This is a book for Kindle and I was just notified by the Kindle tech team the only way to make my Word toc hyperlinks is to completely finish the book and then go back and use bookmarks and hyperlinks to rebuild the entire toc (individually).

YIKES!

That is exactly what I was trying to avoid. Bad part is if you "update
" the toc Word kills all the bookmarks and hyperlinks in the toc and you have to start all over...