What Comes Back

Twenty-five years after he first served in Somalia's shattered capital, an Italian special-forces officer is ordered back to Mogadishu – and, as if fate had circled the date, in the very month of July. In 1993 he had been part of Operation IBIS, and had lived through the fighting history remembers as the Battle of the Pastificio. In 2018 he returns under a different flag and a different mandate, leading a multinational team of instructors with the European Union Training Mission in Somalia. The war has changed. So has the enemy – al-Shabaab, the roadside bomb, the car that will not stop at the checkpoint. Part military chronicle, part travel journal, What Comes Back moves from the cold mechanics of counter-insurgency and the raw minutes of an IED attack to quieter reckonings: the weight a soldier carries home, the distance from those he loves, faith and doubt, a father's last gaze, the wonders and contradictions of Africa. Along the way it asks what it means to go back – to a place, to a memory, to a version of yourself you thought you had closed for good. Because some things never wholly leave us. They return when we least expect them — not to pull us backward, but to remind us who we were, and who we still are.