Shooter (post #3)

“Snipers are always looking for an edge, because we don’t like to fight fair. So when Casey found me that evening after things had calmed down, I was recording my day’s work in my sniper’s logbook. I now had six kills since the start of the war, and I added specific notes about the weather conditions, the range, directions of the targets, windage, and a few other things. Racking up the new kills did not make me feel proud. Snipers hate what ultimately happens when we pull the trigger, but we understand that we are important fixtures in something much larger than ourselves. Out of professional habit, I entered my observations and results in the logbook. Over time, when we compare those notes, the books can reveal patterns of enemy behavior and highlight their mistakes, so we can kill more of them” (141).

When I was reading this I thought about how sick it is to keep a logbook on the number of kills they had that day. That is just completely inhumane. I know they give out medals and awards for what they do out in the battlefield, but is it really necessary to keep track of how many people you killed in a book. These are people we are talking about just like me or you, not wild animals. I think the inhumane actions of war are represented well in this quote. They show how poorly we treat one another and how sick war can really be. The logging of the kills helps create a mood throughout the book that is cruel and gloomy. Not only does the killing create the mood, but the effect it has on family members who lose loved ones to war also creates a mood of melancholy. The mood of this book is probably the same as any other book about a war or a soldier because in a war there is always a loser whether it is a whole country or just a family who lost one of their loved ones. The mood of any war or book about war will almost always be dark and gloomy.