My buddy Meat's the one who showed me the true joy of handling the M203. I mean, yeah, the M16 was okay. You hear a lot of us Marines making a big hoo-ha about our M16s. 'This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine' and all that. But after rolling with Meat, I'd take my M203 over an M16 any day.

You hear all those Nam doggies bragging on their old-school Blooper Gun, the M79 grenade launcher. It could blow up NVC from a hundred feet away. My instructor at Survival Evasion Resistance Escape school, what we called SERE, was Sergeant Bloodworth, a Force Recon Nam doggy who used to brag on how he could fire a grenade with the Blooper Gun and blow up a running NVC in mid-stride. But the Blooper Gun was a pain in the ass, an extra weapon you had to tote around in the bush. So after Vietnam, they came up with the M203 grenade launcher, which clips on to your service rifle. The M203 is one size fits all—jack that puppy into the forward receiver of your M16A2, your M4A1 carbine, whatever you got, and let fly. If you timed it right, your grenade would blow up right in the Iraqi soldier's face. We called that a facial.

Because of my training in muay thai kickboxing, I'd been the punter for my high school football team down in Austin, Texas. Nobody in their right mind wants to be the punter. On Sundays you see all those other NFL guys doing what they've dreamed of doing since they could pee straight. And then there's the team's queer little punter, jumping up and down on the sidelines like he's begging someone to punch his lights out. But there in the desert, with the M203 in hand, I was the quarterback. It definitely put a new twist on the term 'long bomb'.

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'Hard Core' will be printed in full in Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2. To subscribe to Granta and receive the entire issue free, or to buy a copy of Granta 97, click here.