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Guerrilla
Hooches are the buildings where American soldiers fighting in Vietnam live.
Hooch Quotes in Fallen Angels
The Fallen Angels quotes below are all either spoken by Hooch or refer to Hooch. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4
Quotes
The village was a good ten minutes away and everybody seemed relaxed. I wasn’t. I was scared.
I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. I thought I would always be a middle-of-the-road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared, either. I was wrong. I was scared every time I left the hooch.
On the way to the chopper, I found myself holding my breath. I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got it. By the time we took off I was panting.
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Chapter 7
Quotes
An image of the VC we had killed flashed through my mind. I wondered if he had a family? Had he been out on a patrol? When did he know he was going to die?
What was worse than thinking about him dead was the way we looked at him. At least we had cared for Jenkins, had trembled when he died. He was one of us, an American, a human. But the dead Vietnamese soldier, his body sprawled out in the mud, was no longer a human being. He was a thing, a trophy. I wondered if I would become a trophy.
“We won.” Walowick came in after the volleyball game and sat on the edge of the bunk. “They’re paying us off in beer.”
“Way to go,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Seeing that dead gook mess you up some?”
“A little,” I said. “Maybe even more than Jenkins.”
“Who’s Jenkins?”
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Chapter 11
Quotes
The war was different now. Nam was different. Jenkins had been outside of me, even the guys in Charlie Company had been outside. Lieutenant Carroll was inside of me, he was part of me. Part of me was dead with him. I wanted to be sad, to cry for him, maybe bang my fists against the sides of the hooch. But what I felt was numb. I just had these pictures of him walking along with us on patrol or sitting in the mess area, looking down into a coffee cup. It was what I was building in my mind, a series of pictures of things I had seen, of guys I had seen. I found myself trying to push them from my mind, but they seemed more and more a part of me.
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Chapter 14
Quotes
Later we went to the recreation hooch and watched the news. It was all about President Johnson trying to get a bill passed to help the urban poor, and then something about the Pueblo, which had been taken over by the North Koreans. Then there was a big thing on the Super Bowl, and whether or not the Packers had a dynasty going. It wasn’t real that people were thinking about things like that when all this shit was going on. It just wasn’t real.
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Chapter 15
Quotes
Lobel damned near dragged Jamal into our hooch.
“Go ahead, tell him what you heard,” Lobel said to Jamal.
“Sergeant Simpson and Captain Stewart got into a fight,” Jamal said. “Captain Stewart told Sergeant Simpson that if he didn’t shut up and get out he was going to bust him down to private.”
[…]
“What they fighting about?” Johnson asked.
[…]
“He found out that Captain Stewart is volunteering Alpha Company all over the place. He asked him what he’s doing that for, and Captain Stewart said that if he didn’t want to fight, he shouldn’t have extended.”
What Jamal said went down hard. We didn’t mind doing our part because it had to be done, even though we didn’t have answers to why we were doing it.
But nobody wanted to go out and risk their lives so that Stewart could make major.
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Get the entire Fallen Angels LitChart as a printable PDF.
Hooch Term Timeline in Fallen Angels
The timeline below shows where the term Hooch appears in Fallen Angels. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
In the hooch (slang for barracks), Perry asks Gates—who goes by Peewee—if he found any of the “Congs”...
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Chapter 3
In the middle of the night, the sound of artillery wakes Perry. Outside the hooch, he sees flares in the distance, breaking like beautiful and brilliant flowers against the dark...
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...for a pistol, too. The platoon leader, a soft-voiced lieutenant named Carroll, stops by the hooch to welcome the boys. He tells them to focus on their surroundings, not the gossip...
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Chapter 4
Lieutenant Carroll hangs out in the hooch with the squad for a while, checking their supplies and morale. A Black solder called...
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...in a Vietcong fighter for questioning, and when Peewee discovers the enemy in the storage hooch, they strike up a friendly conversation, at least until the VC fighter tries to escape....
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...seems relaxed, but Perry is scared—just like he is every other time he leaves the hooch. When they reach the landing zone, the departing squad warns them that all the village...
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Chapter 5
...Carroll quietly remarks that they know where to find him. He walks slowly toward his hooch.
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But the choppers arrive before Carroll can make it to his hooch. Perry’s stomach tightens with fear, and he wills himself to relax. Sergeant Simpson rounds up...
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...retreat to the landing zone for their own ride back to camp. Back at the hooch, Simpson says Charlie Company made out well; they only lost nine people. But he’s worried...
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Chapter 6
...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...
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Chapter 7
Peewee goes to mail the letter, and Johnson comes into the hooch. Brunner starts to tell him that being called a name isn’t a big deal, and...
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Chapter 8
...Perry when he returns to camp. He shakes his head over the tragedy. In the hooch, Perry tells Peewee and Monaco what happened. Monaco expresses horror that Perry “hit our guys,”...
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...mail a birthday gift to Kenny, he finds Lieutenant Carroll drinking whiskey in the officers’ hooch. Carroll offers Perry a swig. At night, images of Charlie Company’s first platoon crowd in...
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Chapter 11
...war entails hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of terror. Lobel approaches him in the hooch, confessing that he feels responsible for Carroll’s death. He says he was so scared that...
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...begged their comrades to kill them. Perry passes on these stories to Peewee in the hooch. He joins the squad at volleyball, but his heart isn’t in it. The war has...
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...want to hear about the war. He skips a meal and stays back in the hooch to read the letter secretly. In it, Mama tells Peewee that she doesn’t understand why...
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...It’s unbearably hot; security is getting tighter, and they must cover the windows of the hooch to keep the light from the television from shining out. They watch a Christmas movie—Perry...
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Chapter 14
Later, in the recreation hooch, the soldiers watch the news. It talks about President Johnson’s attempts to help the urban...
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Chapter 15
...an apologetic letter to his father and stashes it with his other belongings in the hooch. Perry wonders if his own father would be proud of him. Vietcong forces have laced...
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Chapter 20
Peewee stands in the door of the hooch and announces that the squad racked up a body count of 433 “Congs” in the...
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Chapter 21
...the chaplain. Perry finds it comforting to pray with others. Afterwards, he returns to the hooch where the rest of the guys are cleaning and polishing two new machine guns. The...
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Brunner strides into the hooch with orders for the squad to patrol a stream near the Song Nha Ngu River....
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...to his dismay, that Brunner sounds a lot less confident than he did in the hooch. A ridge overlooks the section of stream they’re supposed to patrol, providing good cover for...
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