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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.

The beauty of journalism, as I see it, is that the right to pursue it is enshrined in the First Amendment. It's a certain nobility of provenance we journalists share with bandits, armed religious cultists and the other assorted lunatic fringe groups who point to the Second Amendment as their bedrock.

But I wander from the point of this entry, which is blaming my sister for my career in journalism. The specific role she played in the making of Generation Kill was to gift me with a set of five Moleskine notebooks at Christmas 2002.

Like many of the gifts I receive from loved ones during the holidays I was horrified when I opened this box of notebooks from my sister. Have you ever noticed that as society seems to become increasingly illiterate, retailers increasingly fetishize the tools of writing? You see all these paper stores at malls these days, selling hand-pressed folios, ink pens, sealing wax. But who actually writes personal notes on paper any more? They may as well be selling suits of armor and wig powder. I regarded the Moleskine notebooks given to me by sister as equally useful. Each came with a small brochure explaining the illustrious lineage of the notebooks, referencing famous personages who had scribbled masterpieces in them in the past. "Who really gives a flaming rat who wrote in these?" I announced to my family at the yuletide gathering held in my west los angeles, motel court-style apartment soon after we'd exchanged gifts.

Typically, before an assignment I'd swing by the 7/11 at the end of my street and stock up on the spiral notebooks they sell between card board wine boxes and duct tape. I had meant to bring a stack of these to the Middle East in preparation for the Iraq war--which I knew, if it happened, I would be covering--but the night before leaving for Bahrain I forgot buy them.

All I had in the house was the pile of Moleskines, the quaint antiquities of a finer age of writing which I had stacked by the recycling bin. As it turned out, I would be very lucky to have them with me in Iraq.

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Evan Wright, Generation Kill, USA, army, Iraq, CIA, war, combat, soldiers, Penguin Books, books