Emmett is knowledgeable about birds and tries to find egrets, which are large, white, heron-like birds that favor marshlands and shorelines. When asked why he wants to see the egrets, he says that it is because they are so beautiful. When he was in Vietnam, “flocks of them would fly over” (36). When Sam asks if egrets would not give him bad memories, he says that they were his only good memories of Vietnam. The birds serve almost as a dream for Emmett, the ideal of beauty in a world marred by war. While at Cawood’s Pond after he finds Sam, he tells her the reason he wants to see the bird: “If you can think of something like birds, you can get outside yourself, and it doesn’t hurt as much” (226) Thus, birds in general and egrets in particular serve an important symbolic function for Emmett. They offer a means of escape as well as a connection to the natural world. Unlike Emmett and his friends, the birds can fly away when they want and are not bound to the earth. For this reason, they can be associated with freedom from war, worry, and earthly complications.

At the end of the book, Sam describes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “like the wings of an abstract bird, huge and headless” (239).