Thanks, Sean.  Here's the reformatted version, minus Smart Quotes.

IT IS A DIFFICULT THING TO KILL.
    At least for humans.  It seemed puzzling at first, until one learned all
of the qualifications.
    First, humans--like T'sen--did not normally kill out of cold blood.
During their twentieth century, cold-blooded murder had seen a rise in
frequency and brutality unmatched in any century, yet it remained
proportionally representative of the motivations that had driven human
beings to kill millennia before.  For one, most murders fell in a category
that could roughly be considered accidental.  A burglar slaying an alerted
houseowner, a mugger killing his victim.  Murders in the heat of passion, as
they were so inaccurately labelled, involved some willfullness of the
perpetrator; they did not, as the fiction presumed, require a close
relationship between the victim and the murderer.  Premeditated,
cold-blooded murder--by the humans' definition--formed a small percentage of
the homicides reported to law enforcement agencies across the world;
sociopathic violence was by definition a rariety, or the product of some
drastic circumstances that made it an integral characteristic of an isolate,
deprived community.  These bloody reckonings were often carried out within a
secret community; one which saw its best interests maintained in secrecy.
   Humans did not consider killing in war murder.
   Indeed, they had various rules about who could be killed and under what
circumstances, but in war, the humans poets--and some of their military
writers--knew better.  In war, the humans became like T'sen to a point.  The
horror and disgust only reared their ugly heads when the tempo of the
killing increased or decreased.  Maintain a steady rate, and they became
jaded to it after a time.  It was a lot like the conditioning, only much
less thorough and far more costly.
   Indeed, learning about the resistance to killing in humans had taught
Mireb much about himself.
   There were poets and writers he had read over the past two years which
had stunned him with their poignant accuracy in depicting human emotion.
There were others, however, who disgusted him with their ignorance.  He had
seen humans, and had measured them by a ruler that no mere human being could
have.  When it came to killing, they were not as naturally inclined to it as
their 'great thinkers' had supposed.  They were not vicious, evil, greedy
beings prone to destroy.  No, destruction was an attitude that had to be
ingrained into their minds; even the T'sen could not admit that their
purpose was wholly destructive.  They sought a constructive path, serving
their Masters.  Humans used destruction to serve constructive means,
although humanity's hand often stayed when the T'sen would not have.
Perhaps it saved them from destruction--surely, no less than ten of this
world's accursed years ago, they had avoided blasting themselves out of
existence with weapons of no military value whatsoever.
   Well, Mireb reconsidered, no value until we arrived.
   Mireb sighed as the thirty-year old Plymouth Horizon bounced along Route
17, plowing its way through the mid-December snow to its intersection with
the New Jersey Turnpike.  The old highway, which would have been an
interstate in a few more years had the recent unpleasantness been adverted.
After a three hour drive from the work camps around Syracuse, Mireb came as
close as he would to regretting blasting the hell out of this miserable ball
of rock.  As he passed what had once been a very small city--Monroe--on the
southern edge of the semi-rural Hudson Valley, he wondered exactly what in
God's name--after uttering human expressions for nearly five Earth years,
they now came to mind habitually--would lead the Careb cell to signal their
northeastern 'fundraisers' for a meeting.
   He came to the old tollbooth station, empty for four years now--the New
York government had abandoned it soon after they abandoned the rest of
upstate.  When Buffalo and the City had closed their limits to refugees,
they had taken their new isolationist fervor to expel nearly three-quarters
of the Zentraedi that had sifted into the area right after the war.
   The New Jersey Turnpike dipped south and turned back north as it ebbed
slowly Eastward.  At least this patch of road was properly paved; Mireb
suspected his Plymouth's shocks might not hold for much longer.  No matter,
the Careb had tremendous resources in the city.  They would either repair
his car free of charge or provide him with another.  After all, unlike
humans, Zentraedi looked after one another.
    That was what made them so different from humans.  We would never kill
our own kind.
    As he approached the fork between the City and Mahwah, New Jersey, Mireb
found solace in this thought.


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+-----------------+-<The Badass Reverend of Funk Prez>---+
|    Presley H.   | Political Science / Computer Science |
|    Cannady II   | and Electrical Engineering Undergrad |
|<revprez@mit.edu>| at the Mass. Institute of Technology |
+-----------------+-<Anime Manga Development Group>------+
|_|"The art of war is of vital importance to the state"|_|