We had been screwed up by West Point officers. We were at a little town in France, close to the German border. The Germans held the other side of the stream, and we held our side. And the West Pointers decided they wanted us to go to the other side and capture two Germans.… We got ready to go, and they called it off. The next morning, they decided we would go that night. By now, everybody on both sides knew we were going over there. We got up to the front, and one of the guys said: “Surely you’re not going over there. The Germans have been working all day—we’ve been watching them—and getting ready for you guys.”

Boy, were they ready. We just got the hell kicked out of us. I got blown up in a barnyard. The first guy who carried me back got shot, but the next guy dumped me in the creek. Anyway, I got back. I couldn’t see much—the Army still rates this eye as blind—both of my knees were broken, and my left foot had been rebuilt so that I still have to buy shoes two different sizes. But I was sitting in a wheelchair, thinking that the Army doesn’t have any use of me anymore, and I knew I didn’t want to farm. I started thinking that maybe I’d like to write, and I started writing a short story in my mind. It wasn’t very good. In fact, it’s pretty bad, but I finally put it on paper, got it published and that encouraged me.

In Oklahoma you must have grown up around Indians.
On our high school football team, the backfield was largely Seminole, and the line was Pottawattamie, and our coach was a Choctaw. He taught algebra. No girls took algebra. What we did in algebra class was study the single-wing, double-wing formations and blocking assignments.

What got you interested in the Navajos?
I had just gotten back from the war, didn’t have a job, didn’t know anybody and went to a USO dance [in Oklahoma City]. I met a very pretty girl with long red hair, and I asked her to dance. I liked her, and she seemed to like me. She told me her dad needed a driver. He had drilled a wildcat well on the Indian reservation. I didn’t have a driver’s license, never had one, had a patch over my left eye, but her dad drove the big truck, and I followed in a smaller one with his red-haired daughter sitting beside me. That was the first time I saw the city of Albuquerque.

Along about Crownpoint, we pulled off the main highway onto a dirt road, and coming out of the hills was a whole column of Navajos. I was used to Indians, but these guys were really dressed up, all on horses, men and women, and we stopped to let them go. When we got to the ranch, I asked the rancher about those Navajos. He said some of the boys had just got back from the Marine Corps, and they’re having an Enemy Way ceremony, a curing ceremony. I said, “Boy, I’d like to see that.” He said if you stay sober and mind yourself, it would be all right. So I went.

What was it like?
What impressed me about it was how all their kin showed up. They weren’t curing bullet wounds or broken bones. The whole point was to teach them to get rid of their bad memories, their anger, hatred and indignation for the way they’d been treated, been shot at, just to get them back in what they call Hozjo, harmony with the world. I thought: “Boy, that’s wonderful; that’s the way it ought to be.” Nobody greeted me. I would have liked to have somebody tell me it would be all right. That stuck in my mind.

And became the basis of your first novel, The Blessing Way. Where did Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee come from?
My first newspaper job was as a police reporter in Borger, Texas, where I met the sheriff of Hutchinson County…I used him as a model for Joe Leaphorn, the way his mind worked. A nice guy. I don’t remember how Jim Chee started. I didn’t have anyone in mind, but I was teaching [at the University of New Mexico] and thinking of all the students I had, bright guys, young, had their own ideas about things. So I put him in there for the chance to open up some new doors.

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