Trombley looks at the wild dogs in the fields and once again his thoughts turn fondly to shooting them for no reason. Ray shakes his head, because he's smart enough to know that Trombley sucks, and he's also enough of a USMC Mean Girl to toe the line and show him scorn whenever possible. I don't understand why Ray never gets bullied. He's fairly begging for it, like, every second. "Trombley, I keep telling you we don't shoot dogs. We shoot people." Not even that last bit cheers Trombley up, much less the booming foreshadowing. "And we generally only shoot people if we have to."

There's this face Trombley makes, whenever people say shit that makes obvious sense. "We only shoot people when we have to," for example. It's like he's getting punished, or upbraided, but it's always stuff that has neutral value. Like if I said to you, "The sky is blue," and you were like, "GET OFF MY BACK!" And all through this episode it kept making me want to stomp him. But then at the end I realized that, as far as he's concerned, you are hurting his feelings, because he's like this detuned radio that's only getting whatever Columbine frequency that makes him tick, so if the sky is green in his world, telling him it's blue actually is fucking with him. And because he's the FNG (and a child of nineteen), anybody who says anything to him is some kind of authority, in one way or another, which means he is getting punished. He's got these Captain America/received-wisdom ideas about what the military is about, and they are so wrong, but if you try to explain what the military is actually like, you kind of are being a dick, subjectively speaking. And the really scary thing is that he is so good at shooting people and killing them that this schizoid approach is not even really a concern.

"...I'm afraid of dogs," Trombley offers, after awhile. Ray laughs. "You're afraid of dogs? What, were you bitten in your formative years?" Evan laughs quietly, because Evan laughs at everything Ray says, because if we didn't have Evan's reaction shots every five seconds we might notice that Ziggy's still a subpar actor with moments of genius. "My dad was once," Trombley offers in a schoolyard tone. "Dog bit him and my dad jammed his hand down the dog's throat, ripped up his fucking stomach." He tells this lie like they're going to be impressed, but because they're not teenagers, they don't actually care. I mean, maybe it's not a lie, but it sucks the same way as though it were. dood thats so fuking hardcorre thats some faces of deth shit right there like yr old man mst hav fuckn balls of steel i bet. Ray whispers quietly, in a fearful and still disgusted tone, "Where did we find this guy, man?" Trombley tries again: "I like cats." Still not getting the response he wants, not even from Evan, not even after trying three different ways to get them to look him in the eye, he sighs and stares out the window. Something else, then. Something he's good at.