week 10 open topic

I have jumped ahead in the reading, and so I don't want to go into too much detail in the book because I don't want to be the girl who ruins the story....but I do want to talk about a part of the book that comes later. Sam "runs away" to Cawood's Pond and camps out as if she is trying to be a soldier. Emmett, being the good uncle, finds her the next morning. They are talking about why she ran she ran away, and Emmett tells her a story about when he ran away because his daddy gave him a whipping. He says, "I ran to the creek and stayed there till it got dark, and while I was there I thought I was getting revenge, for some reason. It's childish, to go run off into the wilderness to get revenge. It's the most typical thing in the world" (221). Sam replies to that by saying, "That explains it then...That's what you were doing in Vietnam. That explains what the whole country was doing over there. The least little threat and America's got to put on its cowboy boots and stomp around and show somebody a thing or two"(221). I remember a few posts back when we were reading "The Things They Carried", and I said something about how the US didn't need to get involved in the war. This just goes to show that there's another person (though fiction) who agrees with me. I don't know exactly what we were trying to get revenge for, but I can see how we were threatened. One of our ships, the US Tonkin got blown up, and that caused a threat to the US...but a small threat, and like Sam said, we have our cowboy boots on, and we are stomping around to show them who's "boss". I almost wish I could laugh...but I know it would be innapropriate.