The military has to shoot ball ammo through its M9s, but civilians shooting the Model 92F have a wide array of effective ammo to choose from.

"The Army Marksmanship Unit is a lead developer of accuracy with the M9," says Lt. Col. Muggeo. "It is quite common for members of Army's service pistol team to shoot 10X groups at 25 yards. There are quite a few examples of this at 50 yards as well. There are no secrets to what we do, or how we do it. It is a common shared knowledge with the Marine Corps, Navy, Coast Guard and the National Guard. In short, anyone who uses the M9."

But just as tricked-out Model 1911s were the guns that qualified on the firing line, the Beretta M9s used by the USAMU, which start out as standard issue service pistols, undergo an average of 40 hours on the bench of the unit's custom shop.

Under the auspices of civilian master gunsmith Tony Kidd, the frames and slides are remachined and retrofitted to tighter tolerances. And because these competition pistols undergo extensive firing of 300 to 600 rounds a week, three oval steel inserts are inlaid in critical contact points on each side of the aluminum frame rails to reduce wear.

The standard chrome-lined service barrel is replaced with a match-grade, button-rifled barrel from KKM, which is fitted with a custom-made, sleeve-type bushing mated to the slide.

"There's absolutely no play, no tolerance," says Kidd. "We also machine the back of the hammer to lighten it about 35 percent. Then it's filled with silicon rubber so it looks identical to a normal hammer. Taking the weight out of the hammer wasn't done for lock time. It was done because the as-issued Beretta hammer fall was so heavy when you fired the gun it caused the front sight to dip and the gun to move. But by taking the weight out of hammer, it eliminated that problem."

And that helps explain the Beretta's hard-to-hit-with reputation. Of course, the 12-pound double-action and 51⁄2-pound single-action trigger pull doesn't help. For his match guns, which are fired one handed, single action, Kidd reduces trigger pull to a crisp four pounds.

The fixed rear sight is swapped for a modified Bo-Mar BMX, and the mini-shark's-fin front sight is changed to a shop-made half-inch tall thick Patridge with quarter-inch steel blade.

The grips are left as-issued checkered black plastic. In fact, aside from the sights, the modified M9 looks like a stock gun. Until it starts shooting, that is. Standard M882 military rounds are used for combat-specific matches, but Ft. Benning's custom shop has also developed a 115-grain competition round for the guns it builds.

"We're getting all of our guns to generally shoot less than 11⁄2 inches at 50 yards for a 10-shot group (with the competition rounds)," says Sgt. First Class Jason St. John, who joined the Army's Third Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, was deployed twice to Afghanistan, served as a sniper and is now the non-commissioned officer in charge of the USAMU's service pistol team.