In April of 1965, I was with the 82nd Airborne, and we went to the Dominican Republic.
We were STRAC. It stood for Strategic Army Corps, and the motto was an acronym of the name — Skilled, Tough, Ready Around the Clock. In practice it meant your gear stayed packed, your uniform stayed immaculate, and your weapon was ready to load onto a transport plane on short notice, because nobody was going to tell you where you were going until you were going. The word leaked into the slang. To call a man STRAC was to say he was squared-away. It was the best thing you could say about somebody.
This was not my first rodeo. I had a couple dozen jumps by then, so going out the door was more exciting than frightening. That part I knew how to do. What I did not know, when we took off, was whether there would be a runway at the other end. Nobody had told us. So we sat rigged for a jump into a country most of us could not have found on a map two days earlier, and I thought about what it would be like to be shot at while floating down — hanging in a harness with your feet in the air and nothing you could do about any of it. As ready as the Army knew how to make a man, and readiness with no application whatsoever to that particular minute.
I was proud of being STRAC. I’m still a little proud of it, which is the part I’ve had trouble with.
Because what I wrote, sixty-one years later, is a novel about two people who are extremely good at their jobs. My analyst keeps a ledger nobody could fault. My MP sergeant keeps a log so thorough he fills the margins when the columns run out. Neither of them fails. Neither of them is corrupt. The harm in this book is produced by people being squared-away, and by the paperwork being accurate, and by an apparatus that was ready around the clock and did not ask what it was ready for.
That’s why it took sixty-one years. You don’t examine the thing you were proudest of. You carry it around, and you don’t open it, and then one day you’re old, and you open it.
Junot Díaz called The Albatross Ledger a chronicle of an invasion the US has forgotten and the lives — and the countries — it made and broke. Forgotten is the word I keep coming back to. I was there, and I nearly forgot it myself.
Super good, Phil. Heavy, and what you all did and went through, paving the way with your beings for us kids that followed, is often hard to imagine. I know it's hard to talk about, so much appreciated.