Reading Hemingway in Somalia -originally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered (October, 2004) I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what I did in the war -- ten years gone and it fades, man, it fades. But I can still tell you what I read there. My last week in Somalia was spent in a cramped, second-floor room in the Army's Kismaayo headquarters building, awake all night, every night. There was a radiophone on the room's only table; it rang every few hours. My mission was to take a message. I read a small pile of books in that little room, but only one left an impression, Hemingway's posthumous Garden of Eden. It's a joke to say I read Hemingway on these nights, in Africa, away at war. They should take away my writing license for saying such a thing. It's a joke. But -- not really. I didn't know it was a joke. Instead of college I'd studied dishwashing -- among other ineffective ways of attempting to support a young family -- before finally giving up to join the army. I was twenty-two years old in Somalia, but still a year away from reading A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I'd read Old Man at the Bridge and Soldier's Home in high school but was three months shy of reading them again and understanding. So I read Hemingway at 2 a.m. in an African war zone, innocent and untainted as a reader should be. I was twenty-two and didn't know anything about anything, about this novel and its place in the scheme of literature or Hemingway himself or who thought what about this or that. None of it colored me as I opened the cover and cracked the spine, nothing shading my view as I read the front leaf then the back then the copyright page then the first sentence. The first sentence became the second then the third then it was just me and the story and none of that other stuff, just me and the story. They were on the Mediterranean coast and the quiet, sad tale unfolded in colors of salt and white sky with a mouthful of dark wine and sharp, strong marinated olives. Hemingway's protagonist was remembering Kenya. Just months before I'd been where he'd been, briefly, and now his world was falling apart and oh I'd been there, too. He would swim and fish in the sun and I would stretch, washing down a stale MRE cracker with a cup of cold coffee, wiping my mouth and looking through the window at the dark night beyond then finally back on the floor to my place on the page. An hour before sunrise the sing-song of Somali chatter would float through the window, men brought in from the city to sweep up around the pier. There'd been violence -- mysterious and malicious pipe bombs and road ambushes -- and within two weeks the Somali men wouldn't be allowed in port anymore. But I'd be gone by then, to Mogadishu with what was left of my unit, then home. For now, though, I was here, in my little night room with a radiophone and a book. The Somali voices meant I had only an hour left on my shift and I would mark my place and close the novel, lighting a cigarette and thinking about what I'd read. I can't always answer what I did in the war because it's ten years gone and man I'm starting to forget. But it's funny -- I remember what I read there. And that reading The Garden of Eden gave a young soldier the confidence to write. I knew what I'd seen in Africa and what I wanted to say about it. I closed that novel and -- fearless, reckless, naive -- I opened a notebook and began scribbling my way toward saying it.