On a mission in Honduras in the 1980s, Eric L. Haney and members of his elite counterterrorist unit surrounded some Cuban-trained guerrillas on a Honduran mountaintop.

We drew our coils tighter and pressed the attack with savage ferocity…Throughout the fight I had been watching, waiting for the guerrilla leader to expose himself. Finally I spotted him. He was up and moving, his radioman at his side, making a last desperate attempt to organize his few remaining scattered troops. I pitched my rifle to my shoulder, saw the sight come to rest just under his ear, slapped the trigger, and shot him through the neck. When the bullet struck, he went down so fast that he seemed to disappear…

The guerrilla commander had crashed to the ground with his left arm crumpled beneath his body and his head twisted to the right…I looked at him awhile and then squatted in the dirt beside him. I felt a need to be near this man. I placed my left hand on his shoulder. Before turning him over and examining him more fully, I paused to say a silent prayer for all of us on the mountaintop, both the living and the dead.

It is an awful thing to handle the still-warm body of a man you've just killed. It feels like God has you under a powerful microscope, and is minutely examining the wrinkles and hidden recesses of your soul. It's a moment that is sad, solemn, and utterly lonely. And it clears away all differences among men.

This man was an enemy no longer. He was now my brother—as in reality, he had always been—and I was the instrument of his death. Whatever he had desired in life, whatever his hopes and dreams had been for the future, they were now over. His desires would go unfulfilled…I was only in my early thirties, but I felt like a man who carried the weight of ninety years.