Part 2 channels Sam's point of view in a flashback to the months leading up to the trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In Chapter 1, Sam graduates from high school and begins worrying about Emmett. She recalls Emmett coming to live with her and her mother after he returned from Vietnam.

In her recollection, he brings some friends with him, and Sam calls them “hippies.” Later, Emmett tries college and several jobs, but he leaves them all. Sam's mother Irene remarries and moves to Lexington the year before the events of the novel, but Sam refuses to move with her, choosing to stay in Hopewell.

Sam reports that she and Emmett now watch reruns of the television program M*A*S*H every night, a comedy-drama show about a US mobile army surgical hospital in the Korean War. They are sometimes joined by Sam's boyfriend, Lonnie Malone. Sam connects many of the characters and events in M*A*S*H to her own life, including the death of the show’s popular commanding officer Colonel Blake. Sam says that “his death on the program was more real to her than the death of her own father” (25).