Fallen Angels

That night, Perry gets his first guard duty with Lobel. Perry seems so nervous that Lobel asks him about it, and  Perry says he can’t stop thinking about Jenkins. Lobel doesn’t remember Jenkins; he keeps his own fears at bay by imagining himself as the hero in a movie. The hero never dies. Perry asks what part Lobel played when they were on patrol—in the firefight, Lobel corrects him—and Lobel says his best role: Lee Marvin as a sergeant. They lapse into silence. An animal skitters past the barbed wire fences, scaring Perry. A bug crawls across his hand. Lobel asks Perry what his favorite movie is, and Perry says Shane. Or the Japanese movie he saw once, called The Island. Lobel agrees that these are good flicks.

Lobel’s uncle is a film director. Contrary to Perry’s assumption, Lobel wasn’t drafted. While he waits to see if Lobel will tell the long story about why he volunteered, Perry remembers telling Mama about his decision to enlist. She had hoped he’d find a job after high school, and she begged him to stay, the smell of alcohol heavy on her breath. But after he realized he would never be able to afford college, he couldn’t stand the thought of staying in Harlem anymore. He wanted to get away and see something new, even though Harlem was where his people were. 

Lobel breaks Perry’s reverie. He asks if Perry has a girlfriend. When Perry says no, Lobel offers to hook him up with a starlet pen pal. Perry declines, saying he’d prefer a real girlfriend to a pretend one. That, sighs Lobel, is Perry’s problem: he’s too hooked on reality, and reality is a bad deal. Lobel worries about not having a girlfriend, because he’s about to turn 20 and he’s still a virgin. He doesn’t want to end up in the role of the baby-faced virgin who dies too young. And he warns Perry to avoid the role of the good but apparently cowardly Black guy who gets killed saving everyone else. Unfortunately, Perry can’t be the romantic lead: he doesn’t have a girlfriend, Judy the nurse is white, and movies about interracial love always end with the Black character dying.

A few days later, a news crew shows up and films the squad around the camp. They film everyone explaining what they’re fighting for. Carroll says it’s to demonstrate that America stands for something. Simpson declares he’s there to free the South Vietnamese people. Brunner answers that he hates Communism. Walowick says he fights because his country asks him too. Lobel and Brew both say something about the domino theory—that if Vietnam falls to the Communists, the rest of Asia might follow. Perry says that Americans can choose between defending their country abroad now or face fighting on their own territory later. Peewee pretends to be surprised that he’s even in Vietnam.

Captain Stewart orders the squad to take the news crew on patrol with them, and at noon, they load into two giant Huey helicopters and fly into the jungle. Simpson puts Monaco on point (in the front) and Johnson in rear, with the news crew in the middle. They walk for about 20 minutes before turning back. As they approach the landing zone, Monaco opens fire. One Vietcong fighter lurks among the trees. Then, Lobel sees him too, and the whole squad opens fire. Perry can’t see anything, but he decides to shoot anyway; he raises his rifle and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. When Simpson calls a ceasefire and the men retrieve the dead fighter from the undergrowth, Perry realizes his gun was unloaded the whole time.

Perry avoids looking at the dead fighter after Brunner throws him into the chopper. The news crew snaps pictures. Back at base, the squad sits down to a delayed lunch of chicken, carrots, and mashed potatoes. The news crew poses the Vietnamese soldier’s corpse and photographs it. Perry starts to agree with Lobel: this doesn’t seem real at all. Maybe it is a movie. Later, back in the hooch, Simpson reveals that the solider was a North Vietnamese regular, not one of the guerrillas they usually encounter. He leaves to take a nap. Monaco rounds up the guys for volleyball. Their archrival team lost its star player when Charlie Company got pinned down in the jungle.