Fallen Angels

In the novel Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers tells the story of Perry, a 17 year old African American boy who joins the military in to aid his poverty stricken family.  Though Perry has an injury and a medical file that is supposed to prevent him from warfare, he is given orders to Vietnam. While Perry waits on his medical profile, he finds himself as an active soldier in the middle of the Vietnam War.  It is though Perry's war experiences that Walter Dean Myers paints the picture of the progression of post traumatic stress disorder for the reader, a psychological disorder that was common yet heavily ignored and undiagnosed during the Vietnam War.  

Perry's first experience with warfare occurs shortly after her arrives in Nam when a member of his platoon, Jenkins, is killed by a booby trap while walking back to the LZ from patrol. Perry is shaken by this death as he thinks to himself, "I didn't know what to think about what had happened. I didn't know what to feel. I touched my fingers to the palm of my hand. I could feel my fingers. It was only inside that I was numb" (43).  Perry begins to notice that he is always on edge and scared, a feeling he never thought he would feel deep to the core of his being.  He says, "I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. (. . .) On the way to the chopper I found myself holding my breath.  I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got hit" (50).  This sense of fear follows and grows as Perry spends more time and experiences more warfare.  

As Perry finds himself in the midst of gunfire, his fear grows as well as the reader's awareness of his post traumatic stress disorder.  While he is on patrol with another platoon, he sees "a picture of Jenkins flashed in [his] mind" (100).  This patrol is a culminating point in his warfare experiences as his platoon accidentally opens fire on friendlies, causing major casualties to their own soldiers.  After this experience, Perry is really shaken up and begins to have more evidence of post traumatic stress disorder.  He says, I couldn't sleep.  They all started crowding in on me.  The guy with the plasma taped to his helmet, the sergeant crying.  None of them were together in my mind.  They just kept coming, one by one.  Short movies.  A few seconds of a chopper taking off over the tress.  A guy cradling his rifle.  A body bag" (106).  Through snapshots of Perry's thoughts, it is evident for the reader that Perry's fear and anxiety is growing as he is psychologically shaken by his experiences, and is really beginning to suffer mentally.

As Perry spends more and more time in Vietnam, his symptoms continue to grow and intensify.  As he hears bombing he says, "now the sound swelled in my consciousness like a dull headache.  It kept coming and coming, day and night.  Sometimes I felt as if the sounds were inside me somehow. And there were times, I never wanted to mention them to anyone else, that I heard the sounds at night when it was very quiet, and no one else heard them" (155).  Perry's internal fear increases and psychologically plagues him day and night.  As readers, we see his embarrassment and confusion of his psychological distress, and authentic portrayal of the progression of post traumatic stress disorder experienced by soldiers of war.  

The most intensifying experience Perry has in Vietnam occurs when he is forced to kill a VC who attacks him inside a hut.  This physically and mentally shakes Perry as he dreams, "I dreamt about being in the hut, and hearing the VC trying to get his rifle to work.  In the dream he smiled as he worked it and I stood there crying, knowing that eventually it would work and that he would kill me.  He would blow my face away the way I had blows away in real life.  I kept waking up in a kind of terror and then falling to sleep again and having the same dream" (188). It is through Perry's experiences that we are able to see into his mind and begin to witness the fear and anguish he feels.  Throughout the novel, Myers continues to show the progression of Perry's post traumatic stress disorder, and offer readers with a gateway into the psychological experiences of soldiers who witness the effects of warfare. I think this is an important display of a disease that may seem far away for those who have not witnessed war, and also provides for a discussion of those soldiers who experienced these effects in Vietnam during a time when this disease was widely left undiagnosed and untreated.  Perry, as many of the soldiers during this time, is an adolescent caught in the middle of a blood battle for which the reason for fighting was often unknown.  Through this novel, Myers is able to offer the story of the effects of warfare, and create a space for those to feel the effects of violence and find empathy for those who witness such acts.