Fallen Angels (Walter Dean Myers)

Fallen Angels
Walter Dean Myers
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Action/Historical Fiction
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Perry was never supposed to be in Vietnam at all, let alone on the front lines. He had a bad knee from a basketball injury, and was told that he'd be given a desk job for his year of military service, the Harlem boy's only option when his college prospects fell through. But a paperwork mix-up led to him being sent overseas - for a desk job, he's assured, just until his medical profile catches up to him and he's returned stateside. Yet somehow he finds himself in a "hooch" - barracks - with the rest of the soldiers, issued a weapon, and sent on patrols. Rumors keep insisting that the war's nearly over anyway, so Perry shouldn't see much, if any, action. If that's true, someone forgot to tell the Vietcong...

REVIEW: Another frequently challenged and banned book, Fallen Angels dives straight into the hellish experience that was Vietnam. For all the talk and propaganda about patriotism and honor and justified force, for those with boots on the ground and blood on their hands, war is hell.
Perry just wanted to go to college and become a writer or even a philosopher, but when college plans fell through, the army seemed like a not-bad option for an income and life experience. He's told, more than once, that his profile will keep him out of harm's way, and learns the hard way that recruiters and superiors sometimes lie, just as countries lie to their own citizens, the first of many harsh lessons. Indeed, Perry ends up learning more about life, death, honor, cowardice, himself, and the world in his tour than he ever imagined, starting the moment he arrives in Vietnam; a fellow green recruit is killed right in front of him before they even reach the barracks, an early warning that death is all around, at all times, and can come for anybody at any time. From this inauspicious start, Perry's experience only gets grimmer. Even his own superiors can be at least as much of a threat as the enemy - and the enemy is often nebulous and seemingly ubiquitous. Efforts to win the favor of a local village by a goodwill visit one day transition almost seamlessly into a firefight in the same village's streets shortly afterwards, a whiplash that borders on the surreal but which is just another day in the madness of the war.
More than once, Perry must ask himself what he's doing here and why he's fighting; the answers he comes up with never seem adequate to justify the horrors he sees and the death he deals to total strangers. His bonds with his bunkmates keep him sane, if just barely at times, bonds that don't spare the rough, dark humor and crudity of soldiers in high-stress situations. None of them are perfect men, and none are any more guaranteed survival than Perry himself is, especially as numbers dwindle and his unit finds itself on a suspicious number of dangerous assignments, particularly the non-white members of the unit; racism is alive and well in the ranks. Some grumble about protesters back home, especially as the flow of new recruits to fill empty bunks slows to a trickle, but the longer the war drags on (despite peace being perpetually just a few weeks away) and the higher the body count (a body count that American news somehow never mentions when it talks about the war at all), the more Perry and the others start to wonder whether they have a point. The end result is a brutal, visceral look at the true face of war, an ugly thing even when necessary and worse when the reasoning is (generously described as) ambiguous.

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