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 the evacuation choppers finally arrive, the ARVN troops surround the American soldiers with guns; they want to be the first ones out. Gearhart orders his men to drop their weapons and put their hands in the air, cluing the helicopter crews into the situation. The machine gunners on the choppers fire on the ARVN forces until they retreat. As Perry scrambles into the helicopter, it jolts into the air, and he barely hangs on. Hands pull him inside, he feels “something” slip past, grabbing at his legs and clinging to his ankle for a long moment before letting go. Someone has fallen out.
The ARVN and American forces are supposed to be allies, yet they turn on each other in their rush to escape the firefight. This points towards Perry’s earlier worry that his side was losing its ability to distinguish between soldiers and civilians. Worse, it suggests, they can no longer differentiate between friend and foe. This idea encapsulates the betrayal of values and ethics that leads to so much trauma for the soldiers caught in the conflict. So too does the loss of the soldier from the helicopter, whom Perry experiences as a “something” slipping past him rather than a “someone.”
Themes
When they finally arrive back at the base, Gearhart tells the squad to get some rest and sleep. But it’s impossible to relax in the boonies, so near the front lines. Soon after Perry drifts to sleep, he wakes to the sound of Monaco screaming “There they are!” and shooting his weapon at the door. Walowick yells “Cease fire!” while Johnson and Lobel wrestle Monaco’s weapon away from him. Monaco swears he saw some “Congs” pulling a soldier out the door and toward the bushes. After Monaco calms down, Walowick sits on Perry’s bunk and confesses that he had a similar experience. Once, the day after he killed a Vietcong soldier who almost snuck onto base during night watch, he was certain he saw the same man again while he was heading to a volleyball game. He dove for cover even though nothing was there. Perry says it was an understandable reaction, even though he doesn’t really understand it.
As if to emphasize that the war destroys lives unilaterally, without concern for sides or ideas like right and wrong, Monaco’s hallucination makes him a danger to his own squad mates when he starts shooting live ammunition around their hooch. And it turns out it’s not just Perry and Monaco; Walowick has experienced similar delusions. Perry understands Walowick’s story in that it makes sense to him, not so much in that he has a language to describe what’s going on.
Themes
By the next day, Monaco warily begins to joke about his vision. Jamal, typing up a report about Brew’s death, realizes that this dreary, rainy Friday would have been the man’s 19th birthday. Perry stops the hopeless task of trying to clean the mud from his boots and goes to the mess tent, where he bums a pound cake and some fruit cocktail from the cook. He brings it back to the hooch and the squad celebrates Brewster’s birthday.
The somber celebration of Brewster’s would-have-been birthday reminds readers how young these soldiers are. The violence and chaos they’ve just experienced makes them seem more mature than perhaps they are. And neither the war itself nor their military leaders seem to consider how much they’re asking these very young men to shoulder.
Themes
Gearhart writes three copies of a letter to his wife. He asks Walowick and Perry to hold onto one each and mail it for him if he doesn’t get the chance himself. It angers Lobel that Gearhart puts this responsibility on the soldiers. Peewee demands that Walowick open the letter so they can all read it. It talks about storm doors and disrespectful paper boys. It asks Gearhart’s wife to tell their kids how much he loves them. It says that things are going “okay” and he’s with some “okay guys.” The letter makes Perry wish he had a wife and kids, someone back in the World who he could look forward to returning to. He knows Mama loves him, but he also knows that he’ll never be the same person he was when he left, and that will disappoint her.
The battle changes the whole tenor of the war for the company; no one can escape their sense of impending doom any longer. The contrast between the extremely dramatic events they experience in Vietnam and the extremely boring things Gearheart writes about in his letter helps the book convey the sense of unreality that pervades the war for Perry and the rest. Additionally, this comes just after the soldiers celebrate what would have been Brew’s 19th birthday; although Perry is still just 17 he already feels older than his years and he doesn’t know how his changed identity will fit when he returns home.
Themes
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Perry asks Peewee if he should write a letter to Kenny telling his little brother what it’s really like in Vietnam. He keeps trying but he’s afraid of making it sound like the movies. Lobel pipes up to say that he has to make it sound like the movies, otherwise they’ll never be able to get people to volunteer for the next war. Mostly, Perry worries that Kenny will think of him as a hero because he’s killing alleged “bad guys.” Peewee protests that they haven’t killed any people yet; people have names and preferences and responsibilities, unlike the nameless, faceless, interchangeable Vietcong fighters and North Vietnamese Army soldiers and civilians they’ve encountered. If they were real people, he reasons, none of the soldiers would have the heart to kill them.
Perry worries about traumatizing Kenny by telling him the truth about the war. But without the grim details, he worries that Kenny will think of him as a character in a heroic war movie. Perry’s fear, trauma, and heartbreak make him feel anything but heroic. Still, as Peewee explains, he’s only doing what he has to do to survive, and this fulfils the book’s definition of heroism. Peewee’s answer points to how the war forces the soldiers to dehumanize their enemies in order to focus on their own survival. While Peewee’s assertion that he’s never killed a “real” person helps him to face the ongoing trauma of war, it also costs him some of his own humanity.
Themes
Peewee’s grand theories about humanity and animality devolve into a petty argument with Monaco about whether Monaco is manly enough to get jock itch. Perry starts a letter to Kenny. His letter says that war is not about right and wrong. It’s just about killing, at least while someone is in the thick of it. Right and wrong require a distance he doesn’t have on the battlefield and fears he may never have. It’s also about heart-pounding fear and, occasionally, excitement. That excitement—and the feeling that the Americans are better, somehow, than the “Congs”—keeps him going. But, Perry confesses, he’s getting tired.
Peewee talks a big game, but his grand theories devolve into meaninglessness in part because the book suggests that they’re wrong. Human beings are human beings and while dehumanizing his enemies helps Peewee survive, it also harms him in the process. But it also, yet again, emphasizes the youth of these soldiers, who banter with each other like schoolboys in a locker room. In his letter, Perry tries to cling to his sense of being on the right side, of being a good guy. But his fatigue hints at how much it costs to maintain that narrative, especially now that he recognizes the deep moral ambiguity of the war.
Themes
Peewee stands in the door of the hooch and announces that the squad racked up a body count of 433 “Congs” in the last fight. Walowick and Monaco joke about the body count until Captain Stewart comes in and tells the squad to get ready to go out again. They’re being sent to occupy and patrol an area already secured by the marines. Peewee wants to know if the “Congs” know that the marines will be leaving. Stewart, in a hard voice, asks if Peewee thinks the marines are better soldiers than Alpha Company, and Peewee answers “Fucking A right!” Stewart demands to know where Peewee’s pride is, and Peewee retorts that he left it in Chicago. With the captain’s permission, he says, he will go home and get it.
It’s hard to tell how accurately the body count reflects the battle’s outcome, since readers already know that Stewart inflates his numbers. It seems, however, like the troops are fulfilling their mandate to maximize destruction. The soldiers, though, have barely recovered from one battle before they head into the next. And the toll this takes on them becomes evident in Peewee’s insubordinate and disrespectful comments. With their sense of purpose in the war irrevocably lost, the soldiers can barely face what they’re being asked to do.
Themes
