We’re in the wilderness. The place without rules. I discovered it on the day when I knew for the first time, really understood, that a stranger was trying to kill me and nothing would change his mind. No words to save me. No police to call. And in the end, nothing between me and the dead man in the ditch but the will I had to put him there, to break his body into wet pieces without taking the time to wonder, what happened? Where’d that spark go? That soul? An animal doesn’t think about that. It doesn’t cross his mind.
-- Narrator (The Marine I Knew paragraph 66)

Importance: As Zahn fights with the college student in the bar, Donovan thinks about how he would not really call what he was seeing a fight. He compares what is happening to what he learned in Iraq when he realized he and his people were truly...