My Trip to the Middle East and the basis for Generation Kill by Evan Wright:

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I arrived in the Middle East in January, 2003 to begin the reporting that would become the basis for Generation Kill. Six months earlier I had spent time traveling around Afghanistan with US Army infantry units, a Canadian armored battalion and a Special Forces team for stories that ran in Rolling Stone. Afghanistan reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit. It was dusty, and frequently I slept outdoors or inside an armored vehicle. When I was in the field I carried a pocketful of spiral notebooks which I filled with contemporaneous observations. But every few days I was able to return to an Army tent and work on my stories in relative calm. I had brought with me an old Apple MacBook computer. It was a bright orange, clamshell design sold in the late 90s. Somehow, the machine functioned in a far harsher environment than it was designed for. The tent I worked in did not have air-conditioning (as some US military field tents have) and dust storms would occasionally blow through, reducing visibility inside to just a few feet. But at least the tent had a power outlet for my computer, and I was able to bang out a couple of 6,000 word features for my editor in New York (emailed over a tenuous Internet connection the military made available to journalists).

Before going to Iraq, I imagined I might work the same way--notes in field books, writing the actual pieces on a computer. Before departing I purchased a new, sleek all-white MacBook. In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq I lived in lived in hotels in Bahrain and then Kuwait. We reporters were periodically flown onto US Navy ships in the Gulf for a few days at a time, which generated a couple some features written at leisure in a hotel room. Of course, none of us knew if the invasion of Iraq would actually take place. By early March military public affairs officers informed us we were to be bused out to forward desert bases to begin longer-term embeds. Shortly before I was to scheduled to leave my the screen on my new MacBook went blank. There were no vendors in the middle east and no time to have a new one shipped over. In all previous situations I had ever been in, I could at least count on there being other reporters with computers I could use in a pinch, or an office or hotel with a machine. But the military informed me I was being sent out with a reconnaissance unit. We would likely be traveling behind enemy lines. There would be no other reporters accompanying the unit. All I would have to work with were the Moleskine notebooks given to me by my sister at Christmas, which I had stuffed in my pack before leaving LA.

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