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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fallen Angels, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
War, Trauma, and Dehumanization
Perseverance and Heroism
Race, Identity, and Belonging
Reality and Fiction
Faith and Hope
Summary
Analysis
Perry finds Alpha Company camped out between Tam Ky and Highway 1 with a bunch of ARVN soldiers. Everything feels off. Peewee and Monaco both gladly embrace Perry but feel bad that he had to come back to the fighting. Things have changed in Perry’s absence; Simpson left and the squad’s new sergeant, Dongan, has rearranged the line. Peewee’s now in front instead of Walowick, and Johnson brings up the rear—lugging the giant machine gun—instead of Brunner. Johnson and Peewee both find it suspicious that Dongan has put Black soldiers in the most dangerous positions, but Dongan won’t allow them to question his authority.
Perry’s uneasiness increases, although it’s not entirely clear if it’s from being closer to the action, from being forced to work so closely with ARVN troops that he struggles to trust, or just because of his cumulative trauma—not only has he witnessed others’ deaths, but he’s now had a close brush with death himself. To make matters worse, the arrival of Dongan with his overtly racist attitudes has unsettled the camaraderie within the racially mixed squad, even though their lives depend on their ability to trust and work with one another. And his unwillingness to answer the soldiers’ questions provides another example of the way that military leadership abuses and betrays the trust of the men it asks to risk their lives in battle.
Themes
It rains for seven days straight after Perry gets back to the squad, soaking everything and turning the ground to mud. Dongan barely acknowledges Perry’s presence. Johnson refuses to accept Brew’s death, maintaining a private fiction that he went home instead. Perry realizes that everyone, including himself, has too many questions and too few answers. A chaplain named Father Santora visits and offers to pray with the squad. Perry doesn’t want to at first—he feels that making peace with God means he’s ready to die—but he eventually warms to the straight-talking chaplain and finds comfort in praying with him. But when the chaplain prays for Brew’s soul, Johnson walks away abruptly.
The rain, like the occasional rashes and other discomforts the soldiers suffer contribute to their trauma; it’s not just the big climactic battles that make them question whether anyone values their human dignity but the daily grind of lesser indignities. Johnson’s refusal to acknowledge Brewster’s death speaks to his sense of betrayal and trauma. And it points to the unanswerable questions of the ultimate purpose of these sacrifices. It’s as if Johnson refuses to acknowledge Brew’s death because that would force him to ask what it was for—and he knows the answer would be unsatisfactory. In contrast, Perry finds an increasing level of comfort in prayer as he realizes the shared sacred space and shared words create fellowship between him and the other soldiers, and that prayer allows him to still feel connected to the friends he lost.
Themes
Tensions continue to rise: Dongan criticizes Johnson for the way he’s keeping the machine gun, and Gearhart must separate them before they come to blows. Perry and Peewee promise to back Johnson if there’s racial trouble. Perry worries about the squad losing cohesion. But he also knows he isn’t going to “take any crap” either. Dongan comes from Indiana, but he looks, talks, and seems to think “southern;” he looks down on Peewee, Perry, Johnson and Monaco, the “niggers of the outfit,” in Johnson’s words. When Dongan pulls Peewee, Perry, and Lobel for guard duty to “check [them] out,” Peewee unzips his pants and tells Dongan to check out his crotch.
Dongan fails at a sergeant’s most essential task in this terrible war zone: fostering belonging and camaraderie among the soldiers under his command, since all of their lives depend on it. The squad fractures into racialized groups, with Monaco the Italian American lumped in with the Black soldiers, presumably based on the others’ discriminatory opinions.
Themes
Perry, Peewee, Lobel, and Dongan go to the guard foxhole. Perry strains to hear approaching enemies in the darkness. Suddenly, Dongan lobs what Perry believes to be a grenade over the wire. Perry hears a thump but no detonation, after which Dongan fires a few rounds into the darkness. Then he sends up a flare, revealing a dead Vietcong fighter draped across the razor wire. Lobel remarks about the dud grenade, but Dongan explains it’s a trick he learned from the marines. He threw a rock, making the “gook” duck. Then, when the expected grenade explosion didn’t happen, the enemy stuck his head up again in curiosity, making him an easy target. Dongan, Perry realizes with grudging respect, knows how to stay alive.
As much as Perry instinctively dislikes Dongan, he has a respect for the man’s survival skills, and his willingness to remain open to what others have to teach him gives him a neat trick that might one day save his life. But this evening in the foxhole also shows how Dongan’s racist attitude towards the Black soldiers aligns with his racist dehumanization of the Vietnamese people; he’s the only character in the book to call them by this extremely offensive slur. And he seems completely unmoved and unbothered by taking someone’s life.
Themes
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Back at the hooch, Lobel approaches Peewee and Perry and asks if they think the unit will have a race problem. Peewee, teasing Lobel and making him protest once more that he “wasn’t a faggot,” says they won’t, not as long as each man has his own gun. Lobel promises that if they do, the Black soldiers will have “the Jew”—him—on their side.
As the squad fractures along racial lines, Lobel aligns himself with the Black soldiers. This is because he also experiences discrimination and abuse based on his alleged sexual orientation and, it seems, because of how he values the friendships he’s forged, especially with Perry.
Themes
The rain stops. The squad waits. Walowick repeats gossip about the Paris peace talks. Stewart volunteers the company for a joint operation with marines in the Phuoc Ha Valley. When the marines are needed elsewhere, the mission is cancelled like so many others. Lobel tries and fails to organize a volleyball game. The company hears that General Westmoreland wants to “maximize” the destruction of the enemy, but no one quite knows what that means. Peewee wonders if they’re supposed to kill each “Cong” twice. Perry wonders if this means they’ll start considering everyone—women, babies, old men—the enemy and shooting them all indiscriminately.
As in other sections of the novel, Perry’s observation of isolated events—some of which are mundane, others of which are notable—conveys the passage of time but also the sense of timeless suspension the war creates. Time passes but nothing seems to change. General Westmoreland, the man in charge of American military operations in Vietnam, adopted a strategy of attrition—trying to bleed his Northern Vietnamese and Vietcong adversaries of manpower and supplies—that proved costly to foot soldiers like Perry and his friends. The disconnect between his aims on paper and the human costs on the battlefield comes through clearly in the soldiers’ dismay over the order to increase their destruction. If villages are already burning to the ground, what more can they do? Perry realizes the dehumanization inherent in this command, since the only way to increase destruction is to kill soldiers and civilians indiscriminately.
Themes
Perry gets—and burns—a letter from Earlene, still trying to apologize to Peewee for abandoning him. He gets a letter from Kenny, which reports that Kenny has gotten a part-time job at a drug store. And it says that Johnny Robinson, another boy from Harlem that Perry used to play pickup basketball games with, died in Nam. Perry didn’t even know a boy like that could even be there.
News that someone he knew in his old life has also died in Vietnam disconcerts Perry, as it suggests a collision between his old life and identity and his new one. It highlights how much he’s changed in his brief months in Vietnam—he feels much older than Robinson, even though they must be about the same age.
Themes
One rainy Tuesday, as Peewee, Perry, and others play poker with some guys from Charlie Company—although it’s barely got enough men left in it for a company—a woman and two children approach the camp. At company HQ, ARVN soldiers can’t get any information out of her. Peewee starts to make a doll as a present for the kids while the Charlie Company soldiers escort her from camp. At the edge of the rice paddies, the woman turns and hands one of her kids to a Charlie Company soldier. The child explodes in his arms, ripping him apart. The child had been laced with an explosive mine. The Americans gun down the woman as she runs across the rice paddies and shoot the other child where it stands, unmoving. Peewee stalks away, his doll lying face down in the mud.
The incident at the edge of camp illustrates the dangers in letting one’s guard down, especially in light of the Vietcong’s intense military tactics. It doesn’t so much punish Perry and Peewee for looking at the woman and her children as human beings—the book strongly implies that this is the right thing to do. But it does illustrate why it’s so hard for them—and everyone else—to maintain a belief that their adversaries, and even the Vietnamese people in general, are human beings and should be treated as such. Using a child as a bomb is an act of almost unimaginable depravity, and the horror of this moment forces readers to confront the violence of the war and the terror of the Vietcong tactics. It doesn’t excuse the ways in which the book depicts the American soldiers dehumanizing their adversaries, but it does help readers to understand why soldiers feel like their only option is to see all Vietnamese people as subhuman and dangerous.
Themes
