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Chapter 5
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
That night, Perry gets his first guard duty with Lobel. Perry seems so nervous that Lobel asks him about it, and Perry says he can’t stop thinking about Jenkins. Lobel doesn’t remember Jenkins; he keeps his own fears at bay by imagining himself as the hero in a movie. The hero never dies. Perry asks what part Lobel played when they were on patrol—in the firefight, Lobel corrects him—and Lobel says his best role: Lee Marvin as a sergeant. They lapse into silence. An animal skitters past the barbed wire fences, scaring Perry. A bug crawls across his hand. Lobel asks Perry what his favorite movie is, and Perry says Shane. Or the Japanese movie he saw once, called The Island. Lobel agrees that these are good flicks.
Lobel instigates the book’s most intense exploration of the difference between reality and fiction when he confesses that he imagines himself in a movie whenever he’s on duty. Faced with brutal reality, he longs for the comforting gloss of fiction. The two movies Perry mentions— Shane is a 1953 genre-defining Western and The Island is a 1960 black and white, foreign-language film—quietly point out his education and sophistication. They also suggest two important elements of his character: moral rectitude (Shane helps a bunch of homesteaders defend themselves against a greedy cattle baron) and responsibility (The Island follows a Japanese family as they care for each other and try to eke out a living on an isolated island).
Themes
Lobel’s uncle is a film director. Contrary to Perry’s assumption, Lobel wasn’t drafted. While he waits to see if Lobel will tell the long story about why he volunteered, Perry remembers telling Mama about his decision to enlist. She had hoped he’d find a job after high school, and she begged him to stay, the smell of alcohol heavy on her breath. But after he realized he would never be able to afford college, he couldn’t stand the thought of staying in Harlem anymore. He wanted to get away and see something new, even though Harlem was where his people were.
Perry assumes that most—if not all—of the white soldiers were drafted, since he can’t imagine why anyone with privilege and opportunity back at home would voluntarily risk his or her life. He himself volunteered to escape his own impoverished and limited circumstances. Readers will have to wait to hear more about Lobel’s rationale, but for the moment, his revelation allows Perry to reflect on his own circumstances.
Themes
Lobel breaks Perry’s reverie. He asks if Perry has a girlfriend. When Perry says no, Lobel offers to hook him up with a starlet pen pal. Perry declines, saying he’d prefer a real girlfriend to a pretend one. That, sighs Lobel, is Perry’s problem: he’s too hooked on reality, and reality is a bad deal. Lobel worries about not having a girlfriend, because he’s about to turn 20 and he’s still a virgin. He doesn’t want to end up in the role of the baby-faced virgin who dies too young. And he warns Perry to avoid the role of the good but apparently cowardly Black guy who gets killed saving everyone else. Unfortunately, Perry can’t be the romantic lead: he doesn’t have a girlfriend, Judy the nurse is white, and movies about interracial love always end with the Black character dying.
While Lobel has just admitted his preference for fiction over reality, Perry maintains the opposite stance. Even when his real life is challenging, he prefers its honesty to gloss and fakery. Lobel warns him that reality is a dangerous thing in Vietnam and at home: in reality, racism, prejudice, death, and danger still exist. In many ways, Lobel’s preference for fiction underlines his privilege compared to Perry, who can’t escape the poverty and limitations that define his life. The story highlights this when Lobel notes that Perry can’t be the romantic lead in a movie. He’s guaranteed to die in that fictional setting, while at least in Vietnam, he has a chance of survival.
Themes
A few days later, a news crew shows up and films the squad around the camp. They film everyone explaining what they’re fighting for. Carroll says it’s to demonstrate that America stands for something. Simpson declares he’s there to free the South Vietnamese people. Brunner answers that he hates Communism. Walowick says he fights because his country asks him too. Lobel and Brew both say something about the domino theory—that if Vietnam falls to the Communists, the rest of Asia might follow. Perry says that Americans can choose between defending their country abroad now or face fighting on their own territory later. Peewee pretends to be surprised that he’s even in Vietnam.
When Perry arrives in Vietnam, he’s certain that he and everyone else fights for a good and noble cause. This certainty gives him strength, while each event that makes him question it increases his trauma. Each soldier gives his version of the war’s just and noble cause, and although their range suggests a concerning lack of clarity on the war’s aims—ensuring freedom for the Vietnamese people, defeating communism, and protecting American interests overlap but are distinct rationales—they all provide a positive reason for each man to risk his life.
Themes
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Captain Stewart orders the squad to take the news crew on patrol with them, and at noon, they load into two giant Huey helicopters and fly into the jungle. Simpson puts Monaco on point (in the front) and Johnson in rear, with the news crew in the middle. They walk for about 20 minutes before turning back. As they approach the landing zone, Monaco opens fire. One Vietcong fighter lurks among the trees. Then, Lobel sees him too, and the whole squad opens fire. Perry can’t see anything, but he decides to shoot anyway; he raises his rifle and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. When Simpson calls a ceasefire and the men retrieve the dead fighter from the undergrowth, Perry realizes his gun was unloaded the whole time.
The news crew continues the book’s exploration of truth versus fiction. Perry quickly—and much to his discomfort—realizes that an element of fiction goes into their reporting as well. The patrol, run exclusively for the news crew’s benefit, only turns up one VC fighter by chance. He seems to die not for nothing more than the edification and entertainment of Americans back at home. Perry’s lack of preparedness for the firefight shows that he’s still playing at being a soldier more than being one. But the firefight and its promise of the war’s life and death stakes startles him back into reality.
Themes
Perry avoids looking at the dead fighter after Brunner throws him into the chopper. The news crew snaps pictures. Back at base, the squad sits down to a delayed lunch of chicken, carrots, and mashed potatoes. The news crew poses the Vietnamese soldier’s corpse and photographs it. Perry starts to agree with Lobel: this doesn’t seem real at all. Maybe it is a movie. Later, back in the hooch, Simpson reveals that the solider was a North Vietnamese regular, not one of the guerrillas they usually encounter. He leaves to take a nap. Monaco rounds up the guys for volleyball. Their archrival team lost its star player when Charlie Company got pinned down in the jungle.
The pivot from the excitement and danger of the patrol and the human tragedy of the VC fighter’s death to the mundane details of army life disorients Perry so much that his sense of reality becomes warped. This points towards the dehumanizing and traumatizing effects of war on the human psyche: it doesn’t feel normal or right to go directly from killing a person to calmly eating lunch or joining a volleyball game, yet, bewilderingly, that is what the soldiers are expected to do.
Themes
