honor.”

Jumping to my choice of “honor” as the common denominator for my Civil War novel titles, here’s why I chose it: Honor is the anchor that good men need to keep their heads above the swirling currents and suck-holes of the horror of war. I think.

I’ve never been in a war, but what I read is that war can quickly wipe away the norms we were raised to view as sacred, and war can easily twist a man’s personal honor to make the unthinkable acceptable. 

That brings me around to Captain McBee and his honor. In Book I, he got tangled up in a deep patch of clinging moral seaweed, a danger he never saw until it wrapped around his legs. McBee almost drowned.

In Book II, he worked his way back to the surface, accepted a new reality of what he was capable of doing, both good and bad, and redeemed himself, more or less.

In Book III, McBee is going to struggle again to hold onto the honor--that is the integrity, respect, dignity, and reputation--he lost once and barely reclaimed.

But things in the Confederacy in 1864 went downhill at rapid pace. (Is the fall of the Confederacy the origin of the modern phrase to describe when things are going badly as “going south”?)

Anyway, elusive “honor” is going to once more do its best to confound and trip up McBee and those dear to him.

My sincere thanks to the readers of my blog who have ordered a paperback copy or a Kindle download of Redeeming Honor from Amazon. I’m not writing novels to support myself or send the grandkids through college, but sales on Amazon are gratifying proof that some folks like my books. And that’s what I really want.

It’s October and there’s actually a nip in the air outside here in little Lockhart. Hoorah!