three day road response #2

It is just like hunting, I think. It is hunting.

This section of the book focusses largely on the war -- specifically on sniping. Xavier and Elijah become snipers, and the description of their actions and thoughts made me think about how we've become so desensitized to war.

I knew what war was when I was growing up; I learned about it in class and from general talk, but I don't ever remember thinking of the 'enemy' as real people. When we talk about war and conflict in our world, we always make it out to be so black and white: the good guys and the bad guys. Our side and their side. The heroes and the villains. And we when we hear about the enemies dying, we're happy about it -- we don't think about the fact that those enemies are people, too, that they have families and lives and maybe they're just fighting for what they believe is right. How has our world desensitized us to violence and war so much that we're happy to know another life has been taken?

The same happens in Three Day Road. When Xavier and Elijah are trained to become snipers, Xavier tells himself that it is just hunting. If he can look at his enemy and see the Germans as deer to be hunted, he won't have to think about the fact that it's actually another human being on the other end of that gun. He's killing people, plain and simple -- even if the action is done in war and in the same of freedom, he's still taking a life. But hunting? Of course that's different. We hunt so we can eat, so we can survive. If he looks at the man he's killing as something to be hunted and caught, maybe it won't be such a hard pill to swallow.

I wonder if the rest of the soldiers did that too -- told themselves they weren't killing people, told themselves the enemy was just something to be hunted for sport or survival. Maybe it helped them sleep at night. Somehow, I can't really blame them.