In Vietnam, one of the members of Richie Perry’s squad, Lobel, comes from Hollywood, where his uncle is a movie producer. Unsurprisingly, Lobel is obsessed with movies, and early on in their friendship, he explains to Perry the coping mechanism he uses to deal with the dehumanizing trauma of the war. Lobel imagines that he’s the main character in a movie. The main character in a movie never dies, and his “victims” are just actors pretending to die on screen. This insulates him from some of the ongoing horrors he sees all around him. Soon afterwards, a TV news crew accompanies the squad on patrol. Although Perry hasn’t been in Vietnam long, he has experienced enough to recognize that what the news crew portrays—a bunch of tough, fearless soldiers stalking through the jungle and eviscerating enemy combatants—isn’t real. He even catches the crew posing a dead VC fighter’s body for a better image. When he later sees the footage, Perry can’t even recognize himself.
Even as ongoing trauma makes the events happening around Perry seem less and less real to him, he strongly resists glorifying war in the way that movies and the news crew do. He doesn’t want his little brother Kenny to assume that real war is like war in the movies. However, Lobel warns that if people back home figure out that war isn’t like the movies, no one will ever sign up for the army. In this way, Fallen Angels directly criticizes the ways in which American media glorifies war and conflict generally, and the Vietnam War specifically. While it suggests that fictionalizing or dramatizing one’s personal experience of war can be a reasonably effective way to deal with trauma, it also implies that dramatizing the war for the general American public risks obscuring the horrific reality the soldiers experience.
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Reality and Fiction Quotes in Fallen Angels
“Hey, Lobel, I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I guess I’m just a little nervous.”
“No sweat […] I’m a little nervous, too. I’d be real nervous, except I know none of this is real and I’m just playing a part.”
“What part are you playing?”
“The part where the star of the movie is sitting in the foxhole explaining how he feels about life and stuff like that. You never get killed in movies when you’re doing that. Anytime you get killed in a movie, it’s after you set it up.”
“You play a part when we were on patrol?”
“That wasn’t a patrol […] that was a firefight […] Anytime anybody is getting shot at it’s a firefight. […] Anyway, I was playing Lee Marvin as a tough sergeant. That’s my best part.”
“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.
The village looked like the one they had constructed for practice at Fort Devens. Only here there were real people […]
There was a sense of panic in the air. We had our weapons ready. Sergeant Simpson was telling us not to kill the civilians. I didn’t consciously want to kill anybody, anything. But I felt strange. The sight of all the bodies lying around, the smell of blood and puke and urine, made my head spin, pushed me to a different place. I wanted to fire my weapon, to destroy the nightmare around me. I didn’t want it to be real, this much death, this much dying, this waste of human life. I didn’t want it.
Later we went to the recreation hooch and watched the news. It was all about President Johnson trying to get a bill passed to help the urban poor, and then something about the Pueblo, which had been taken over by the North Koreans. Then there was a big thing on the Super Bowl, and whether or not the Packers had a dynasty going. It wasn’t real that people were thinking about things like that when all this shit was going on. It just wasn’t real.
The mortar shells landed behind us. They were long again. Long but walking. They had spotters who saw where the shells were landing, and who were directing the fire. They kept shortening up the range to get closer and closer to us. And the shells were coming fast.
The noise was terrible. Every time a mortar went off, I jumped. I couldn’t help myself. The noise went into you. It touched parts of you that were small and frightened and wanting your mommy. Being away from the fighting had weakened my stamina. It did even more to my nerves. I was shaking. I had to force myself to keep my eyes open.
Thoughts came. What would Morningside Avenue look like now? It would be day and the park would be filled with kids, their screaming and laughter would slide along the light beams into the helter skelter world of monkey bars and swings. On the courts there would be a tough game. Black bodies sweating and grunting to get the points that would let them sweat and grunt in the sun for another game. It wasn’t real. None of it was real. The only thing that was real was me and Peewee, sitting in this spider’s grave, waiting for death.
[…]
Pray.
God….What to pray? What to tell God? That I’m scared? […] That I didn’t want to die? That I was like everybody else over here, trying to cling to a few more days of life?
Peewee moved, adjusted position.
“I got to shit,” he said.
