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Chapter 18
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
Word comes through that Northern Vietnamese reinforcements are coming; the ARVN and American forces must evacuate quickly. The soldiers set about the grim task of collecting and burning their dead, afraid to leave their corpses to be mutilated by the enemy and realizing they don’t have the ability to evacuate them. They strip dog tags and equipment from the dead soldiers, then pile them up in one hut. At least one poncho-wrapped man, from Charlie Company, is still breathing, but when they pull him from the pile, they quickly realize he will not survive his wounds. A Charlie Company soldier screams at Jamal to “do something,” but Jamal insists soldier’s friends must “take care of” him. A moment later, from outside the hut, Perry hears a single gunshot.
Collecting the bodies of the dead illustrates the morally troubling double-bind in which the soldiers find themselves (and which contributes to their traumatization). On the one hand, they respect their friends and fellows enough to try to keep them from falling into enemy hands, where their bodies might be mutilated or desecrated. On the other, the pressing needs of their own survival—their need to get out of the village as quickly as possible—means that they must dispatch the corpses with a minimum of respect and ceremony. So even while trying to protect their integrity, the soldiers contribute to the degrading treatment these fallen men receive after death. Even worse are the soldiers who they know they cannot save; although it may be more merciful to kill the wounded man quickly (given the gruesome descriptions of Vietcong torture methods elsewhere in the book), killing their own friends nevertheless goes against every empathetic and humane instinct the soldiers have. The war systematically deprives the young soldiers of their humanity, leaving them broken and traumatized.
Themes
The soldiers set the hut with the bodies ablaze with a flame thrower. Perry knows he’ll never forget the smell of burning human flesh. As they retreat, Gearhart asks about the tags, and it becomes clear that the Charlie Company soldiers forgot them in the hut. Peewee wants to know how the army will notify the families. Perry wonders, too. Will they send empty, body-less coffins for burial? Admit that they lost the bodies of people’s sons, husbands, brothers? Admit that their brothers-in-arms burned them in a panicked rite? Or not even admit their deaths at all?
The hasty burial already denied some of the fallen soldiers’ humanity; the loss of their identification tags completes their erasure. They become mere numbers, depersonalized casualties of war. Neither the war in general nor the American military seems to care about their lives, and they become interchangeable cogs in the military machine. The book thus criticizes the American military for its complicity in this dehumanization, for the way it obscures the ruined lives and deflects blame for these soldiers’ (and others’) deaths.
Themes
The American and ARVN forces head for the same pickup zone, with the Americans pushing through the cover of the trees and the ARVN troops skirting the open rice paddies. As nightmarish as Perry finds it to fight through the trees, it’s still preferable to the open, where the ARVN soldiers quickly come under fire. Everyone dives for cover, and Captain Stewart orders them to stay down. But when Johnson shouts “Get up! Keep moving!” Perry, Monaco, and the rest obey. So does Stewart. Perry watches himself and the rest on the move from outside his own body. He wonders where they’re going and hopes that someone knows the way.
In the chaos, Gearhart and Stewart lose control of the men under their command. Stewart has already shown himself to be an untrustworthy leader, and the consequences of this become evident here. But the squad’s group cohesion holds when they follow Johnson back to the landing zone. The relationships they have, their shared identity as soldiers and squad mates, gives them something to cling to in the midst of this chaos and destruction. And in this moment, Perry experiences the out-of-body feeling of he described earlier when he thought about perseverance. Despite the horror and trauma that surrounds him, he somehow finds the strength to keep going.
Themes
Monaco, in front on point, holds up his hands and the troops drop to the ground. When he motions them forward, Jamal remains frozen on the ground. Peewee punches him in the face; Perry and Gearhart drag him to his feet. Perry disassociates from his body again, although he’s aware that it’s running faster and faster through the trees. Monaco again signals the soldiers to stop, then advance. Perry watches Gearhart, Johnson, and Peewee get up, wondering how they still have strength to move. He longs for this terrible war movie to end. He pushes on, through the sounds of grenade launchers and human screams. Suddenly, Alpha and Charlie companies stumble onto a platoon of NVA soldiers in a clearing. As the Americans open fire, Perry disassociates again.
Somehow, something in Perry keeps him moving; Jamal lacks the same inner strength. But his squad mates refuse to leave him; the soldiers look out for one another, even when no one else will. When Perry wishes for the movie to end, he’s no longer using the idea of films as an escapist fantasy. He cannot deny the grim reality of the firefight raging around him. Rather, it reflects his sense of lost control: he feels forced to witness his own danger without feeling any power to do anything about it.
Themes
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Captain Stewart orders Peewee to cross the clearing under the cover of the machine gun, but Peewee refuses. Stewart levels his pistol at Peewee, and Johnson turns the machine gun and fires a few warning shots in front of Stewart’s feet; he turns it back towards the enemy as soon as Stewart holsters his pistol. Johnson cuts down an enemy soldier, but not before that man fires a rocket-propelled grenade across the clearing. Perry hits the ground. Dirt and human flesh rain down on him. He fires—accidentally—on the ARVN forces to his right, then turns his attention back to the VC troops, now surrounded in the middle of the clearing.
The squad’s mistrust of Stewart comes to a head in the clearing, since he’s already made it clear to everyone that he cares more about himself (and his promotion) than anybody else’s life. In contrast, the men beneath him are willing to risk everything—their careers and even their lives—to protect and look out for one another. This relationship provides the only solid ground they have to stand on. When Perry fires on ARVN forces, this points to the chaos of the scene, but it also suggests that the longer he spends in the war zone, the harder it has become for him to differentiate between friend and foe among the Vietnamese fighters. Slowly and surely, the war compromises his ability to see other’s unique humanity and individuality.
Themes
Gearhart yells “Cease fire!” as a jet passes overhead, dropping napalm. It falls so close to the American soldiers that its heat scorches Perry’s skin and lungs. Cautiously, the American soldiers move into the smoldering clearing. Atop a pile of dead VC bodies, Perry sees a man completely blown open, his organs exposed. Peewee points out the body of an American soldier, his hands still clenched around the throat of a dead VC soldier whom he strangled. Perry turns away. He thinks that people are not supposed to be made of twisted tubes and blood. They’re meant to be “sitting and talking and doing” instead.
This isn’t a friendly fire incident, but it does point to how indiscriminately the deadly weapons on both sides of this war will harm and kill. And it continues to suggest a callous disregard on the part of the U.S. military for its own soldiers, as it’s willing to expose them to danger if it can score hits against the enemy in the process. When Perry and Peewee look at the corpses around the clearing, they see the extent to which the war dehumanizes its victim-soldiers: not just in the blown-apart bodies but also in the animalistic, hate-fueled way in which some of them grappled in hand-to-hand combat.
Themes
