‘Cows!’ I yell in warning as through my optic I see excited hairy bovine run across the slope in a wrong stampede to die in heavy graceless mess in the thorough cross fire. Split brown cows crash to sag and waver under their weight and momentum, falling and crushing soldiers in crazy eyed animal panic. Some looking like beasts asleep but for the leaking holes. Fodder Private Danzig goes down under the hooves of a rouge cow breaking away from the herd, deranged and foaming at the mouth, and Sergeant Baps fills it’s face with bullets before it reaches me stumbling backwards in the mud.
‘Close ranks!’ I yell into my mic. The twins, ten-year-old Fodder Privates on my flank, closing in on my position are hit direct by mortar and disappear like a blink of their blue eyes in a haze of bright light and hard heat. A small limb of cooked meat spins past my face, the stump a tangle of wet tissue strung out in a fierce breeze; dying on the frontline, the sweet bliss of God’s magnificent best.
‘The cows!’ I yell to my squad and we take cover behind the large hot bodies. Still life and flies in their eyes.
Arms tense we murder the small figures in the tree line, Dickey large and easy in our sights. My killing gun, pumping like a fast angry heart, sprays out heavy metal death in front of me, metal working for my mind, hot barrel burning the cows flank. Tracer arcs of triumph for the lens to follow, discreet eye of massive resolution, like bright flies tormented mindless on perpetual suicidal vectors. Something big blows in the tree line below us, throwing falling trees into sharp relief, stealing chunks of Earth’s punished leather and knocking me over.
I reload, wait for the green Go light, keep very low on the shallow down slope, legs flat and wide my pose perfect and still, a masterpiece of God and purpose in the intermittent red rain, sneaking looks around the corpse of the dead cow disintegrating in the barrage. Soldiers dying out there from friendly fire and the other; no matter.
A Mk 8 Workhorse explodes next to me as if from some infernal internal conflict, plastic PA speaker squealing feedback. Thin screams of pain and cries of thick rage fill the organic mechanic air. Peripheral glimpses of soldiers with bloody ears and gritted teeth fill the frozen seconds of brutal clarity between the white flashes of melting metal and the snap of jilted bone. Eyes all tunnel vision I fire hard and heavy down the hill lying still, keeping small. I roll to one side to reload another three hundred clip as crisped fat falls from the sky to settle with the thousands of shell casings rattling high pitched over the fat bass of the violent war noise. Crescents of red shoot temporary patterns in the low mist; crimson signals of deaths triumph as I start to inch forward with the shallow land, cow all but destroyed now as cover. My surviving squad around me. ‘All going to plan.’ I tell them.
Murder Major Singh, moustache flapping in the flustered artificial winds, shouts ‘fall back...back to the ridge. All going to plan. Just fall back.’ into his PA two stories up his Media Command Tank, the FLC Thatcher. 
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