These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.

Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble.

It's only now that I remember the racket that went on. At the time you become immune to the sounds around you because you're so busy concentrating on where you must go, what you must do to stay alive. There's no room in your head for anything else except your survival. But the roar of guns, the screaming, the din catches up with you eventually.
Also the sights that you see affect you more at a later stage than they do at the time. I won't forget men in a row. I won't forget men on fire. I won't forget a tin hat rolling, spinning across the embankment with the head of a man inside.
Sounds and sights wait inside you, along with the stink of smoke, gunpowder, mud and rot and burning flesh. They invade your waking hours as well as your dreams.

Today is my birthday. I'm twenty-nine. It's November 10, 2004. I'm a staff sergeant with 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment, stationed in Fallujah, Iraq. I'm near the end of a thirty-six-month "all others" tour away from my family, currently deployed to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Fallujah had been abandoned for six months when we arrived in the late fall of 2004. During that time, four thousand to six thousand enemy insurgents have entrenched, preparing their defenses for our arrival. Bodies are all over the street, festering bacteria. Within a matter of days of our arrival, we've all suffered strep throat, fevers, and diarrhea. It's horrible. We engage in close-quarters combat, within a deadly two-foot radius. The enemy is a mix of highly skilled professionals and amateurs who fight with passion. We never know what we're going to encounter. I'm not bothered by fear. I'm fueled by it.

Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.

I could hear us firing, I could hear M-16s, I could hear hand grenades going off, I could hear heavy machine guns going off, hear the AK-47s, and you could hear the North Vietnamese talking and you could hear us yelling and there was organized chaos. I'm talking about branches falling, small trees falling from the intensity of the firefight and you don't dig in, you just go take 'em on, and whoever's got the biggest toys is going to win.

I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.
So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.

People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.

Even as my conscious mind concluded that we were under fire, I threw myself on the ground and flatten into the lowest profile possible. You’ve heard the bromide about combat making life more real. I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly true that when you are flat against the ground with your face in the dirt, the whole universe looks different.

With respect to the effect of "friendly fire" hitting among troops. however, it is to be observed that if the circumstances leave any room for doubt as to the source, the men will jump to the conclusion that they are being victimized by their own guns.

We were at the eye of a storm. We heard gunshots from all directions. I saw armored vehicles rushing on the square and troops pouring in. We were surrounded.

When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.

You have to put up some kind of a beef. Scream or holler or scratch or make some sound that you’re alive and can fight. You know, cough or do something. Otherwise, they just walk past you and look at you and say, “He must be dead, he ain’t moving.”

Sharp drops from a high altitude to a small one, minute overload, from which sometimes it darkens in the eyes - all this is easily tolerated by a physically hardened person. Sometimes in battle, performing a cascade of figures, you lose consciousness for a moment. You will come to your senses, now you are included in the combat situation and again you act at any height, at any speed, in any position.