Fallen Angels Book Response

Book Title: Fallen Angels
Author: Walter Dean Myers
Year of Publication: 1988
Number of Pages: 312
AR Points Awarded: 17

Literary Elements
Narrator - First person, "Told who?' I said  p. 1
Protagonist - Perry is a guy fresh out of high school from New York and is headed to Vietnam. He is timid and listens more than he talks. "Everyone around me talking about killing Congs as I sit there in silence."
.Antagonist - Beginning of book: At first it was the VC and a little bit of each other because they all just met and do not know each other very well yet. " You kinda little to be talking about somebody's daddy." He pushed the words out of his thick lips. p30
End of book: The VC are still trying to kill them so of course they are still the enemy and now their sanity is starting to fight them. They have to fight their minds to keep fighting from all of the terrible things they see. "When he picked up the child his shoulders exploded apart and every piece of his body separated into different directions. The child had been rigged with a bomb." p.230
Setting - The setting is the vast jungles of Vietnam. They spend a lot of time in the base they do not get into great detail where the base is exactly at but they are for sure in Vietnam." The longer you stay out in the jungle in the dark letting your mind wander, the jungle begins to consume you" p.189

Conflict - The conflict is both man vs. man. Perry vs the enemy. Another conflict is man vs. self. After all the killing he starts to question his moral standings and who he is as a person. "We went after them. Monaco shot one of them and the other stood up and threw his arms into the air. At his feet the soldier, still alive, was moaning in pain. I looked and saw they had cut his fingers off. I looked up into the face of the Cong soldier. He was young, no more than a teenager. He looked scared and tired, the same as me. I squeezed the trigger of the sixteen and watched him hurtle backward." p.251
Theme - The theme of the story is war is not made out to what it truly is. War is bloody, hopeless, and filled with grief and death. No matter what you hear on the news or read it is always worse than what it is made out to be. People die and get hurt but in order to keep moral up at home they do not talk about that, they just talk about the enemy dying. Life is precious and when its taken away from you that is when you realize what you had because now its gone. "I knew Mama loved me, but I also knew when I got back, she would expect me to be the same person, but it could never happen. She hadn’t been to Nam. She hadn’t given her poncho to anybody to wrap a body in, or stepped over a dying kid." p.237

Reflection
I enjoyed this book a lot. It has a real outlook on the Vietnam War the way it was fought. They get in such detail that you feel like your experiencing what the characters are feeling. This is the way war was meant to be explained in its bloody darkness. The characters are continuously bombarded with hopelessness throughout the whole book. It may be sad, but it was how it was, the truth behind the war. This book gave me chills in some of things they saw or what they did. I believe this book is the way war was meant to be told. The way the soldiers looked at war and what they experienced.