Breathe in… out one, two, three, squeeze. The trigger on the Barrett depressed, and Specialist Nelms tracked the round. The rifle used the venerable .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun round or “50 BMG.” Developed during the First World War, the round was extremely powerful with massive overkill on “soft” targets like Iraqi insurgents. When the target was hit, the bullet, quite literally, blew the tango apart. The upper torso of the Iraqi insurgent blew upwards and to the left, trailing unidentifiable pieces, while the severed legs and pelvis dropped out of sight.

The Barrett had pushed Nelms back at least three inches, despite the fact that he was stretched out on the ground, but he brought it back into battery automatically and retargeted. Breathe… squeeze!

This time he’d hit high and the round punched through the terrorist’s upper chest, spreading a red stain across the wall behind the muj and covering his buddies with blood. The impact tore away the connective tissue and bone on the right side of the Arab’s throat and upper chest and when he fell backwards his head flopped off to the side.

Nelms contemplated the sight for about an eighth of a second with dispassion. It was an interesting example of ballistics and he wanted to make sure he’d seen it correctly. With the exception of casual professional interest, he had no other feelings about the shot. He sometimes wondered if that was because of all the hunting he’d done or because of the nature of the enemy. He, like most of his fellow soldiers, really did not like the Iraqi insurgents. They had no particular honor in their fighting methods, most of them weren’t even from Iraq and, in general, they were incompetent at anything but setting roadside bombs. To Nelms the man that he had just shot was less than a human, and killing him felt more like stepping on a cockroach than murder.