A delegation from the Dega Central Highlands Organization has travelled to El Paso for a veterans conference. These photographs are the record of it: the room, the uniforms, and the talk that ran long.
It is a long way to go to sit in a hotel conference room. The Dega men who fought alongside American forces between 1965 and 1975 are scattered now — across North Carolina, across the country, and across a sea from the Central Highlands they came from — and a gathering of veterans is one of the few places where the people who were there and the people who carry the story afterwards end up in the same room.
In the room
What the delegation went for was conversation, and there was a great deal of it — about the Dega people, about what has happened in the highlands since 1975, and about the plans for the Dega Nation. Some of it was with American veterans who served beside Dega soldiers and have not forgotten them. Some of it was with people meeting the Dega for the first time.
Dega men fought under an American flag for ten years. The conversations in that room were with people who remember it — and with people who had never been told.
Between the sessions
El Paso sits within a short drive of White Sands, and the delegation went out to see it — white gypsum dunes to the horizon, about as far from the red earth and pine forest of the Central Highlands as a landscape can get.
