This text is considered "literary nonfiction," a type of prose that employs the literary techniques usually associated with fiction or poetry to report on persons, places, and events in the real world. One of those techniques is parallelism, which is repetition of phrases, sentence structures, etc. See if you can find some.
 

In the first paragraph of quoted text, the author repeats the phrase “wiped out” three times. What is the author’s purpose for doing this?