Orson Scott Card's novel, Ender's Game, is one of my favorite books to give to students.  Ender, a young boy who leaves his family to join the group on another planet, becomes the leader of the boys by virtue of overcoming all the obstacles placed before him including attempts to kill him.  This statement, that the buggers never did deliberately attack civilians, means that the enemy that Ender has been fighting for so long is not really trying to kill off their human population which has been the popular belief.  Now Ender must decide which strategy to use to defeat or to deflect the buggers from Earth.  Reprisals could mean the buggers would change their strategy to one of complete annihilation of the civilian population.  The quote foreshadows both Ender's internal conflict about how to handle the buggers and his external conflict with the other members of his army. It also foreshadows the end of the book where Ender leaves the army in search of answers to the questions his dreams have created as well as foreshadowing who and what the buggers are and what they were really doing.