Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fallen Angels, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
War, Trauma, and Dehumanization
Perseverance and Heroism
Race, Identity, and Belonging
Reality and Fiction
Faith and Hope
Summary
Analysis
As Christmas of 1967 approaches, Peewee and Perry debate having sex with Vietnamese girls before they go home. Everyone, including Jamal—whose opinion Perry trusts—says that the war will be over soon. The temporary truce for the Vietnamese new year, Tet, will turn into the permanent peace agreement. Captain Stewart seems disappointed but hangs his hopes on kicking “a little ass” in the war’s final weeks. But there’s other gossip, too, about Northern Vietnamese convoys on the move in Cambodia. Newspapers from home speak of conflict, too, with racial and countercultural violence on the rise. Perry writes to Kenny, warning him to be careful. On Christmas Day, the soldiers eat roast beef, mashed potatoes, and carrots yet again.
Even though Perry is generally cautious, he lets himself hope that the talk of peace and a quick end to the war may be true, even though not all of the gossip is rosy. He lets himself believe what he wants to believe, even though Captain Stewart’s attitude shows readers that the soldiers aren’t necessarily safe. And the newspapers from home remind Perry that strife and trouble continue there. In fact, in his absence, he knows that Kenny faces racism and discrimination. And the repetition of the same meal metaphorically suggests that the same things that have been happening—war here, racism at home—will keep repeating themselves too.
Themes
Word trickles into camp that the marines are “catching hell” everywhere, especially in the hills of Khe Sanh. Lieutenant Gearhart frets over reports that they’re encountering North Vietnamese soldiers—who, like the Americans, get training before being sent into battle—rather than Vietcong guerrillas. He worries that the Northern Vietnamese plan to face the Americans directly. Artillery and small arms fire become incessant, and jets scream overhead frequently. Perry feels as if these loud noises infiltrate his very body. Sometimes he can still hear them in his head, even in the quiet of midnight. Then, Northern Vietnamese forces attack every major city in the country from the DMZ all the way down to Saigon.
While there’s some historical debate about the strategic importance of the hills of Khe Sanh to the Northern Vietnamese war efforts, general modern consensus says that the NVA attacked the hills as a diversionary tactic, to keep American forces busy while the Vietcong positioned themselves for the Tet Offensive, a series of coordinated attacks throughout the whole of Vietnam in the early months of 1968. The conflicting reports should suggest to the soldiers—as they do to readers—that things are not always as they seem, especially in times of war.
Themes
The platoon gets assigned to interdiction or “ambush patrol” stopping enemy movements at night. Six “new brothers” join them, including two—Nate Turner and Darren Lewis—on Perry’s squad. Sergeant Simpson only has 22 days left when they make their first patrol under Gearhart. Simpson tells Perry and Monaco to watch the lieutenant and keep him from doing anything stupid. They’re assigned to an exposed section of road, and Simpson fears that Vietcong have mined the rice paddies and fields on both sides. A shallow trench and some scraggly bushes provide the only so-called cover, and Simpson disagrees with Gearhart’s assessment that a few sandbags will shore it up sufficiently.
The company has struggled to keep its squads fully staffed given the rate at which soldiers are injured or die. But this doesn’t seem to matter as much to the faceless military leadership as keeping their patrols on the move, even if they are short soldiers. And the reasons for their shortages lie in the types of missions deemed important enough to risk lives for, like securing roads in exposed locations.
Themes
Simpson puts Monaco up front and Peewee and Perry at the rear, facing toward the rice paddies to prevent the Vietcong from sneaking up behind them. He tells them to “light it up” at the first noise they hear, trying for as many casualties as possible. Perry carries the claymores—mines that shoot metal fragments in whatever direction they’re pointed—and the grenade launcher. As the squad settles in, Perry realizes he forgot to set them. He sneaks out into the field and places them as quickly as he can. He rushes back to cover when he hears Peewee making a clicking noise. But it’s just the squad checking in with each other quietly by echoing clicks up and down the line.
As Perry comes to accept to an ever greater degree the harsh realities of the war, the tension of each mission ratchets up. His excited description of the chaos the claymores can unleash speaks to his fear—he feels good about them in part because they make him feel safer on the mission—but it also shows the degree to which he’s losing his ability to think empathetically about his adversaries’ lives. In a kill-or-be-killed situation, it’s preferable for him to consider their deaths than his own.
Themes
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Then Perry lies on the wet ground and waits. He wonders if the army has really started sending outfits home. He thinks about Hawaii. He tries to find something distracting to think about. He remembers—and begins to fantasize about—Faye Jackson, a light-skinned, sweet-voiced girl he knew in New York. Suddenly, someone in the squad sends up a flare, pointing to their positions. In its light, Monaco spots enemy fighters in the field; Simpson realizes that one of them has just turned one of the claymores around. Everyone hits the dirt as it explodes.
Perry’s fantasies provide him with a real—if empty—relief from the pressure of the mission and the horror of the war. But they keep him from noticing the Vietcong soldier—who evidently has not let his guard down in a similar way—sabotaging his mine. Fictions and fantasies make life easier, but it can be dangerous, too.
Themes
Perry hears bullets whining over his head and he can see what looks like a whole company’s worth of muzzle fire across the field. He freezes for so long that Peewee takes the grenade launcher and grenades from him and begins shooting them across the field. When Perry gets a hold on himself, he grabs Peewee’s M-16 and begins firing. Finally, Simpson shouts for the squad to retreat. They regroup and race through the undergrowth to the landing zone. While they wait on the chopper for an endless half hour, it begins to rain. A Vietcong fighter stumbles into their clearing to relieve himself, and Gearhart silently “waste[s] the Cong.”
This is the second mission on which Perry has made serious, potentially life-ending mistakes, and in which his fears cause him to freeze up. His survival seems more and more the result of luck rather than skill, which makes the war seem even more terrifying. Survival is, Perry realizes, to his growing shock and horror, a matter of luck. Yet, despite his fears, he eventually shakes himself fully present and begins to do what he needs to survive—and help his squad mates. He chooses the hero’s path.
Themes
When the chopper finally arrives, Peewee climbs in first, followed by Monaco and Perry. Perry twists to give the next guy—Walowick—a hand, but Walowick’s rifle fires just then, sending a bullet ricocheting through the cabin and wounding the chopper’s medic. In the clearing, someone screams, the victim of enemy fire. Under cover of the chopper’s machine gun, Simpson, Gearhart, Monaco, and Perry jump out to retrieve the injured soldier, who they throw into the chopper. Monaco demands to know who set the flare off and Gearheart confesses that he did so accidentally. The medic, injured himself, grimly attends to the injured soldier, Nate Turner. He cuts away Turner’s fatigues, then covers over the soldier’s gaping chest wound with a large square bandage and gives him a thumbs up. Turner dies before the helicopter gets back to camp.
As if anyone needed another example of how random the chaos and violence of war are, the medic nearly dies from Walowick’s accidental gunshot and Gearhart’s mistake nearly gets the whole platoon killed. Like the Charlie Company fiasco, these accidents remind Perry (and readers) that in war, no one is safe, either from his enemies or even his own friends. Nate Turner dies horribly on his first mission, just like Jenkins did, further driving home this lesson. In light of this suffering, the questions about why the soldiers are fighting take on an even greater urgency, since they all want and need to know that their sacrifices aren’t pointless. But it’s becoming less likely that they’ll get their answers.
Themes
The chopper drops off the squad, taking the wounded medic and Darren Lewis—who suffered a broken arm during the patrol—back to Chu Lai. Later, when Simpson comes into the hooch, Peewee declares that they need to kick Gearhart’s ass. Simpson agrees, but Gearhart isn’t the only one who made a major mistake: if one of the Vietcong turned the claymore around, why didn’t it hit the squad when it went off? Perry suddenly realizes that he’d set it up wrong in the first place, pointing it back in his own face instead of at the enemy.
Perry realizes that he, too, made a potentially fatal mistake on this mission, and that only luck saved him (and everyone else) from falling victim to their own claymore. On one level, this points to the endless, chaotic violence of war, which doesn’t discriminate between sides or ideologies. But it also reminds Perry of why it’s important to keep focused on the reality in front of him rather than the stories he’d like to tell himself.
Themes
