Humanity?

The image to the right is an old newspaper clipping of an obituary from a civil war. It is a list of the men who died fighting.

To us this is just a list of names. We see them as names instead of seeing them as people. We can't help it because we didn't know them. In the story, the sniper just sees those people as targets, as part of his job. He sees killing them as something he is just expected to do. It is his job to be a sniper and unfortunately it is his job to take away the lives of others.

The story shows that people are capable of anything. People create their own preceptions of right and wrong. The sniper was able to kill his own brother because he did not see him as a person. If the sniper had never seen the target's face, he would have just been another name on the list.