The Village in the Evening

I never went into Santo Domingo.

I should say that first, because the novel I have just finished is set in the city, and a reader is entitled to know where the author was standing. In April of 1965, I was twenty-two years old and serving with the 618th Engineer Company, a support unit within the 82nd Airborne Division. The 618th’s job was air-droppable construction equipment: bulldozers and road graders rigged with parachutes, designed to be put on the ground behind the lead element so the lead element had roads, fills, and cleared lanes. We were the company that arrived to make the next thing possible.

In the Dominican Republic, that meant San Isidro Airfield, twenty kilometers east of the capital, and a bivouac near a village I will not name because I no longer remember the name. We were near it. That is what I can say honestly. I walked out to it in the evenings when I was off duty, which was often enough that the walk became familiar, and the village became, for the months I was there, the place that was not the airfield and was not the war.

I was twenty-two, and I was not political.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because a man of my age now writing about a young soldier then has to resist the temptation to make the boy more thoughtful than he was. The boy was not thoughtful. The boy had a vague notion that he was in the Dominican Republic to stop Communism, which was the explanation his country had given him, and which he accepted in the way a twenty-two-year-old accepts the explanations his country gives him. He had not heard of Juan Bosch. He did not know that the men in the city he was twenty kilometers from had, three years earlier, elected a president by sixty-three percent of the vote, and that the unrest he could hear on the wind at night was, in some real sense, the unfinished business of that election. He knew Communism was the problem. He had been told so. He was twenty-two, and the men telling him wore more rank, and that was enough.

It would not stay enough. But it was enough then, and I am not going to retrofit the Cold War politics of the sixties onto the boy who did not have them.

What I remember from the village is the heat first: warm, humid air that sat on the skin and did not move much after sundown, that you walked through rather than walked in. The air carried smells the way that kind of air does, which is to say it held them. Cooking smells from the street vendors, fragrant and unfamiliar, the specifics of which I could not tell you now and could probably not have told you then, because I did not know the names of what I was eating. I ate it anyway. It was the best food I had encountered in my life up to that point, and the fact that I cannot reconstruct it now does not make that any less true.

There were young women in the village, and I noticed them in the way a twenty-two-year-old far from home notices what is around him. It is a truth I have come to hold with some rue.

I should be honest about the other thing, too. The village welcomed me, and the welcome was real, and the welcome had a structure. I was a customer. I had American dollars, and the village had cooking, and the transaction worked in both directions, and both sides understood it. What I did not understand then, and what I understand now in a way I could not have understood at twenty-two, is that the welcome had been engineered, generations before I arrived, by men in uniforms not unlike mine, in ways that made it possible for a young American with cash to feel like a guest in a country his own government was occupying. The warmth was not a lie. The warmth was real. But the structure underneath it was not built by the people offering it, and it was not built for them.

This is not a sentimental memory. It is a real one. The two are different.

What I want to say about it, sixty years later and with The Albatross Ledger about to go into the world, is this. The country I was deployed to was not, for me, the country in the novel. The country in the novel is a capital city in crisis, an embassy with a fluorescent flicker, a checkpoint that materializes out of a side street, a corridor between neighborhoods that becomes a door that closes. I built that country out of research, out of the accounts of men who were in it, and out of sixty years of reading and thinking about what the operation was and what it did.

The country I was actually deployed to was a village in the evening with cooking fires and young women and warm air, and a transaction made in American dollars that I did not yet understand was part of anything larger. I walked back to the bivouac in the dark and slept and got up the next morning and did my job, which was bulldozers and road graders and the work of making the next thing possible for the men who were doing the operation.

Both countries are true. They occupied the same months. They were twenty kilometers apart.

The Albatross Ledger is about the country I did not see. It is told with the seriousness that the country deserves. But the writer of the novel was twenty-two in a village in the evening, paying for cooking with dollars from a country he had not yet thought hard about, and I do not want anyone reading the book under the impression that the writer was somewhere he was not, or that he saw what his characters see.

I wrote the book for the men who went into the city.

I wrote it from twenty kilometers east, where I was twenty-two, where the air smelled like cooking, where the welcome had a structure I did not yet read, and where I was paying attention to the wrong things, in the way you pay attention to the wrong things when you are twenty-two and the country you are in is warmer than the country you came from and the dollar in your pocket buys more than you knew it would.