Karen was a tall, slender, beautiful woman in her early thirties, the wife of a junior officer stationed at the Strategic Air Command. Twice a week she came to my English composition class with her equally beautiful friend Marilyn, a woman about the same age whose husband also was an officer at SAC. The two women looked different from their slightly younger, more casual blue-collar classmates—prettier, cleaner, wealthier, better dressed. Karen and Marilyn wore loose, silky, fashionable clothing in complementary earth tones or, occasionally, crisp sporty outfits in bright citrus colors—always with matching shoes that looked brand new and handsome leather handbags or purses and distinctive yet tasteful jewelry that looked as if it had been designed and crafted by professional artists. Carefully made up, their eyes appeared bigger, clearer, more wide open, as if their eyes shone more brightly than the eyes of others, their creamy skin looked softer, their summer tans more uniform, more golden, and even their lips appeared fuller, healthier, their teeth whiter, brighter, perfect. Marilyn had long wheat-colored hair highlighted with light golden-blond streaks. Karen wore her glossy, silken, auburn hair in a page boy, and when she tossed her head to laugh, which she did easily and often, each lock of hair returned perfectly to its proper place. Karen and Marilyn were charming, intelligent, witty, fun. They were articulate, deferential, polite. They participated in class activities yet at the same time they remained remote, aloof, as if they knew they did not fully belong. When they arrived at the beginning of the class period and when they departed at dismissal and if and when it was appropriate during class, they whispered privately or conversed in subdued voices with one another, smiling quietly or occasionally giggling confidentially or rolling their eyes in amusement or mock surprise at something the other had said. From their classmates, invariably dressed in tee shirts and shorts or cutoffs or jeans, Marilyn and Karen remained separate, special, slightly but clearly distant. In their assigned essays they disclosed little if anything about themselves or their personal lives, choosing to write only on neutral, impersonal topics in an academic, expository third-person style. They did not permit me to read their essays aloud nor to discuss with the class what they had written. They had almost nothing to say about the open, raw emotional confessions of their classmates—detailed first-person narratives of the intimate ordeals of surviving one’s parents’ divorce, or one's own, or of recovering from alcoholism or drug addiction, or from domestic violence and abuse, or of teenage pregnancy, or of adoption or abortion, or of rape, or of drinking too much and driving too fast and spending a night in jail. Although daily I endeavored by my questions to include the two women, I could not. To my every query they answered yes or no or I don’t know or simply nodded dismissively or shook their heads and smiled. Radiant, they smiled beautifully. One day the topic of our class discussion was war. In the realm of world affairs years before September 11 a distant and minor territorial conflict had suddenly escalated. There were disturbing news reports of civil unrest, protests, riots, organized acts of ethnic revolt and terrorism, urban violence, allegations of governmental repression and torture, official denials, and acts of opportunistic aggression by neighboring states, and now there was the possibility of even wider war. In both the national and local media American politicians and journalists were quarreling over the appropriate American response. Usually my students were disdainful of if not downright hostile to politics. They were all isolationists, apathetic and indifferent to international affairs and utterly uninterested in foreign policy until American military involvement seemed imminent. To my students politics was a dirty word.  But now due to this recent crisis several students had become bellicose and contentious. Our great nation had been insulted, they said. One young man demanded that the United States government issue immediately an ultimatum.  His proposal was quickly seconded. How dare such a puny, pitiful enemy dis and defy us? We should bomb them, a third suggested. Though I did not exactly say so, this analysis seemed to me uninformed, simplistic, and at best naive. I felt compelled to dissent. I advised restraint. We should wait a while longer and see what happened, I said. Violence, I reminded them, was no small thing. Perhaps this crisis still could be defused and the situation resolved without it. There was after all still the distinct possibility of negotiation and compromise and hope for the success of nonviolent diplomacy. When I had concluded my typically liberal remarks on behalf of world peace by condemning in general the murder of innocent civilians and noncombatants through the indiscriminate bombing of densely populated cities, Karen was the first to raise her hand. “No, you’re totally wrong,” she said evenly. “We have to kill them where they breed.”