by Farrell O’Gorman

In the summer of 2001, as I neared completion of the first draft of Awaiting Orders, I made the mistake of revealing some plot details to an acquaintance. He knew I’d been in the Navy in the early 1990s and was disappointed to learn that I wasn’t writing a Tom Clancy techno-thriller. I told him that life in the military wasn’t always as exciting as The Hunt for Red October, that some of my fellow officers had in fact spent a year doing what the characters in my novel initially find themselves doing—awaiting orders to enter flight school, officially on duty but effectively on leave.

“No,” I said. “If it were a political exposé, it’d be ten years too late.”

By mid-September, as I worked on the final chapter, it would be even later.

Though I had never conceived the book as a “political exposé,” I had conceived it in part as a book about the world I’d graduated into, the world of the 1990s, when the Cold War had come to an end and we—Americans—suddenly seemed to have it made.

Just as suddenly, that world was gone.

And yet with all the undeniable evil that came to us that September came also something that maybe seemed—somehow, to some of us, for a time—good. Something that the protagonist of Awaiting Orders keeps looking for: A sense of purpose. The sense of purpose that comes with having an enemy.

No, I hadn’t tried to write the novel as an exposé. I’d tried to write the kind of novel I would want to read myself, a novel about lives lived in a particular place and a time but resonating beyond each. I’d tried to write a cross between Catch-22 and Waiting for Godot, between Dangling Man and The Sun Also Rises, a novel that took some of what I’d experienced and some of what I’d read and re-imagined both into something new, something that was fiction but nonetheless true. Truer than any newspaper might be. Because it would, I hoped, still be true decades later.

The premise of Awaiting Orders occurred to me halfway through my Navy commitment, at a time when I was reading a lot of Walker Percy, whose flawed protagonists often don’t know what to do with peace and so secretly long for war. I knew enough by then to know that military life was often as much about idleness as it was about action. And to know that it made people show sides of themselves—good and bad—that might have remained hidden in the civilian world.

By that time, I had also read enough to know that I wanted to emulate Percy and other authors whom I admired. So I began to dream up early versions of the characters, thought maybe I had a long short story in the making. Started it, but then stopped, and kept it in a box for six years while I was in graduate school.

And then in the spring of 2000 I picked it up again. I’d been reminded by Tobias Wolff and Andre Dubus how the peculiar circumstances of military life, even in peacetime, tend to create a kind of crucible in which character is tested and revealed—in both intentional and inadvertent ways. And I’d begun to realize how frequently in older fictions I kept coming across the figure of the bored soldier who courts trouble, who stands forever on the brink of war. Look, and there he is, in pop culture and in the classics—in Mister Roberts and From Here to Eternity but also in Tolstoy, in Dostoevsky, in Chekhov.

So, done with my doctoral dissertation, looking to breathe again and convinced that my characters would at least have respectable company, I started writing the novel. And writing the novel, of course, wasn’t about articulating big ideas—it was about seeing people and places and finding the words to make others see them. This is both the challenge and the pleasure of writing fiction, and work though it is, much of it is undeniably pleasure. For me, it was the pleasure of remembering the land and the seascape of southern California, so different from the place where I had grown up. And the pleasure of finding the characters—the four young men, even the worst of them, all in part myself, but myself somehow intermingled with others I had known, whether in life or in books. Wherever they came from, they were there, beginning with the moment in writing the first draft when I looked at my protagonist and asked myself, “Now why did you go to a military college in the first place?” And the answer was there.

It was an answer that came altogether effortlessly, altogether naturally. And it—like all the other answers about character that I had to confront—was altogether consistent with what my faith as well as my experience had taught me about human beings.

The fact is, I didn’t have a political exposé in me, wouldn’t have cared to write one even if I did. What I had in me was a story about a group of young people struggling for the first time with the inevitable question: “How should I live my life in the limited time I’ve got?”

That’s the story that was available to me to be told, and that’s the one I’ve done my best to tell.

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