Fallen Angels Study Guide

When Walter Myers was three years old, his mother died in childbirth. His father asked his first wife, Florence Dean, to raise Myers and his brother Milton. She and her husband took the boys to Harlem. Myers grew up in a mixed-race home: his adoptive father, Herbert Dean, was Black and his adoptive mother, Florence, was German and Native American. Myers was an avid reader and writer from a young age, in part because a teacher encouraged him to explore writing as an avenue to communicate despite a life-long speech impediment. Despite his natural intelligence, he struggled in school and eventually dropped out of New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School before completing his degree. After ending his formal education, Myers served in the United States Army before working a series of odd jobs and struggling to find a direction in life. Eventually, he remembered the advice given to him by his high school English teacher—to never stop writing—and turned back to the craft. He wrote advice columns for men’s magazines before turning to literature. During his career, Myers authored over 100 books, most of which center on young Black protagonists. His skillful writing made him one of the most decorated young adult authors of the 20th century, but his willingness to tackle complex and painful themes means that some of his books, like Fallen Angels, frequently face censorship challenges in the United States. Throughout his career and up until his death, he was a tireless advocate literacy and for diversifying American children’s literature.

Set in late 1967 and early 1968, Fallen Angels deals with the two main socio-political events of American life in the late 1960s: the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights campaign, which ran roughly from 1954 to 1968, worked to abolish legalized systems that segregated, discriminated against, and disenfranchised Black and other racialized groups in the United States. It focused on non-violent protest and civil disobedience, even though its participants faced violent oppression. The second, and more salient, historical context is the Vietnam War, a conflict which ran from 1955 to 1975. This began as a civil conflict between the communist Viet Minh party (which controlled the north) and the Diem regime in the south. But, in its global efforts to oppose the rise of communism, the United States supported the Southern Vietnamese government, and Vietnam quickly became a proxy war between the United States and USSR. American military presence increased between 1964 and 1969, then fell until the last American soldiers withdrew in 1973, two years before the Northern Vietnamese army won the war. It exacted a tremendous human cost, with estimated casualties of soldiers and civilians ranging from just under 1 million to 3 million lives; the use of chemical weapons and extreme arial carpet bombing by US forces contributed to the loss of life and destruction of the Vietnamese countryside. The Vietnam War was also the first war to be widely covered in real time by radio and television news, although the United States government hid many of the true costs from the American public.

  Set during the Vietnam War, Fallen Angels joins countless other works of American fiction which explore the trauma and dehumanizing effect of war on the psyche, from Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage to Joseph Heller’s World War II Catch-22. In Catch-22, as in Fallen Angels, soldiers are asked to take on dangerous missions for their superior officers’ benefit. Both novels graphically depict the violence of human death in war, and they both highlight the absurd frustrations of navigating the military bureaucracy. The blend of fictional story with historical and personal fact (drawing from Myers’ own experience in the army and his brother’s death in Vietnam) in Fallen Angels also bears a similarity to Tim O’Brien’s quasi-fictional, quasi-autobiographical novel The Things They Carried, which likewise blends fact and fiction. This book’s series of linked short stories shows the humanity of human soldiers caught in a brutal and futile war and explores the complex relationship between the soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam with the lives and loved ones they left back home. Other books about the Vietnam War for young readers include Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars, which follows a boy learning about the war from his teacher; and Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhhà Lai, about a young Vietnamese girl who evacuates Vietnam before the Tet Offensive. Finally, for a non-fiction look at the way the brutal, dehumanizing, and amoral conditions of war contribute to the post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms suffered by Perry and his comrades, readers should consult Achilles in Vietnam, a book written by a psychiatrist who treated many Vietnam veterans, which explores the nature of PTSD among combat veterans.