"So have at it, you dumb son of a [expletive]. Write a [expletive] novel.”

And that's an order...

I went to Korea as a 22-year-old regular Army sergeant and became the "Go-For” of Lieutenant General ID White, who had been sent there to straighten-out the X United States Army Corps Group.

As his Go-For I performed varied assignments, which General White decided I could do more efficiently than other members of his staff, but I was surprised to learn that I was now also the Public Information Sergeant of X Corps Group. General White had relieved the full colonel who had been PIO (public information officer), and replaced him with a second lieutenant who knew something about public relations.

Understandably, the second lieutenant was having difficulty controlling his 13 combat correspondents. These were well-educated young PFCs (private first class) and corporals who had been journalists before being drafted. I was to do two things in my new assignment: first, control these wild men, and second, make sure that none of their dispatches—which were distributed around the world as Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service stories—mentioned his name.

I knew this was going to be interesting when I went to the mess tent and saw sitting at a table a tall hawk-featured PFC wearing a combat correspondent’s insignia and the combat infantry badge. On the table was a sign that read “4th Grade Thru College.” Across the tent, where the senior sergeants like me dined, was a sign reading, “First Three Grades Only.”

The PFC was John Sack, fresh from Harvard, where he had not only published the first two of his many books, but also had been the first man to be simultaneously editor of The Harvard Crimson and The Harvard Lampoon—and the first Jew to be editor of either.

Truth being stranger than fiction, John and I became friends, and remained friends, until his death 60 years later.

One day, some months after we met, while sharing a bottle of Haig & Haig I had purloined from the general’s mess, I confessed that the few stories I had written and seen sent out “on the wire” had made me wonder if I too might hope one day to be a writer.

“[Expletive] Butterballs, you’re a better [expletive] writer now than anybody here but me. So have at it, you dumb son of a [expletive]. Write a [expletive] novel.”

The first chapters of my first novel, Comfort Me With Love, were written in Kwanda-Ri, North Korea, shortly before John and I came home and got out of the Army, and General White left X Corps, to ultimately become Commander-in-Chief, Pacific.

W.E.B. Griffin is the #1 best-selling author of more than 50 epic novels in seven series, all of which have made The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and other bestseller lists. More than 50 million of the books are in print in more than ten languages, including Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and Hungarian.

This "Writers on Reading" essay was originally published in "At the Scene" eNews January 2015 as a first-look exclusive to our enewsletter subscribers. For more special content available first to our enewsletter subscribers, sign up here.