The medics offered me some pills to knock me out, but at first I refused. Didn't want any more drugs fucking with my brain.

Thirty six hours passed, and still I was unable to sleep. My sanity fraying, I at last relented and swallowed a handful of Zolpidem.

Minutes later I slipped into a blissful coma.

I was unconscious for 14 hours,
untroubled by dreams.
Only in death could my consciousness have ceased more utterly to exist.

After the passage of strange aeons, I heard the voices of the living whispering from the light....

Excited voices on the radio. Something about an al Qaeda chopper crashed nearby. Fire exchanged. Soldiers down. Major Sampson, angry, ordering all units to remain at their stations until further notice...

Not a dream. Gotta wake up....
Something's wrong.
(A sound, like a bear digging through a garbage can. Things falling, breaking.)

I sensed immediately that everybody else in camp had gone -- rushed off to the crash site to get a piece of the Qaedas, leaving me alone.

And now, somebody else was in the tent with me.

My only chance would be to drive the blade into his throat immediately. Follow with a crushing kick to his testicles, let his forward momentum drive the knifepoint home into his brain. It would have to be immaculate. I'd get no second chance.

I couldn't do it.

Every instinct in my body screamed KILL HIM NOW. Not just to save my own life; not just to save the lives of all the men, women and children this fucker might kill if he escaped; but for that look he gave me... that contemptuous sneer whose meaning I knew all too well:

"Stupid cunt, where do you get off pretending to be a soldier?" For that look alone, I should have turned his face into a blood faucet. I wanted to kill him, so badly...

But something was preventing me.

A great invisible hand had reached out of nowhere, clenched around me.

It wasn't a matter of personal choice. It was neither a thought, nor an emotion....
It was a certainty:

Taking another life was wrong.

I recognized the voice of Sgt. Urfe.
Heard the safety click off a .45.