Hinterlands (Prologue)

Although this story contains things from the world in which we live, it should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and not based on any actual living person. The events that take place in this story are entirely the product of my imagination. The town of Oak Ridge is mythical, but it could be any real small town in America.

For so many years I was trapped there, but I had gotten out, I had escaped. As if from a prison. With the benefit of years of hindsight, the hatred finally softened. I could visit as one who had thrown off the yolk and made my own place in the world with not a scintilla of assistance from anything or anyone in Oak Ridge or the state in which it was located.

Nobody in my hard-earned and new-found military career even knew I had gone to school and played Division 1 sports there and didn’t know my family’s connection, because I never mentioned it. I viewed it as ancient history and a closed chapter. I didn’t even put my short professional experience there on my resume and was reluctant to list the school as having been the source of my first degree. There was a taint to it in my mind and in reality. I experienced it.

After I got out of there, as far as anyone knew, I was Neil Dalton from Texas and had graduate degrees from schools in other places. Unless someone was some sort of crazy college football fanatic who recalled my name and one flukish play that made me famous — or infamous if you rooted for Alabama — no one ever knew I had even attended school there. I liked and wanted it that way.

Football. A modern-day gladiator spectacle, polished up with slick and colorful uniforms that masked the rotten truths the crowds ignored. It was the only thing my father had ever been known for, and I got so sick of talking about it when I was living in Oak Ridge. It was a state where people worshipped football almost as much as they worshipped God. Perhaps more even. People would hear the last name and start in on him, talking about things he had done more than three decades before. They really were not talking about him or me; they were reminiscing about themselves and some long-ago memory of a game.

I would tolerate it, the entire time wanting to tell them about what really mattered to me: my father was also a husband who had been married to the same woman, his high school sweetheart, his first and only wife, for nearly fifty years; a father to three children who spent more time with them than any other father in my experience; and the best role model I ever had or would have. None of that had anything to do with football. But everything he had done after the age of 23 never mattered to these people. None of what I had done mattered either. It was like we were frozen in some sort of time capsule at 23.

It came to the point where I got almost nauseated when people from the state who were supposed to be my friends introduced me to others — years and decades later, after I had built a life away from the game and accomplished so many more important things, like serving my country in war, building my own home and family, methodically constructing a solid reputation and a long military and legal career— with the line, “He played for the football team!” Thus, reducing the sum total of my life’s accomplishments to having played a game when I was 18–23 years old. That’s right. Decades later, pushing 50, that’s how some folks in the state still viewed me. It was disheartening and disturbing. And extremely annoying, to be honest. It was over half my lifetime ago. Why did they still talk about it?

I didn’t want to end up the way people talked about my father; forever sealed up as if in a time-capsule, only to be seen in a football uniform in old, gray pictures, remembered only for something I had done at the age of 22 or 23. It was sad to me. It was the reason I turned down tryout offers in both pro football and baseball. The thought of being 30 or 35 and other people’s sense that the greatest accomplishment in my life was something I did in my early 20s was not something I found enticing.

There is nothing more sad and pathetic than the aging athlete who talks about his glory days, except perhaps the humble, aging athlete who actually doesn’t want to talk about it, but gets constantly asked to do so by fans. I wanted the opposite for myself, and I took another path. Outside the state, I never really had to deal with any of this baggage, but I knew when I returned, just as sure as the sun would rise in the eastern sky in the morning, it would eventually and inevitably come up, and this fact would begin churning all the old feelings, resulting in the two-sides-of-the -coin experience. The love and hate for Oak Ridge and the state would often be intertwined within the same event.

So now I was doing one of the few things I loved to do when I was visiting Oak Ridge — sitting in Whitlow’s having breakfast and reading the town newspaper, the Oak Ridge Gazette. Whitlow’s was a funky little restaurant inside an old auto-service garage. On nice days they would raise the big roller doors on both ends, letting the breeze pass through. In the spring and fall this could be very pleasant. Whitlow’s had these really fantastic blueberry pancakes and waffles that would literally soak up maple syrup, and they also made the best biscuits anywhere.

The walls were lined with old and straining bookshelves that were filled with aging hard-cover and weathered paperbacks that had the price written on the binding in pencil. It was known primarily for its great breakfasts, but in the evening they also served an eclectic dinner menu. My weekend routine in law school, which continued into my short legal career in the town, usually started on Saturday mornings at Whitlow’s. I could spend hours in there.

Now, years on, I was a veteran of more than a decade of Marine Corps service, which included Iraq and Afghanistan post 9–11. Why was I back in Oak Ridge? My parents had moved there for their retirement during my long absence, necessitating visits one or two times a year. It was quite ironic, actually. But Whitlow’s was still there, providing me a respite from the otherwise very narrow-minded atmosphere of the place. And so I went there most mornings I was in Oak Ridge, to say hello to the owners, and to enjoy those blueberry pancakes.

The Oak Ridge Gazette wasn’t exactly the Washington Post, but it was always entertaining, especially the letters to the editor. Against my better judgment, I turned to that section. I say against my better judgment because I knew there would always be something in those pages to serve as a counterweight to the quiet pleasure of breakfast at Whitlow’s, some comical offering from a local resident who fancied himself an astute observer of world events.

Sure enough, there was a letter from some guy who probably grew up in Oak Ridge and had never left for any real period of time in his entire, provincial and stunted life. It was a cheeky thing written to the national political party that had recently taken control of Congress (the Republicans). The writer was giving them advice about what they needed to do when they took office the following January. As if he knew anything.

His final suggestion was to severely cut the size of the military, at a time when we were still fighting a war for the ground that had spawned Al Qaeda, a group of cold-blooded zealots who had murdered over 3,000 of the letter writer’s fellow American citizens on a brilliantly sunny early September day in 2001. This guy and the town that generated and sheltered him — the same town in which I found myself sitting — was so far removed from the real world, indeed the rest of the nation, it was a certain fact he and it had never been witness to anything resembling 9/11.

I ruefully chuckled when I considered whether a guy like Mohamed Atta or Ramzi bin al-Shibh had ever been to Oak Ridge or even passed through. Why would they? There was nothing here that would gain anyone’s attention by attacking it. Nothing of strategic or cultural significance. Al-Qaeda liked and wanted mass casualties and that would never happen here. I thought guys like the letter writer were proof that Orwell’s famous quote was still accurate: People still slept peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stood ready to do violence on their behalf.

I myself had planned, participated in, and witnessed this very type of violence and destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq. I had been part of secret meetings where I helped orchestrate surprise attacks from the heavens in which vicious terrorists who enjoyed cutting off people’s heads had been vaporized in milliseconds by laser guided bombs as they ate lamb kabobs in their living rooms.

I had watched it on TV from a drone video feed; one minute a house would be sitting there, the next it would explode out on all four sides spewing debris for a quarter mile and all four directions. The forensic guys hated it because they almost always had to use DNA to confirm the occupants’ identities. I knew Orwell’s quote was still accurate and I also noted that people apparently still wrote unbelievably stupid, ignorant “letters to the editor.” And although these stupid letters continued to come in from all corners of the country, they seemed to be the only thing published in the Oak Ridge Gazette, as if the town were filled solely with Bush-haters and football maniacs, a strange mix under any type of social analysis.

I wondered what would happen if the Taliban rolled through here just once. What would the letter writer do to defend himself? How would he fare? Would he do anything? Or would he be curled up in the fetal position?

Once again I felt like a stranger in that strange land, those hinterlands of hills and deltas, and I somehow knew that whenever I was in Oak Ridge and the state in which it was located, I always would.

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