Our Pointy Boots

THANK YOU Maureen Gibbon for giving me another amazing “war story”

Although, Our Pointy Boots by Brock Clarke was much more than a war story. It was written with layers of emotion and detail, with each page bringing the reader closer to the characters and their world.

I was reminded of The Things They Carried (O’brien) which I’ve also read in a course of yours.

Through all of recorded history, war has been an inevitable factor of life. Regardless of choice, we are all effected by war in more ways than can be known. I’m always grateful to get a glimpse of what military life is, because I look at veterans and they know and I know that they have seen and done things that I could never understand, they feel things that I am incapable of feeling, because the closest I’ve come to experiencing military life is sleeping in a tent, or maybe playing dodgeball in grade school.

We hear all through life that we can be and do anything we wish, the sky is the limit.

As children, we dream of the day we turn 18 and recieve the world. At first you are untouchable, dizzy with freedom, but soon you learn that responsibility and adult life is hard, but by then it’s too late.

We can’t go back to being 18, we can’t do what we did years prior and expect the same outcome, all we can do is live, and love, and cope with disappointment. The pointy boots in Clarke’s story represent the American dream, how great it is when we feel it for the first time, and how life continues after the best and the worst are over.