The letter that changed the book

Several years ago, just before my mother passed away, she asked whether I wanted to read the love letters my father had written to her from Fort Benning, before Korea. I said yes, hesitantly, the way a son does. They were loving and plain and they gave me a new view of the man who had been the guiding beacon of my life.

One passage stayed with me. He mentioned, almost in passing, that his battalion was being sent to Nevada for an assignment. He did not know what it was. He never wrote of it again.

Years later, deep in research for Archangel — the 1960 Winter Olympics, the CIA's OXCART program, the Nevada Test and Training Range — I kept running into the names of the flats where atmospheric tests were conducted. And I remembered the letter.

Between 1951 and 1957, Operation Desert Rock placed more than eighteen thousand American soldiers and Marines in trenches roughly seven thousand yards from atomic detonations. The recommended distance for the scientists observing those same tests was ten nautical miles.

My father, Paul Burton Meek — teacher, minister, builder — died of liver cancer in 2001 at sixty-eight. He never smoked. He never complained, and he never spoke of Nevada, most likely because he had been told not to.

I did not set out to write a book with a personal wound at the center of it. But the research found me anyway, and I decided the honest thing was to say so plainly, in an author's note at the back of the novel.