Bertrand Russell could not have been more accurate by saying, “War does not determine who is right–only who is left.” This proves to be true in the Vietnam War. In the 1950s the United States began to send troops to Vietnam; throughout the following 25 years, the ensuing war would create some of the strongest tensions in United States history. During this time frame, an estimated 2.5 million people were killed for an unknown cause. United States soldiers were fighting the North Vietnamese, and none of them knew a valid reason why; after all, the Congs were not much different from the U.S. Soldiers. Many of the American soldiers didn’t come home from Vietnam, and the ones who survived only survived because they learned to contend with the harshness of war. Walter Dean Myers wrote Fallen Angels, a novel that realistically recounts the day to day lives of a group of solders in the Vietnam War and the way they cope with reality of it; faced with the horrors of war, each soldi
er must either reconcile reality with his personal beliefs or cling steadfastly to comfortable illusions of absolute morality.
Peewee and Lobel both try to understand their role in the war, but do so in different ways because of their different personalities and backgrounds. Peewee responds to fear and confusion with brave humor, making jokes out of any unsettling doubts. When Peewee is momentarily stunned by the Vietnamese mother's sacrifice of her child, Richie is able to pull himself out of his paralysis by joking, “They got kids over here?” Moments later he casually asks, “Me? Feel bad? . . . Never happen,”(p.232), showing that he hides his emotions behind a attitude of bluster. Lobel, on the other hand, turns to movies as his escape. He views Vietnam as a giant movie set and sees himself as the star of a war film. His obsession with movies is more than a simple recreation; it is an escape from a reality that is too difficult for Lobel to face unprotected. He desperately c
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