Next stop – the Republic of Vietnam, 1967. Eleven in a series of fifteen.
Myers, Walter Dean (1988). Fallen Angels. NY: Scholastic. 309 pages.
Evaluation and summary: Seventeen year old Richie Perry can’t afford to go to college, so he takes another way out of Harlem: he joins the army. The army promptly sends him to Vietnam where, despite a medical profile for bad knees, Perry is assigned to a combat infantry unit. There are rumors of an upcoming truce for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, but Perry and the other members of his squad are seeing more and more combat…
Maybe it’s because I was a teenager in the ‘80s, when movies about the Vietnam war – Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, Hamburger Hill and Born on the Fourth of July to name a few – seemed to crowd the cinema, but the plot of Fallen Angels seemed very familiar . Raw recruit becomes a blooded veteran while witnessing the horrors of combat, experiences both brotherhood and racism in the ranks, and realizes the futility of the war. This is not a criticism of the author but an observation of how thoroughly I absorbed the tropes of the ‘Vietnam story’ without realizing it. I certainly enjoyed Fallen Angels, especially the character of Peewee Gates:
“You guys think we’re going to have a race problem over here?” Lobel asked.
“Not as long as everybody over here got them a gun,” Peewee said.
Lobel stood up. “Well, just in case we do,” he said. “I want you to know you got the Jew on your side.”
“Who’s the Jew?” Peewee asked.
“Me, I’m a Jew.”
“You ain’t no Jew,” Peewee said. “You too tall.”
“Fuck you, Peewee.”
“There you go with them promises again,” Peewee said.
It’s not hard to see how this book could be challenged due to profane language. Granted, I think banning or burning books is horrid, but why someone would want to ban a book because it contains the word fuck, while overlooking the scenes of graphic brutality (like children being machine-gunned along with their mother) is beyond me. Oddly enough, Fallen Angels is mentioned by one of the characters in Tomorrow, When the War Began, as an example of how ugly a guerilla conflict can become, and indeed the violence in Fallen Angels is an order of magnitude far worse.
Booktalk hook: The scene in which Perry and Peewee are cut off from their unit, crouched in a spider hole, on the verge of being discovered by ‘the Cong’ would be a great one to read aloud.