The 10th Mountain compound had a mess tent, and the cooks, bless their hearts, had been busy at their stoves while the fighting raged outside the walls. After the long night in the rain and the ferocious battle, my boys and I were starved, and I loaded a plate with potatoes, eggs, and some awesome links of sausage. We had stood down, but my adrenaline was still pumping and my combat senses were still sharp. The taste buds were wide-awake, and I shoveled in the food. My fellow snipers and I yelled insults at each other, and everything was in vivid color.

The colonel who had welcomed me came into the tent. He was one of those big dudes, a six-foot-something who looked sharp in his creased battle-dress uniform with a pistol on his hip. He swaggered to our table and looked with disdain at the stack of food disappearing into me, a man who had just finished killing a bunch of people. “How can you sit here and eat like this?” he asked.

“I’m fucking hungry,” I replied, detecting a problem. A hush settled over the mess tent.

“Well,” said the colonel with a rather theatrical sigh, “I guess that’s the difference between us.”

I stand five-nine and weigh 165, but I never back down from bullies. I rose from the bench and moved into his personal space. “No. The difference between us is that I don’t squeal for help when somebody shoots at me.”

The colonel huffed, and his eyeballs bulged with surprise. “Who the fuck are you, anyway? What’s your rank?” He still had no clue, pulling this chickenshit routine right after we had saved his ass.

I had been through too many fights in too many places on this planet to take any shit from this guy, colonel or no. Hell, he had probably been shuffling papers at his desk a few nights ago when I was out on foot patrol in the rain with the French Foreign Legion. “My name is Gabriel,” I said, smirking. My senses were quivering again, my muscles tense. I knew my boys had my back if an Army-Marine brawl erupted. “And my rank is none of your damned business. You got a problem, take it up with General Klimp.”