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I BOARDED THE plane in Baidoa, soaking wet with sweat. I’d been in Somalia less than forty-eight hours but had shot enough material for two reports and needed to return to Nairobi to write them. I was dehydrated and running a high fever.

I’d finished off the last of my water the previous night. The Red Cross had let me stay in their guarded compound. I’d slept on the floor and considered myself lucky.

When the C-130 finally took off, I leaned back. Cool air blew out of a pipe in the roof, and the plane quickly got cold. I shuddered with the change of temperature.

One of the airmen removed a cassette tape from his flight suit and disappeared toward the cockpit. Seconds later, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” began to blare from speakers near my head.

“Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality.” I looked out a side window, trying to catch one last glimpse of Baidoa.

“I always wanted to pee over the equator,” one of the airmen said. He unzipped his flight suit and leaned against a pouch on the side of the plane, which allowed his urine to trickle out into the clouds. The pilot began to rock the plane back and forth, making it difficult for the airman to keep his balance. Everyone laughed.

I arrived back in Nairobi and showered the dust from my hair, lathered my body, pried the dirt from my finger- and toenails. I put on fresh clothes, went to an Italian restaurant, ate pasta, drank passion fruit juice, watched the TV above the bar. I’d been there, now I was here. A short plane ride, a few hundred miles, another world, light years away.

I finished my meal. A cool breeze blew through the restaurant. When I breathed deeply, however, I was suddenly assaulted by a smell. Smoke, rot, flesh, and food—it was the smell of Somalia, and it came like a stiletto stab out of the shadows. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. My clothes were clean, so was my skin. For a moment I thought it was my imagination, a hallucination brought on by the heat and my fever. Then I realized that it was coming from my boots. I had only one pair, and the smell of that place had soaked into the leather, worked itself into the soles. Just that morning, in Baidoa, getting pictures of a dead donkey, I’d stepped into a pool of blood. Who knew what else I’d walked through?

Every story has a smell. I don’t always notice it at first. Sometimes it takes days before it weaves itself into the fabric of my clothing, and sinks into some dark corner of my cortex, becoming memory. I come home, I can’t smell a thing.

That night, lying on the well-worn mattress in my dingy room, listening to the tap drip and the mechanical laughter of the matatu minibuses on the street outside, I cried. It was the first time in years.

SOMALIA GOT ME a full-time job as a correspondent with Channel One. That’s what I’d wanted. That’s what I’d been hoping for. When I actually got it, however, it didn’t feel so good.

The pictures of the man and woman washing the body of their dead child caused a stir among many schools that aired Channel One in their classrooms. Some schools held raffles and bake sales to raise money for Somalia relief.

“I’m building a career on the misery of others,” I said to a friend.

“You’re not doing that,” she told me. “You’re informing others about the plight of people who are suffering.” Perhaps—but the irony was, the more sadness I saw, the more success I had. After I got back from Somalia, Channel One gave me a two-year contract.

In Somalia, the relief flights continued for several months, but it became clear that much of the food wasn’t getting to the starving. Once it left the planes, it was ripped off by the warlords who ruled the streets. The U.S. military announced plans for a humanitarian mission, to secure the distribution of aid—Operation Restore Hope they called it. In December 1992, some three months after I’d first gone to Somalia, Channel One asked me to go back, so I could be there when U.S. troops landed.

I flew to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, a crumbling city of