Not all of the soldiers of Richie Perry’s U.S. Army battalion find easy acceptance among their peers, as they represent a full cross-section of American identities. Perry, Johnson, Peewee, Sergeant Simpson, and Brewster are Black; Monaco is Italian-American; and Lobel is Jewish. Some of Lieutenant Gearhart’s comments are indirect, subtle, and unintentionally racist or bigoted, while Walowick, Brunner, and Sergeant Dongan are openly racist. This range of attitudes reflects the fact that, during the Vietnam War years, America faced internal conflicts over social change and civil rights. Yet, by portraying each character as an individual person with both strengths and weaknesses—and, more importantly, by showing how Perry’s squad achieves cohesion despite racial tensions—the book imagines what a more inclusive and accepting society could look like. Even the underlying racism with which the American soldiers approach their Vietnamese enemies and allies—calling a Southern Vietnamese cleaning lady “Mama Cong,” for example—eventually falls away as Perry comes to focus more and more on the humanity of the people he’s fighting and fighting with.
In the end, Fallen Angels humanizes each of its characters, suggesting that their humanity makes them inherently valuable—even when they speak or behave in reprehensible ways. As the openly racist Brunner comes close to the end of his year-long tour in the country, Johnson tells Gearhart that Brunner deserves a promotion. He and Brunner may dislike each other personally, but he still respects Brunner’s experience and backs him up on the squad. Another time, Johnson sagely tells Perry that what a man (in this case, Lobel, whom everyone assumes is gay) does in bed has nothing to do with whether he’s a trustworthy brother in arms. Everyone in the squad has the same chance to earn their peers’ respect, if he shows team spirit. After experiencing the horrors of war together, the men’s identity as soldiers—even though Perry isn’t always quite sure what that identity really entails—proves to be a stronger connecting force than any personal differences.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Race, Identity, and Belonging ThemeTracker
Race, Identity, and Belonging Quotes in Fallen Angels
Peewee and I had breakfast together. I asked him if he liked the army […]
“You got all this chickenshit to go through,” he said. “And I don’t like that. But this is the first place I ever been in my life where I got what everybody else got.”
“What does that mean?”
“Back home when everybody got new sneakers, I didn’t get none,” Peewee said. “Either Moms didn’t have the money, or she had the money, and we had to get some other stupid thing, like food. When everybody got a bike, I didn’t get one ’cause there was no way we could get the money for a bike. But anything anybody got in the army, I got. You got a gun, I got a gun. You got boots, I got boots. You eat this lousy-ass chip beef on toast, guess what I eat?”
“Lousy-ass chip beef on toast,” I said.
“[Walowick] called [Johnson] a cootie, sir,” [I said.]
“A what?” [Captain Stewart asked.]
“That’s what he called me,” Johnson said.
“What the fuck’s a cootie?”
“It’s a bug,” Walowick said.
“That’s like calling me a nigger,” Johnson said.
“Is that a racial thing?” Captain Stewart looked at Walowick.
“A cootie’s a cootie,” Walowick shrugged. “He shouldn’t have called me no farm boy. If he calls me a farm boy, I’m gonna call him a cootie again.”
That’s when Johnson hit Walowick again, and the fight started again. This time Lieutenant Carroll got out of the way. When the fight was over, Captain Stewart told them both to stop talking to each other. That was that.
Then I asked him about the letter.
“You know why that letter sucks?” he asked.
“How come?”
“Because I joined the friggin’ army in the first place so he would stop thinking I was a faggot,” Lobel said. “Now he thinks I’m a creep because I’m in the army.”
“What the hell does he know?”
“You know what I hope?” Lobel asked. “I hope I get killed over here so he has to fit that shit between his vodka martinis.”
“The next time we call for artillery, we’ll aim it right at your pad at home,” I said.
“You know what that jackass doesn’t know?” Lobel said, looking away from me, “He don’t know that now I can go back home and blow him away. That’s what I’m fucking trained for man. That’s what I’m fucking trained for.”
The war was different now. Nam was different. Jenkins had been outside of me, even the guys in Charlie Company had been outside. Lieutenant Carroll was inside of me, he was part of me. Part of me was dead with him. I wanted to be sad, to cry for him, maybe bang my fists against the sides of the hooch. But what I felt was numb. I just had these pictures of him walking along with us on patrol or sitting in the mess area, looking down into a coffee cup. It was what I was building in my mind, a series of pictures of things I had seen, of guys I had seen. I found myself trying to push them from my mind, but they seemed more and more a part of me.
“The guy’s got to be a spook,” Gearhart said. “You know, CIA.”
“What do they do over here?” Monaco asked.
“Below the DMZ they do pacification stuff, look around to see who is infiltrating, that kind of thing. Then they do a lot of stuff above the ’Z. The navy guys slip them in on the west and the Green Berets slip them around the ’Z through Laos. Down here she’s probably his cover.”
“Is the kid a spook, too?” Monaco asked.
“Who knows?” Gearhart answered. “This is a funny war.”
I didn’t like the idea of having people who were civilians around. It just didn’t seem right somehow.
“You know, I never thought much about black people before I got into the army. I don’t think I was prejudiced or anything—I just didn’t think much about black people.”
“Well, we’re here,” I said.
“I think I should let his parents know what happened […] I don’t want to be let off the hook.”
“The letter I wrote […] is going to sit better with his family. You might feel bad, like you need to get something off your chest, but don’t drop it on his folks. It’s going to be hard enough just having him dead.”
He looked at me, then pushed the letter across the table. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
I wanted to be pissed at him. I wanted to think that he was crap because of what he said about black people. But the only thing I could think about was that I was glad it was Turner, and not me.
Lobel damned near dragged Jamal into our hooch.
“Go ahead, tell him what you heard,” Lobel said to Jamal.
“Sergeant Simpson and Captain Stewart got into a fight,” Jamal said. “Captain Stewart told Sergeant Simpson that if he didn’t shut up and get out he was going to bust him down to private.”
[…]
“What they fighting about?” Johnson asked.
[…]
“He found out that Captain Stewart is volunteering Alpha Company all over the place. He asked him what he’s doing that for, and Captain Stewart said that if he didn’t want to fight, he shouldn’t have extended.”
What Jamal said went down hard. We didn’t mind doing our part because it had to be done, even though we didn’t have answers to why we were doing it.
But nobody wanted to go out and risk their lives so that Stewart could make major.
“He forgot the tags,” Gearhart said. “He left them in the hut.”
“How they gonna let their folks know they dead?” Peewee said.
Gearhart didn’t answer.
What would they do for a body? Would they send home an empty coffin? Would they scrounge pieces from Graves Registration? What would they say to their parents? Their wives? We lost your son, ma’am. Somewhere in the forests he lies, perhaps behind some rock, some tree?
We burned his body, ma’am. In a rite hurried by fear and panic, we burned what was left of him and ran for our own lives.
Yes, and we’re sorry.
Perhaps they would tell them nothing. Not having a body in hand, not having the lifeless form to send with the flat, they would not acknowledge that there was a death at all.
Yes, and we’re sorry.
It was Monaco. He was sitting against a tree. He had his head in his hands. His piece was about ten meters in front of him. I wanted to go to him, but Peewee stopped me.
“He ain’t sitting there for nothing,” he said.
I looked around. Nothing. What the hell was wrong with this damn war? You never saw anything. There was never anything until it was on top of your ass, and you were screaming and shooting and too scared to figure out anything.
