Lost and found

You two visited Sudan together as part of your research. Can you describe what that experience was like?

D.E.: He was the first of the Lost Boys to go back.

V.A.D.: We went in December 2003 and we went there for three weeks, almost four weeks.

D.E.: A lot of that time we spent in Nairobi, trying to get a flight. Because there are no commercial flights, we had to find somebody who would let us sneak onto an aid flight, basically. I remember Val walking across the patio of this hotel in Nairobi, and I had just gotten word that somebody was going to let us fly in [to Sudan], and he was going to his hometown. [to Deng] I remember you clapping at the table

V.A.D.: Yeah, like, are we going to go? Have you booked the flight? Are we really going to Marial Bai? I couldn't believe it.

D.E.: We flew on a Russian plane. It was big -- full of cargo and then us. So we were sitting on bags of grain and there were bikes stacked up right behind our heads.

V.A.D.: It really was in rough shape, the plane. It looked very, very old.

Did your family know in advance that you were coming?

V.A.D.: It all happened so quickly. They didn't know I am coming. But luckily, we met one of my friends from Kakuma, who, as we left, he called a guy on the radio and told people that Val is on the way. So they heard only a few hours before our plane touched down in Marial Bai.

D.E.: So when we got off the plane, Val's parents were right there. They live about 200 yards from the airstrip. When we got off the plane, it was only a few minutes before Valentino saw his mom and dad. It was surreal, because they definitely knew that their son would be getting off the plane, though it was pretty clear that Valentino didn't recognize them, and they might not have recognized him. His dad is a soft-spoken man who was very quiet during the reunion, and met privately with Val later on. His mom sat with us in the Save the Children compound and was crying, sitting next to Val, holding his arm, and virtually speechless. Val was, too. He didn't say anything for a long time. I think it was all too much to figure out.

Over the next few days, people who knew him, and knew his family, would walk, a two days' walk, to come and visit. The local SPLA commander came to pay his respects, but at that point, I still didn't know the full story with the SPLA. Like most of the Lost Boys, Val wasn't forthcoming about the role of the SPLA. It was with the local commander that I first understood.

That there had been a relationship between the SPLA and the Lost Boys?

D.E.: Yeah. Most of the stories were about the boys walking alone. And then this guy, the local SPLA commander, said, "Well you know of course we helped arrange their transport to Ethiopia. We wanted them to go to school." He just blurted it out, basically, that as much as many boys like Val found groups to walk with, there was also some planning. The SPLA had in some ways planned for the young boys to go to Ethiopia. It wasn't entirely as random as most people think.

Was there ever a certain point where you two talked about Dave writing the book from a journalistic point of view, using a more dispassionate, third-person voice?

D.E.: Well, that's how it started. Those pieces I wrote in the Believer, that was actually an attempt at establishing a style for the book. At one point, that was how the book started: I thought it would start with us going back to Sudan and then would begin flashing back from there. But writing it that way required too much of me, actually. I thought, I don't want my voice in this book. I don't want to be a character. Finally, very late in the game, actually, I realized that the only way to disappear was to write the story as an approximation, or an extrapolation, of Val's voice.

V.A.D.: And it also took me a while to realize that I have to have a certain way of telling the story that is going to be a book and not a story for the newspapers. That means I had to recall as many details as I can and that came from Dave's questions. He would ask me, "How was life in Marial Bai?" And I described Marial Bai, what life was like. And then he would take something that I mentioned and say, "How was this? I want you to elaborate, provide more detail on this particular event." I would think about that. At some point, it takes me weeks to answer the e-mail because I have to recollect and try to put myself back there.

Right, because you were only 5 or 6 when your village was attacked.

V.A.D.: I was very young. I think some of the questions remained unanswered because I cannot recall.

D.E.: It was funny early on, I would say, "What was it like in Marial Bai?" And Val would say, "It was nice." I would say, "No, no, no." It took a while for him to know what kinds of details the book required. And it finally broke through with the Royal Girls of Pinyudo [a group of good-looking girls Valentino encountered at a refugee camp in Ethiopia when he was about 10]. He actually wrote out an account. It was beautifully told. It was so alive. You could tell that he was gleeful, using exclamation points and stuff. That really helped me to get his voice from that part of his life.

The book has a lot of female characters, including a very cruel female soldier in Ethiopia. After all we've heard about the Lost Boys in recent years, I was surprised to know there were so many girls and women present.

V.A.D.: Yeah, there were girls. They weren't in a ratio that would match the boys to girls, but there was a good number of girls for a society in exile. Then their numbers started to diminish as they grow older. This is a society where girls get married off at an early age -- 14 or 15 -- and they were married to soldiers or to commanders. We lost them so quickly among us. By the time we left Kenya to the United States, most of these girls were married women and they weren't allowing families to go.

When Dave asked me those questions about girls, I told him, "I don't want us to spend much time on this." He started asking more questions, and I was like, "Do you really want to know this?" And he said, "Yeah!" He sent me an e-mail and said tell me about these girls. I went and wrote, "They were nice and they were good." And then he wrote back: "All right, there has to be a reason they were nice. Tell me the details." And I began to write the story, and I sent it to Dave. And later on I looked at it, and I felt pretty excited about it. I said, "Wow, in spite of what I went through, there was some fun here. There was some happiness here." And this is important for readers to know, too -- that I didn't just suffer, that I had fun occasionally.

Next page: "I was on a truck full of corpses"