And that night, for the first time, I understood what I was facing. Before, it had been easy to imagine that all these terrible things were some kind of mistake. The misguided ideas of a misguided leader who in turn was misguiding his army and his people. Hadn’t there always been people who were poor and hungry? People who were hated and despised? Hadn’t there always been wars where the young men fought and the innocent died? It was horrible, and it was the world. But that was not what I saw in that officer’s face. What I saw was the joy of hate. The happiness of causing another person’s death
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