Chapter 7

Theme Statement:
Choices from the past will come back and help or harm you.

Literary Device: Diction
“While at the Job Corps Center, Wes had problems floating off the soft country air of Laurel. A year after graduating, he realized they had not disappeared – they’d simply returned to Baltimore, waiting for him to come back. In his absence, they’d compounded. Tears welled in Wes’s eyes but never fell. He’d realized long ago that crying does no good.”

Analysis:
When the other Wes Moore tries to get his life on the right path, he is bombarded with problems he made in the past. Being involved with drugs and having many babies our of wedlock in his past stopped him from being able to move on with his future in the right path. In this quote, the phrase "problems floating off the soft country air of Laurel" shows that the choices from Wes's past were still there to haunt him. This theme is also seen in the beginning of the chapter. When the author Wes was able to become the regimental commander for the 70th Corps of Cadets because of his good choices at Valley Forge with his education.