I've fired big guns before, stuff like .308s, .454 Casulls, and even two memorable rounds out of a bone-crunching .600 Holland & Holland Nitro Express, the famed elephant gun of English hunters. But none of that prepared me for the almighty Richter-scale recoil of the tank's German-built 120mm smooth-bore cannon. The 65-ton Abrams literally rocked back on its torsion bars and shocks. And the view out the GPS-LOS was a hurricane of dust. I suppose I should say that it was scary, or disorienting, or at least sobering, as when they detonated the first A-bomb in New Mexico and J. Robert Oppenheimer remarked, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." But what it really was was empowering. The kind of empowering that people like New Ager Deepak Chopra will never understand. And a lot more fun than I'd ever had with pistols and rifles.

Major Johnson had generously arranged six rounds for me to shoot, and by the sixth round I was hooked. But completely. I wanted six more, and I was ready to write a check to cover the cost. I don't know what heroin or biker meth feels like, but if it feels anything like shooting a gun as big as a utility pole accurately enough to shear the mustache off Saddam's face, I had a 120mm monkey on my back.