Where It All Goes Down
Fort Hood Army Base, Texas
It's all about that base… the army base, that is. Jamie and her family live on the army base so her dad (a.k.a. the Colonel) can do his job. Listen to the way she describes it:
We were stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, a flat piece of real estate that threatened to burst into flames every afternoon from June through September. (2.1)
Charming, right? Okay, not exactly. Her life on the base helps establish Jamie's family as a strict military family—their whole lives are about the army. Her family is only on the base so her dad can work as a colonel in the army. But while Jamie might have lived on army bases all her life, but it's not until the Vietnam War starts that things get sticky.
Let's talk about the war for a minute, shall we? The whole thing started when President Johnson chose to bomb North Vietnam, but needed Congress's approval to do so. (Congress is like the parents in this relationship.) Congress voted and gave the green light, but it was based on poor judgment and misinformation. The bombing raids that followed marked one of many moments where the fighting got worse, instead of stopping all together.
Whether he intended to or not, Johnson had bargained with Congress for war, and he got exactly that: A skirmish that the President expected to win within the year became a full-scale, decade-long struggle known as the Vietnam War. Even worse? The U.S. ultimately lost the war. Jamie might not go into much detail about the war (or none at all) in the book, but as savvy readers, we're supposed to pick up on this context just from the setting.