"The soldiers will 'beat up the drum and march through the country and spoil your corn.' "

In Sarah Vowell's, "The Wordy Shipmates", the whole book seemed bland to me. Hard to get into, in other words. I just wanted to hammer through the book, and get the overall meaning. I spent a-lot of hours, picking up and dropping the book through confusion, but it wasn't until the chapter about the Pequot War, where I actually couldn't put the book down. There were very few points where I got confused, and even understood what roll each character plays. I suddenly realized, this was the first war in Puritan history, and even one of the first in American History. As it seemed then, as a blood-wretched skirmish then, seemed to make a pretty significant impact on America today.

This was the first sign of a rule America still lives by today, an enemy of our foes, is an ally of ours. As the Puritans seek revenge on killing Captain Stone, they form an alliance with Canoncious and Miantonomi, the Narragansett sachems. As days tick on by, we learn from the past, and fix our mistakes, but, as we learn, you need help to win a war. To this day, The United States tries to form allies, and unite with other countries, incase we are ever in doubt.

In order to take out the Pequot indians, the English try to use the sneak attack method, where they  ambush the indians in deep sleep. The war seemed to fall right in their lap, knowing that, " The pequot fort is encircled within a palisade -- a wall made of thick tree trunks standing up and fastened together. Around seven hundred men, women, and children are asleep in wigwams inside." Everyone thought this would be a quick war until they "heard a dog bark," then they knew, "Their sneak attack is foiled." Though the English end up burning all the indians inside their own wigwams, the sneak attack method was used later in history. The most known example was with George Washington, our very first president. The president and his army crossing the icy Delaware River, and defeating the Hessian forces in Trenton. War just seems like something that America can't get away from, and the only way to achieve our goals now, is to see how they were accomplished in the past. This even includes those Puritans that wiped out a the Pequot indian tribe.