Redemption
Our protagonist is what the Usual Suspect would describe as “green as snot.”
Fallen Angels takes place in a time when our nation was in doubt about its actions in the world. Fallen Angels is a novel about military life during what could be considered America’s most controversial War. The year is 1967 and America is right in the middle of the Vietnam War. The main character is a young black man from Harlem who joined the Military believing that the war would be over before he even had to fire his weapon. He joined to get away from all the unknowns. He grew up living with an alcoholic for a mother who definitely could not put him through college despite his intelligence. So he is searching but he does not know exactly what for: he is totally adrift. But none of that really matters because Richie Perry is on his way to Vietnam. And the author knows it.
War as a lie has been a constant theme throughout the readings all semester. Vonnegut exposes war as a lie, by using liars as his main characters. O’Brien says it flat out. Walters takes a different route, he uses foreshadowing. An interesting approach because the “lie” does not expose itself right away and it is learned along with the main character. The novel starts off ambiguously; it does not give much away as to the location of the characters. The location is slowly established through the dialog between Peewee and Perry. Peewee, who is nameless (for now), has the first line of the novel, “Somebody must have told those suckers I was coming.” Perry is confused as to what he is talking about, but figures it is a joke. A little later Peewee uses the word Cong for the Vietnamese, which is the first tip off as to where they are. I had assumed that they had just arrived in Vietnam, but then Dunkin asks if Peewee thinks he is already in Vietnam. So suddenly I went from believing that they were in Vietnam, to not knowing where they were or what they were doing. In effect the author sets up an entire false reality. He lied to us.
The lie continues and grows deeper. Myers builds a lie around Perry’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Perry was originally in another company that was slated to go to Nam but due to a knee injury he was moved into another company. The intention was to keep him out of combat because his knee injury was substantial. However due to this he ended up on a plane headed towards Nam and his old company was shipped to Germany. He was assured that he would be given a job behind a desk, but because of the beginning we the readers know better. When Perry gets to Chu Lai he approaches a captain to tell him about his knee but the captain tells him to go and talk to his company commander and walks away, so much for a desk job. These are all lies that have been feed to him, which others reciprocated unknowingly. Besides, Perry was under the impression that he was going to get to Nam and then the war would be over. Again another lie. Before I go any further I want to point out that these characters did not know they were passing on lies, but hind-sight is twenty-twenty and we the readers know where all of this is heading. The author uses Jenkins as a transition. He is the first truth of the book.
When we first meet Jenkins he is scared out of his mind. Perry even says, “He looked like one of the characters from an Archie Andrews comic, but he was so scared it wasn’t funny.”(Fallen Angels p.20) When I first read that passage I did not think much of it, but then I did a quick Google search and found that Myers was actually drawing a deep connection. Archie is an all American boy, a middle class white American, a womanizer, he is passionate about sports, and leads a rock band (Wikipedia). Jenkins is a stand in for all the doomed boys that went to Vietnam.
Myers also takes the chance to expand and solidify his motif: war is a lie. Peewee, being the constant prankster, sees a chance to have a little fun. So when Jenkins asks him how long they have been in Vietnam Peewee lies to him and tells him they have been there eight months when he had only been there nine days. He then goes on to jerk Jenkins around for a while about the possibility of getting out early until Jenkins catches wind of it and calls him out for a liar. Peewee believes the war will be over soon, and while some of it is a front, he is far more Gung-ho about getting some action then is Perry and is definitely more Gung-ho then Jenkins. In a certain sense what happens in their interaction is a believer in the war, a believer in the lies, finds someone who is not, someone who can see the truth, and begins to do what all the other believers have been doing: he lies. Except since Jenkins can see the truth he calls him out on it. Jenkins represents truth and innocents but not naivety: that is Perry’s job.
Jenkins is convinced he is going to die, rightly so, and he tells Perry. So Perry tells him that he will be fine. He tries to reassure Jenkins by telling him what he was told at Fort Devens, “Most guys over here won’t ever fire their rifles. I mean, they won’t ever really shoot at anybody.” (Fallen Angels p30) Ironically, Jenkins never fires his rifle because he dies before he has a chance too. Jenkins sees right through that because he points out that the guy who said it probably had never been “in country.” Just another lie. Obviously Myers put this passage in there to expose Perry’s naivety about war. A man does not need to ever fire his weapon to die in war. This is the last time Jenkins has any dialog in the book, while he is mentioned, he never speaks. He steps on a land mine. He is the first character to die in the book and since he represented truth, truth dies with him.
“In war, truth is the first casualty” -Aeschylus
Thanks Call of Duty 4.
Filed by whitepe at April 23rd, 2008 under Uncategorized
