Special thanks to 
The Moment
The sun bore down on him like an oversized heat lamp, cooking him inside of his kit and his uniform. His Kevlar felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, which was only slightly less weight than his plate carrier. His eye protection, which the rest of the guys in his truck liked to poke fun of by calling "cool guy shades," didn't do much at all to dim the stark light reflecting off the desert. It was miserable, sweaty, and hot.
But that didn't bother him. No, the only thing that was on his mind was the enemy contact he'd just taken, and the half-dozen shooters he'd mowed down with his Ma Deuce .50 caliber machine gun. They'd been conducting a route reconnaissance when an ambush popped out from behind a rocky outcropping on a hill some 200 meters away. He'd frozen for only a second, long enough for his truck commander to scream up through the hatch at him before he called out what he saw. A second later, his truck commander gave him the command to fire, and he jammed his thumbs down on the butterfly trigger, releasing a stream of hot lead in the direction of the incoming fire.
His heart was pumping so hard with all the adrenaline saturating his system that he'd let go of almost thirty rounds before he managed to pry his fingers off the trigger. He had to force himself not to fire again until he'd taken a look at the area where guys with guns had been shooting at him and his platoon. Squinting his eyes, he'd scanned the outcropping to try and make out anything. When he saw a flash of light and a dark silhouette against the bright white rock, he'd oriented on it and released another burst of fire, followed by another, and then another. After that, nothing else had moved. While his truck commander was calling the report up on the radio, he had kept his eyes fixed on the spot, thumbs itching to jam down on the trigger again.
It was everything he'd trained for over the course of the last year. Basic Training had been a new and terrifying kind of hell at first, but he wasn't a fresh-faced teenager. When he had signed his life away on the dotted line at the recruiting station, he was 22, with a number of jobs under his belt, a few of them which had actually carried some level of responsibility, and a college degree. He went in with both eyes open, and after the first few weeks, Basic Training and the following Advanced Training for cavalry scouts had been just another kind of routine. It was the same way when he'd arrived at his unit, a newly minted specialist in the Army, and he was on top of his game.
Standing in the gun turret now, though, it seemed a world and a lifetime away. His training had kicked in and saved his unit from what might have been a few casualties, his muscles responding the way they had trained every day and every week to do. Nowhere in his countless hours of training, though, had he actually killed another human being. Earlier today, he'd killed six. They were too far away to make a clear identification, but his mind was pretty eager to fill in the gaps and visualize their faces. He could see them scowling down the top of their AKs as they opened fire on the American cavalry platoon. He could almost make out the vacant expression in their eyes as the life ebbed out of their bodies through the numerous fist-sized holes he'd just made in them.
He'd went in with both eyes open, he had told himself when he signed up, but nothing could have prepared him for this. Now it seemed like the boy who had signed up to be a soldier had been replaced by a man; an actual soldier, who'd been in actual combat, fighting on the other side of the world. He was too preoccupied with the here and now to think about what that meant, but there was a vague understanding in the back of his mind that nothing would ever be the same for him. Not anymore.