The one question that I ask you [is] if someone was in the Army if they could ever be kind again? For someone had told me that once someone is in the Army they take all the kindness away. —LETTER FROM MOM Ottie Garrett rolled into Kalona in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. He was among hundreds of English people across the country hired by the Amish as drivers for up to sixty-five cents a mile, and he was in town bringing relatives from Indiana and Illinois for Thanksgiving. I was a naive fifteen-year-old who had recently graduated from the one-room Centerville School, a half-mile up the road from our farm. He was a forty-year-old man of the world, married three times, about to get another divorce, and more boisterous than anybody I’d ever encountered before or since. He was the first person I’d seen who was unafraid to speak his mind among the Amish, and his views often challenged the community’s befuddled elders. He was also playful and gregarious, traits both foreign and troublesome to the Amish.
