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Shortly after I arrived at Camp Mathilda, the northern Kuwait encampment which housed my assigned subject, the Marine Corps' First Reconnaissance battalion, I was told by the commander to hand over my satellite phone. This was a relief. If I had no satellite phone, I would be unable to talk to my editor. My editor wouldn't be able to ask for a story, and I wouldn't have to explain that my computer was broken. I would just take notes, and write the stories when I returned to civilization.

I would spend nearly two months with the battalion. On previous jobs I had always carried either cheapo spiral notebooks purchased from 7/11 or long, thin reporter's notebooks. Sometimes, I carried legal pads. It wasn't until I started writing in Moleskine books--which I had scoffed at as a frilly, overpriced "Frappucino notebooks" when my sister gave them to for Christmas--that I began to notice their advantages. The spiral books would always become crushed when I carried them in my pocket. The spirals would get bent, and the pages would fall out. The Moleskine notebook was stitch-bound, and fairly indestructible, which got high points from me as we crossed the line into Iraq and entered combat.

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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).

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In the mid-1990's when I was an editor at Hustler magazine I served as guide to David Foster Wallace for an article he wrote about the porn industry. (Wallace's article was originally published in Premier magazine under the title "Neither Adult nor Entertainment." It was reprinted in somewhat different form in his essay collection Consider the Lobster, with the title "Big Red Son.") It was Wallace who inadvertantly taught me a new way to write notes when researching a story.

My meeting with Wallace was set up by Glenn Kenny, an editor at Premier (now with a website t/k), who wanted me to help show Wallace around the porn industry's annual convention and awards show in Las Vegas. My main job at Hustler where I served as Entertainment Editor was to cover the porn industry and review XXX-videos. Because of my lofty position--Hustler's "Fully Erect" film rating, which I had the power to bestow, was one of most sought after ratings in the raunch-film industry--I knew all the players and sketchy characters (of whom I was one) in the business.

But when Kenny originally called to ask me to help out with Wallace I was deeply annoyed. I had hoped someone from a mainstream publication would ask me to write this article. Wallace was at the height of his fame, the recent recipient of a MacArthur "genius" Award, featured in Time magazine as the great new hope for American letters. Why did this guy need my help? I was the one trapped in the porn ghetto hoping desperately to escape it.

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I learned to read out of spite. My older sister had been attempting to teach me to read with Dr. Seuss and Richard Scary books for several weeks when one night she refused to provide any further instruction. She would no longer sit beside me at bed time and flip through the pages, enunciating the words, pointing to the corresponding pictures, tucking me in when I drifted off. I was on my own. Enraged, I banished her from my room--I do remember slamming the door, thrashing blankets around, tears--and picked up Go Dog, Go! Reading it on my own was an act of sheer hatred, intended to prove to my sister, the entire world, that I needed no one. They could all fall off the face of the planet. I had found my new family among the dogs of Go, Dogs Go! joining them as they raced their cars for the party at the top of the tree, the climactic finish to the book. I vowed to never come down from that tree, to live in the world of dogs until the end of time.

It took many years before I realized how susceptible I am to reverse psychology, that my sister had played me masterfully.

My sister definitely deserves credit for this. Teaching me to read at such a young age, before I'd even entered first grade totally screwed up my life. I was so far ahead of the other kids when I started school, I became an immediate slacker. It set the pattern and so retarded my progress that by the time I reached adulthood, I definitely needed a career in a profession requiring no credentials or qualifications. Journalism fit the bill.