Fort Bragg
Coletta had been lying on the ground for ten hours.
That day was so hot that his heart had start painfully beating over his temples, and to avoid being picked out he had to piss his pants.
They had told him plenty of times to do it with no problems when necessary, but doing it for real for the first time made him feel somewhat uncomfortable.
While the urine was drying on his pants, his eyeballs were starting to pulsate, and since he couldn't move at all the sweat over his face was starting to become very annoying. Next time he would use a head-band for sure, just like many of the others did.
And in the end, they finally opened those damn little cages.
The chickens got out.
There were ten of them, but just one had a flashy bow around its neck, and Coletta's job was to hit it and no other one than that one.
The chickens started walking everywhere inside their very small pen, and all very close to each other.
It wasn't really so difficult.
I mean that yes, it was: Coletta was tired, stiff, far away from it and the target was small, moving and amongst many moving others he had to avoid hitting, but none of these things were enough to make Coletta nervous.
Coletta had had to shoot while risking his own life in the past, during a bear-hunt, and so it took much more than this to make a guy like him nervous.
And then of course, there was the risk that another chicken got in the way of his shoot right when he had just pulled the trigger already, and after all of those hours of wait and heat he could miss the shot too, but deep inside of him he was sure he was doing everything he could in order to do everything right.
And that's the way the tension did not prevent him from reasoning.
Coletta lowered his eye to the rifle-scope as late as he could, in order to study the movements of all of the others birds inside the pen.
When he saw the right timing, he quickly lowered his head to the rifle-scope and shot just like that, with no indecisiveness or second thoughts.
The chicken-target exploded in a cloud of plumes and blood.
The shot had been fired from so far away that the other chickens were scared by the explosion of plumes, not the sound of the shot.
On the other side of the plain, inside the safe-zone, Garner raised his eyes from his binoculars.
“Impressive” he said.
And it was.
Coletta surely was one of the best of his course and competing with the best ones in whole US army.
Of course he wasn't the best around yet but he was a young and excellent marksman with as yet unknown potential.
If he carried on getting better like he had been the last few months, God only knew to what levels he would get. It has been a long time since Garner had recommended someone for Olympics qualifications, and he was looking forward to doing it again.