Fallen Angels

In the book Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, we read about the hardships and troubles of the main character, Richard Perry, during the Vietnam war. We learn a lot about Perry throughout the book, and by the end of the book we feel like we know exactly how Perry feels, and we have a understanding of some of the hardships that the soldiers faced in Vietnam. In this book, Perry kills a Vietnamese man in a hut he was supposed to check out, and from this point on he does a lot of thinking about why he is fighting in the war. From experiences like this Perry changes both physically and mentally. Also he does a lot of thinking about himself, and he asks himself what kind of person he is. Then Perry looks deep inside and asks himself with "all the dying around me, all the killing, was making me look at myself again, hoping to find more then the kid I was. Maybe I could sift through the kid's stuff, the basketball, the Harlem streets, and the find the man I would be."

In the beginning of the book Perry is very different than he is at the end. In the beginningof the book Perry goes into the war a little scared, because he doesn't know what to expect. After Perry is wounded and sent back to war he becomes horrified by the thought of going back to war, and throws up. Another difference between Perry before an after the war is the fact that before the war he had never killed anyone or had been around death that much. After the war you know that he will never forget these tragedies, because these are very traumatizing things to see, and they scar for life. One example that probably scared Perry for the rest of his life were the sounds he heard after Brew, and himself had been shot. He saw them trying to help Brew, but then " I heard the zipper. I didn't have to see it. I heard the zipper (208)." This sound, you can only imagine, is one of the scariest things you could hear, because you hear them working on him, but then to hear them zipping up...