She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence.

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.

He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven…

I swear I’ll never give in. No, I refuse.

Maybe you’re just like my mother, she’s never satisfied.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember.

Bigmouth strikes again, and I’ve got no right to take my place in the human race.

In fact, Karzai is right: It is completely inhuman. But it’s inhuman because many of our soldiers have, for their own sanity, learned to strip humanity out of the equation, making their enemy not a man, but a “gook” or “towelhead.” Being able to make that distinction in your mind is important in war, because when you can look at the person at the end of your gun barrel and think he’s not a man, you allow yourself to ignore all the lessons you learned about how killing people is wrong. If your enemy is not a man like you, with a family and a mother, then why not shoot him in the heart? And once you’ve shot him in the heart, why not pee on him?

We allow—nay, encourage and demand, our troops to shoot people in the face, stab them in the guts, and bomb their homes. We ask them to do work that destroys families, communities, cities, and countries. We ask them to witness their friends and colleagues get slaughtered on the battlefield, and to see gore and trauma generally found in scary movies. What’s more, frequently we ask them to do all this when they’re still teenagers, too young to even drink a beer.