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
In the hospital at Chu Lai, Monaco explains how the rest of the squad escaped. He was knocked unconscious and missed the chopper, so he stayed at the landing zone praying like mad that they’d come back for him. He drifted off and woke up surrounded by enemy fighters. He tears up, telling Perry that he feels like he died under that tree, only coming back to life when Peewee and Perry opened fire on them. He doesn’t know how to thank them. Perry protests that they were all just lucky. He wants Monaco to assure him that his surgery tag doesn’t say anything about amputation.
Monaco’s story of loss and rescue parallels the words of the 23rd Psalm which Perry prayed and thought about at the end of the last chapter: Monaco found himself in the shadow of death and, in facing his own mortality, did in fact experience a kind of psychological death. He gave up. He was saved, not by some faceless and nameless helicopter crew representing the military more broadly, but by his own brothers-in-arms Peewee and Perry. If there is a meaning to be salvaged from the trauma of war for these soldiers, it lies in their relationships, not in any high-minded rhetoric about protecting freedom or the American way.
Themes
Monaco holds Perry’s hand as the doctor wheels him into surgery, and Perry wonders if what he feels for his squad mates is anything like being in love. He comes out of surgery dreaming about taking Peewee to the Apollo Theater. He thinks he hears Peewee calling his name, but he wakes to find it’s just a tired-looking nurse. She tells him that his leg will heal well. She doesn’t answer when he asks if she’s seen a patient named Harold Gates—Peewee.
Just as Perry doesn’t quite understand what his new identity is, given all that he has gone through in Vietnam, he doesn’t quite know how to articulate how he feels about his squad mates. It certainly isn’t romantic love, but he can’t think of anything else that’s quite as intense, and the love he feels for all of them—even those who have looked down on him because of his race—is certainly intense. These soldiers will—and in some cases do—die for each other. Ultimately, their shared identity as soldiers brings them into closer bonds of friendship than most civilians will ever know.
Themes
Three days later, Peewee finds Perry. He tells Perry that his wounds were bad enough to get him sent home. He tells Perry to act crazy if he must in order to get a medical discharge. The nurse sneaks some beer in for Peewee, Perry, and Monaco the night before Monaco flies back to rejoin the squad. Peewee drinks so much he pukes and bursts his stitches and has to go back for emergency surgery. It’s only then that Perry realizes the extent of Peewee’s injuries. In the morning, he finds a note from Monaco reminding him that tuxes will be required at Monaco’s wedding.
Despite their strong affection for the rest of the squad, Perry’s and Peewee’s survival instincts remain intact and Peewee counsels Perry to do whatever he must to get a medical discharge. After two close brushes with death, Perry agrees. Monaco isn’t so lucky, and their parting from him reflects that: they look forward to a common future in the idea of Monaco’s wedding, ignoring the possibility that Monaco might not survive long enough to have one.
Themes
Perry slowly recovers. His leg feels good, and he worries that it will heal too well. He would rather spend the rest of his life with a limp than get sent back to the boonies. Lieutenant Gearhart calls and tells him and Peewee to tell that the rest of the squad is “all right,” but Perry knows that neither he, nor Peewee, nor Monaco—nor anyone who has tasted death in this war—is “all right.” Gearhart also says that Captain Stewart finally got his promotion.
Perry knows that the rest of the squad isn’t—and can never be—“all right” because they’ve all suffered intense mental anguish and trauma. Besides, only Brunner, Walowick, Monaco, and Johnson remain. Finding out that Stewart finally got his promotion adds insult to the injuries Perry and Peewee suffered, since it reminds them that their sacrifices were not for a bigger purpose. They just helped boost one selfish man’s ego.
Themes
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Two weeks later, when a doctor removes Perry’s cast, he asks if Perry volunteered to fight even though his medical profile exempted him. Perry answers that he was told his medical profile never arrived, but the doctor says it did in early March. In any case, the doctor says, the newly-promoted Corporal Perry will be going home with his second—and hopefully last—Purple Heart.
Perry arrived in Vietnam in September of 1967; only about half of his year-long tour has passed. But he’s already experienced enough trauma for several lifetimes. And the late arrival of his medical file points one final time to how the impersonal military machine betrayed, abandoned, and misspent the lives of American soldiers.
Themes
Peewee needs a third surgery for abdominal adhesions, but he’s still hoping to leave with Perry. They follow war news in the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, but it only provides enemy body counts. When it mentions American casualties, the small numbers don’t even seem to tally with the number of men Perry sees in the hospital. He and Peewee can’t get news of their old squad. Perry pays a personnel sergeant a few dollars to look up Judy Duncan for him.
The seriousness of Peewee’s injuries becomes evident only slowly; similarly, the trauma and mental anguish suffered by soldiers in the Vietnam War won’t come into full focus for the American public until years after the fact. Perry and Peewee may have only spent six months in the war, but those six months will affect the rest of their lives. Perry’s realization that casualty numbers in the newspaper seem wildly low reminds readers how the reality of the war diverges from what most people are led to believe about it, thanks to rosy reporting from American media and government.
Themes
When Peewee’s and Perry’s orders come through, they’re for the same departure flight. The rest of the squad already feel like distant memories to Perry by the time he and Peewee find themselves standing in line waiting to board a flight back to the United States. They try not to look at the stack of silver caskets going with them. The personnel sergeant brings Perry bad news—Judy Duncan got transferred to a field hospital and died in an artillery attack there. He didn’t really know her, but her death makes Perry sad for her and for her family, who will never understand what she faced in Vietnam.
As important as his squad mates became to him while he was in the boonies, Perry can’t wait to put that part of his life behind him when he leaves. And because it’s hard to imagine or believe the sheer horror of their experiences, it’s tempting to pretend that what happened wasn’t real. But the stack of caskets reminds him that it was real. For the men and women who traded in their old identities for the role of “soldier,” there are two ends: they will become anonymous in death, or they will survive, carrying their memories and their wounds for the rest of their lives.
Themes
New recruits file off the plane, openly staring at the injured men waiting to go home. They try to stand up, bowed more under the weight of their exhaustion than their injuries, in Perry’s mind. In Osaka, Perry and Peewee talk a sergeant into putting them on the same commercial flight to California. In the air, Perry makes Peewee promise to visit him in New York. As he describes Harlem, he notices Peewee shaking; he says he can’t believe he made it out of Nam alive. A stewardess brings them both Cokes.
Perry didn’t notice or mention any wounded soldiers waiting to go home when he arrived. But the soldiers arriving in early 1968 do not have the privilege of maintaining their illusions about the war being easy or almost over. Similarly, as reports of the true scale of the war and the atrocities committed by both sides began to filter back to the United States, the government wasn’t able to maintain the narrative about the war any longer. Public opinion began to shift as people realized it wasn’t like a glorified war movie.
Themes
Perry slowly relaxes and Peewee falls into a restless sleep. Perry’s mind wanders back to the boonies, and he feels almost guilty for being on the plane. He imagines being on patrol with Monaco on point, Peewee, Walowick, Lobel and Brunner following behind, Johnson carrying the big machine gun like a baby. Perry sees himself at the rear, imagines turning and seeing the others trailing the platoon: Brew, Jenkins, Sergeant Dongan, Turner, Lewis, Lieutenant Carroll, and all the others whose deaths he witnessed. He prays for God to care for all of them, to keep all of them whole. And as a man complains about the flight’s limited wine options, Perry looks at Peewee and thinks about the fact that they’re both finally headed back to the World.
Although Perry feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude to be leaving Vietnam with his life, and although he’s already trying to let his memories of that time fade, he knows he will carry the dead with him for the rest of his life. His relationships with other soldiers, both those who lived and those who died, puts a human face on the war, even when military command so often treated its soldiers as nameless, faceless, unimportant and replaceable pieces of equipment. In this moment, prayer allows Perry to bridge between the living and the dead, drawing all those whose lives touched his into one group, united in their shared experience of the war. As he goes home and tries to figure out who he is now, they will stay with him, and those that died will live on, in a way, through his memory.
Themes
