Book review: A fictional exploration of an honorable man’s life, infused with Territorial Guard history

“Honor at Last”

By Aurora Hardy; Epicenter Press, 2026; 146 pages; $14.95 paperback; $7.99 Ebook.

How does one write about a family member she hardly knew? In Aurora Hardy’s case, the answer came as a “fictional biography.” Although her new book never says outright that her novel is anything other than “based on a true story,” a reader might infer that the main character — Sonny — is her own father. In interviews, she has said that is the case, and that she built her story from what she could research and learn from other family members about the man who left his wife and daughter when she was 4.

The portrayal, a sympathetic one, swings back and forth between the life of an ailing Yup’ik man sitting outside his sister’s fish camp in 1978 and his memories of everything that has come before.

The most detailed sections of the book come early, concerning Sonny’s birth, early years, and especially his time in the Alaska Territorial Guard, also known more commonly as the “Eskimo Scouts,” beginning when he was just 12. “Honor at Last” could be considered, at least in part, a history of the Guard. Hardy presents that history from the point of view of a young person living on the lower Yukon, frightened by news of the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians, and proud to be a protector of his homeland.

Early on, a plane arrives with Maj. Marvin “Muktuk” Marston and Territorial Gov. Ernest Gruening, who make patriotic appeals and enlist volunteers. Sonny, whose skill with a rifle is attested to, is allowed to join and then works with his father to drill, cache supplies, keep trails open, patrol the river and coastline, identify foreign planes, and radio authorities to give and receive reports. On two occasions — likely fiction, but representing the work of the Guard — Sonny and his father shoot down a Japanese bomb balloon and search for a missing plane.

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Hardy emphasizes the many changes that came to Native villages during the war years, the intense patriotism of villagers, and the sacrifices they made by forgoing their normal routines, rituals and especially their subsistence practices. “The unity of purpose empowered the Yupik men. Old men dug deep into their remaining strength while young boys grew in purpose and care while serving in the Guard.”

By the end of the war years, Sonny had contracted tuberculosis. While he yearns to join his friends in signing up for additional military service, his health requires multiple hospitalizations in Bethel. There, removed from his village and its ways, he is exposed to white culture and meets and marries a blue-eyed nurse.

In Hardy’s telling, Nuliaq — Yup’ik for “wife,” the name used throughout — is loving but manipulative. She insists on moving to Kodiak, where she’d first worked as a nurse, and then, after the 1964 earthquake, to Fairbanks, where the couple experience overt racism, then to caretake a remote mining camp where they spend a very cold winter. Nuliaq learns of Native allotments and moves the family, now with a small daughter, Bun, to Chitina. There, they build a cozy home on land “abundant with life and natural resources.”

Sonny, always a hard worker and devoted family man, is twice cheated by men who hire him, once of an entire summer’s earnings. He had never learned to read and write and depended on trust. He is at last forced to go to Anchorage to find work, never to return to his embittered wife and confused daughter. He also never returns to his home village.

After he leaves, Nuliaq refuses to speak of Sonny or to allow any contact with him, and Bun grows up without knowing anything of her father except what she later learns from his relatives. She had felt loved by him and held onto one particular memory, a time when he “read” a familiar storybook to her; instead of reading the words she knew almost by heart, he made up his own story, one infused with Yup’ik knowledge and teachings.

Bun, seemingly a stand-in for Hardy herself, many years later comes across a news item about the U.S. Army discharging members of the Alaska Territorial Guard from service. Bun fills out the required paperwork and, in 2007, nearly 30 years after her father’s death, receives the document granting him an honorable discharge. Hardy concludes, imagining Bun’s reaction: “He had served as a Guard member when his country asked him to help fight the war. He had used his Guard training to overcome challenges for the rest of his life.”

Fiction serves history well when it brings to life people who lived it. Through her personal connection and research, Hardy has shown what the World War II experience in Western Alaska could have meant for a young man, and how his service may have influenced the rest of his life.

Between 1942 and 1947, 6,389 volunteers from 107 Alaska communities served in the Guard as a military reserve force of the U.S. Army. They were as young as 12 and as old as 80, mostly too young or old to be eligible for conscription. It wasn’t until 2000 that Sen. Ted Stevens introduced a bill to direct the Secretary of Defense to award Guard members honorary discharges; this was signed into law by President Clinton. Only then did Guard members receive veteran status and eligibility for federal benefits. The youngest of those who served, if still alive, were then in their 70s.

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