"Maybe." The coffee's still too warm to drink, judging by how the ceramic wall of the mug feels against the backs of his fingers; it's a pity, as he could really use a natural excuse to pause and arrange the thoughts in English. "Some things, they become ordinary. They are sad but ordinary. You see it so many times, there just..." He gestures with the hand that isn't holding the mug. "...is not shock."

This, of course, is different. But the things he'd seen in Chicago just hadn't affected him like they seemed to hit the American trainees. Modern life, with all of its amenities, hadn't toughened them, hadn't built any mental strength. Their wars of imperialism were far away, not outside of the homes where they slept; he suspects the same can be said for this man—he's concluded that's what's going on here, that he's simply a gay man who likes to wear women's clothes, not transgender, which he did see a few times in Chicago—even if he has seen war, he hasn't seen war with guns, which tools specialized to end human lives in minutes. He wasn't a contemporary of factories with the kind of machinery necessary for a traumatic amputation.