Somewhere Else -originally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered (October, 2003) It wasn't our war anymore, if it ever had been, and the only one interested was a young airman from the plane's crew, his face pressed to the Plexiglas to watch for bright, silent explosions in the dark city below. The rest of us in the ascending C-130 had been here and were leaving, tired faces and bodies, guys looking at their hands or the ceiling or eyes closed altogether but no one looking back. We sat among duffels, footlockers, M-16 rifles, and sleeping bags filthy with dirt and grease; all of it smelled and none of it smelled like home. As the plane leveled I turned to pull a paperback out of my rucksack and that's when I saw the airman peering out -- I knew what he was seeing, the bare purple outline of Mogadishu at night, a city without electricity. White-orange flashes near the center, dark holes and flat shadows within shadows -- it was like looking at the outline of a slow-breathing thing buried shallow beneath a dusting of black sand, but not seeing the thing itself. The plane landed in Djibouti two hours later, to refuel, all of us climbing down onto the runway, stretching and yawning and peeing in the bushes. We drank a cup of warm water from a red picnic jug the airman pulled from a hatch, then lit cigarettes, looking up through our smoke rings at the stars. It didn't smell here, in the breezy midnight, didn't smell like us and our gear and our time in that world like it did on the plane. The lieutenant said we could smoke another one. Only then did guys start talking, quiet, the first few jokes going around, a nervous laugh here and there. Five hours later we were in Frankfurt, bright glass windows and loudspeakers, and a bathroom to wash up in. Back in the world. And that was the end of that. We were all who we were again, not who we'd been, briefly, while we were somewhere else.