You had to be there to fully appreciate it, I said in my review of Patrick deWit’s recent Vietnam-era novel, “Dodge City,” which could as well be said about Laurel Ferejohn’s “Crossings,” which will resonate most strongly with readers who were of a certain age during that stressful time.
Certainly it will likely make them more empathetic toward one of the novel’s two protagonists, Valetta, who at 18 is married to a hardcore Marine, Dixon, who, like the others in his unit, is in a holding pattern in Hawaii awaiting certain deployment to Vietnam – a prospect also looming for the novel's other protagonist, Tomby, a fellow member of the outfit whose homosexuality makes him a frequent target of abuse from Dixon and his buddies.
Indeed, the novel opens with Tomby being manhandled by them during a beach outing, with the abuse witnessed from shore by Valetta, whom Tomby joins when he emerges from the water and in short order becomes allies with.
An ally, too, Tomby finds in Lili, a bartender at an off-base establishment which if not expressly a gay bar nevertheless offers safe harbor for those of Tomby’s persuasion.
“Be careful,” though, she keeps warning him as the two become simpatico enough that it is through her that a way is set up for him to head for Canada – an alternative that, like deWitt’s protagonist, he keeps vacillating about.
Saying more would be giving away too much about a novel which, as with deWitt’s, is lent topicality by the current situation in Iran, which couldn’t have been even a blip on the radar when Ferejohn began writing but certainly now, with talk of boots on the ground there and the draft being talked about for the first time in decades and a number of Americans already having lost their lives to that conflict, makes both Ferejohn’s book and deWitt’s, for all their remoteness from the present time, very much germane today.