" I was soaked to the skin and up to the eyes in mud and I was hungry and cold and I was fifty thousand light-years far from home.
A foreign sun emitted an icy bluish light and the gravity, double what I was used to, made the slightest movement weary and painful. After some forty thousand years, this corner of the universe had not changed at all.
It was very easy for the air force, with brilliant spacecrafts and superweapons, but when one arrived there, it fell to the infantryman to take and hold the position, with blood, inch by inch. Like this bloody planet of a star we had not heard of it until we landed on it. And now it was holy ground because the enemy had come.
The enemy, the other intelligent race everywhere in the galaxy... cruel, repulsive, hideous creatures, horrible monsters.
The first contact had taken place in the centre of the galaxy, after the slow and difficult colonization of thousands of planets; and war broke out, immediately. They had begun to fire without trying to reach an agreement, a peaceful solution. And now, planet by planet, we had to fight tooth and nail.
I was soaked to the skin and up to the eyes in mud and I was hungry and cold; the day was livid, the wind was blowing so hard that it harmed my eyes. But the enemies were trying to infiltrate and all the positions were vital.
I was alert, the gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years far from my mother country, fighting on a foreign world and I wondered if I could save my skin until I could go back to my homeland, my wife, my little daughter...
Then I saw one of them creeping towards me. I aimed my weapon and opened fire on it. The enemy gave that strange horrible cry that all of them used to utter. Then a deathly silence. It was dead. The cry and the sight of the dead body made me shudder. In the course of time, many of us had become accustomed, took no notice of that; but not me. They were horrible disgusting creatures, with only two legs, two arms, two eyes, that sickening white skin and without scales!"
The Sentinel - Fredric Brown