Fallen Angels

“Stay away from dope. There’s only two kinds of people in Nam. People who are alert twenty-four hours a day, and people who are dead.”

During the Vietnam war, many soldiers turned to smoking marijuana or using heroin to cope with the traumas that they experienced. This quote highlights the impossible physical and emotional standards that soldiers were expected to meet. One of the most significant themes discussed in the novel are The Psychological Impacts of War. This type of hypervigilance is represented later in the novel as Perry and his squad see increasing amounts of death and violence.

“I wanted to say more to him. I wanted to say that the only dead person I had ever seen was my grandmother. I wanted to say that when I saw her I was ready…Jenkins was different. Jenkins had been walking with me and talking with me only hours before…seeing him like that…had grabbed something inside my chest and twisted it hard.”

Perry witnesses his first death during the Vietnam War and finds himself deeply unsettled by the sudden shift between life and death. Jenkins, despite not being a significant character in the novel, represents Perry’s first brush with both The Psychological Impacts of War—he finds himself constantly thinking of Jenkin’s death and this becomes the basis of his constant fear of death—and The Importance of Friendship and Camaraderie Between Soldiers.

“My father used to call soldiers angels warriors…Because usually they get boys to fight wars. Most of you aren’t old enough to vote yet.”

Lieutenant Carroll’s explanation of the concept of “angel soldiers” introduces one of the motifs within the novel that emphasizes The Psychological Impacts of War on the soldiers who fight it: God and religion. This moment also functions as foreshadowing for Lieutenant Carroll’s eventual death and the way that the squad recites his father’s prayer on his behalf.

“I really wasn’t pissed, because I knew the real question wasn’t about my knee. I thought the knee would be okay. The real question was what I was doing, what any of us were doing, in Nam.”

After Perry decides not to leave Vietnam on account of his prior knee injury, Peewee questions his intentions, stating that he shouldn’t be a hero. Perry contemplates his own decision, unsure about why he and his squad are in Vietnam in the first place. This doubt and confusion builds on the novel’s idea that war may be ambiguous, not having a palpable reason or meaning.

“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…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.”

Movies are a motif that are used throughout the novel to portray both the soldiers’ disillusionment with the war and the various coping mechanisms they use in response to trauma. Lobel sees himself as a character in a movie, sure that he can’t be injured or killed according to common clichés in war movies; this allows some of the psychological pressure and fear to be diverted and fictionalized.

“It wasn’t real. We were eating baked chicken, and all I could think of was that it was pretty good. We had gone out to the jungle and seen one VC and killed him. Then we came back in time for lunch. Maybe Lobel was right. Maybe it was just some kind of movie.”

After Perry sees a Viet Cong soldier killed, he becomes confused with the normalcy that he experiences afterward. The simple and quotidian nature of his statement, “[t]hen we came back in time for lunch,” highlights the paradox of this normalcy after killing someone. He is unable to process the events that have occurred around him and begins to experience dissociation, thinking that the events that he witnesses are outside of him and his life.

“I needed something real. It didn’t even have to be something that was going on at the time, a plan for when I got back would have been fine. I couldn’t think of anything and felt depressed.”

Perry feels himself becoming lost and separated from the life that he had lived prior to being sent to Vietnam. He needs to hold onto “something real” to help him recognize both his identity and his life as separate entities from the life he lives at the moment. This moment marks Perry’s first realization that he is being psychologically impacted by the war.

“I couldn’t sleep. They all started crowding in on me…The guys that our artillery blew away didn’t have a reason to die. They hadn’t died facing the enemy. They died just because someone was scared…being scared made you do things you would regret later. We were killing our brothers, ourselves.”

After watching over 15 soldiers be senselessly killed by friendly fire, Perry struggles to sleep, realizing that death is always a possibility, even amongst friends. This moment depicts the consequences of the immense psychological pressure that soldiers faced fighting in Vietnam. The incident, produced by fear and trauma, leads to even more fear in Perry and a new understanding of his fragile morality within Vietnam.

“I noticed that lately there were things I would let myself think about, and things I wouldn’t. But every once in a while things would come into my mind, not like a thought but like a picture, and I felt a little strange about that. I wondered if that happened to any of the other guys.”

Perry begins to notice how trauma affects him. Perry finds himself attempting to compartmentalize what he has seen, but his mind is unable to process some of his experiences, resulting in his intrusive images and flashbacks. His wonder about his fellow soldiers is an example of dramatic irony that highlights Perry’s naivety and inexperience, since Perry does not know how widespread The Psychological Impacts of War are.

“There were Vietnamese, mostly women and old men, running for their lives. Few of them made it more than a few feet as the chopper guns swept everything in their path. These were the people we had come to save, to pacify. Now it was ourselves that we were saving. God have mercy. God give us peace.”

Perry watches as the people whom the army had tasked his squad with saving became casualties of the greater conflict. One of the themes of the novel contemplates The Ambiguity of War, and here, Myers shows that war impacts not only the soldiers but innocent civilians as well. Perry is forced to contemplate the ethics of war as he sees the lives of different groups of people prioritized over others. He begins to understand that war is more than simply a good guy fighting a bad guy.

“Back home the World seemed to be splitting up between people who wanted to make love and people who wanted to tear the cities down. A lot of blacks against whites, and we didn’t talk about it too much, but we felt it.”

As tensions back in the United States begin to increase, the soldiers find themselves impacted emotionally by what is happening. The dichotomy of “mak[ing] love” and “tear[ing] the cities down” creates an obvious distinction between peace and destruction, highlighting who is in the wrong and who isn’t. Racial protests and protests over the United States’s involvement within the war force the soldiers to question exactly what they are fighting for, ultimately adding to their slow disillusionment with the war.

“The noises shook you, made you want to stop and hide. Now it was different. Now the sound swelled in my consciousness like a dull headache. It kept coming and coming, day and night. Sometimes I felt as if the sounds were inside of me somehow.”

The Psychological Impacts of War become apparent as Perry depicts the way that the sounds of artillery and gunfire follow him outside of the battlefield. The synesthesia of the sounds being physically inside of him highlight the inescapable nature and confusion of trauma.

“The war was not a long way from where we were; we were in the middle of it, and it was deeply within it…I think we were glad that we hadn’t known him better. Maybe, even, that if somebody had to die from the squad, it was better that it was some new guy. It was always better that it was someone else.”

After Turner, a new addition to Perry’s squad, dies, Perry contemplates how it may be better for the new guy to die rather than someone he is attached to. The theme of The Importance of Friendship and Camaraderie Between Soldiers is illustrated here as it explains why Perry feels this way. Through their common experiences, Perry’s squad has formed an inseparable bond they prioritize to keep each other alive.

“You have to remember that there’s as much of a psychological war going on over here as there is a physical war. I have the feeling that we could win the real war and still lose the psychological war.”

This quote functions both literally and metaphorically. Literally, Perry explains why the Viet Cong choose to terrorize and target villages that were supported by the United States. Metaphorically, the moment highlights the psychological cost of the war; even though the physical war may be won, the psychological cost of the war will be severe and ongoing.

“We were all jumpy. It wasn’t that we were hurt. It was just that we couldn’t get down. We had been shooting and screaming and scared that somebody, that something, was going to kill us. We just couldn’t get down that easily. It didn’t stop when they blew the whistle. I didn’t know if it would ever stop.”

The psychological toll on Perry’s squad continues to grow as the war intensifies. This quote helps to showcase one of the different impacts of repeated trauma: hyper arousal. Hyper arousal occurs when someone is constantly in a state of fight or flight, consistently afraid that something may occur or believing that they always have to be on guard. This passage reflects the message they received earlier in the novel that they must be alert if they don’t want to die.

“I started crying, and Peewee got up and came to my bunk. He put his arms around me and held me until we both fell asleep.”

Experiencing the aftermath of killing a person, Perry has his doubts about the war and what they’re really fighting for. Peewee, a fellow member of his squad, comforts Perry wordlessly. This moment shows the necessity of camaraderie and a support system in the midst of war.

“I had come into the army at seventeen, and I remembered who I was, and who I was had been a kid. The war hadn’t meant anything to me then…and now all the dying around me, and all the killing, was making me look at myself again, hoping to find more than the kid I was…maybe I could sift through the kid’s stuff…and find the man I would be. I hoped I did it before I got killed.”

Loss of innocence is a topic throughout the novel that highlights the costs of sending young men to war. Perry, in this scene, realizes that he is not the same person that he was before the war. He no longer identifies with the 17-year-old version of himself that came into the war.

“Saying that you were trying to stop Communism or stuff like that was different than shooting something. It was different than being scared and looking at somebody who was maybe as scared as you were.”

Perry struggles to explain his actions to his younger brother who views him as a hero. He realizes that taking someone’s life is different than having an abstractedly ideological goal. The moral Ambiguity of War is highlighted by his inability to tell his brother of his actions.

“I felt awkward talking to Judy. I was glad to see her, but I couldn’t talk to her. The words didn’t have the right proportion somehow. There was this feeling that everything I was going to say was either too loud or too strange for a world in which people did normal things.”

Perry’s experience with the war has made him feel socially isolated from people who did not experience the same things. This difficulty communicating with others after the war is a psychological consequence of the war that has a significant effect on his ability to return to a sense of normalcy.

“What would they say to their parents? Their wives…We burned his body, ma’am. In rite hurried by fear and panic, we burned what was left of him and ran for our lives…Perhaps they would tell them nothing. Not having a body in hand…they would not acknowledge that there was a death at all. Yes, we’re sorry.”

After watching his Company burn the bodies of other soldiers as they ran to be evacuated, Perry finds himself wondering what the army will tell the families of the dead. This moment marks a significant shift in Perry’s disillusionment with the war, and it highlights The Ambiguity of War, framing the US as the “bad guys” in the scenario.

“I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to sit forever. Where the hell was the popcorn machine? Couldn’t I just watch the rest of this damned war? Couldn’t I just be out of it for a few hours, a few minutes.”

Movies are a motif that reflect dissociation and escapism for the soldiers in Perry’s squad. Unable to process the violent and horrific events that unfold around them, the soldiers turn to different ways to psychologically cope with the war. Perry, in this passage, demonstrates his desire to separate himself from the war, having become emotionally dependent on his ability to dissociate from it.

“He kept his hand on my wrist. I moved my hand and took his. We held hands in the darkness.”

As Peewee and Perry hide in the small spider hole from the Viet Cong soldiers, they seek comfort from each other. The short, monosyllabic sentences reflect their loss of energy in the battle. This moment portrays the importance of soldiers having bonds between each other as they become major sources of strength.

“I had never been in love before. Maybe this was what it was like, the way I had for Monaco and Peewee and Johnson and the rest of my squad. I hoped this was what it was like.”

Perry, as he is wheeled into surgery, thinks about his relationship with the members of his squad. He feels deep admiration, gratitude, and affection toward them and amends his definition of love to fit these feelings. This is a moment of character development as Perry learns about deep relationships.