Deployment Order -originally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered (December, 2003) I was a new private when I first heard of a country called Somalia. First Sergeant Billy Joe Taggert had stomped out late to morning formation, yelling louder than usual. He started the same way he always did: head back, bellowing -- we should feel privileged to be a part of his United States Army and his mighty 1098th Medium Boat Company and God was good to allow us such an honor so early in our lives. Then he barked something about a place he called "Samoolya." There was anarchy and famine and it might get hairy what with the locals shooting everything that moved but we had nothing to fear. This was an Alabama first sergeant's loose translation of a Pentagon deployment order -- our first call to war. At the company barracks the payphones were duct-taped, blinds were drawn, the side doors chained. Locked in. OPSEC, baby. Operational security, Private. Loose lips sink ships. Queen of battle, follow me. My platoon sergeant had me collect money and secured permission for us to drive to the PX and buy forty or so cartons of cigarettes. PX regs say you can only buy three cartons at a time, but the old man who stood behind the counter had done eighteen months at Cam Rahn Bay and he knew the score and put the cartons in two bags for us. "Keep five yards," the old man said and my sergeant tried to smile and I carried the bags back to his truck. I wanted to go. I wanted to gear up and put boots to ground and drop and roll and fight -- something; anything. Gimme a target. I'd thought about fear but I didn't really know fear. I just wanted to go. I wanted to pull laces on combat boots and feel the grip of black leather on my calves, strap on my LBE and know the weight of all those bullets resting on my hip. I'd spent a year shooting fake ammo at fake targets -- not what I signed on for. The next day we were cocky and cool in our new desert-pattern uniforms, parading in front of mirrors and snapping pictures. We thought we looked like soldiers then. I slung my rifle and smoked cigarettes and tried to look tough. We flew out from Langley Air Force Base in a civilian 747, drinking and eating and cracking each other up all the way to Africa. Thirty-some days later the first pipe bomb went over the wall of the Mogadishu port compound. We heard three soldiers were going home, their bodies no longer whole. The first bite of mortality. The first sliver of something wrong. Hail Mary, full of grace, keep the shrapnel from my face.