02 March 2005 FALLEN ANGELS by Walter Dean Myers, Scholastic, 1988

"And we held onto each other

Like brother to brother

We promised our mothers we'd write"

--Billy Joel, "Goodnight Saigon"

" 'I loves it here,' Peewee said. 'I ain't never seen no place in the world better than this place right here. You know what I love the most?'

" 'What's that?' Sergeant Simpson was amused by Peewee.

" 'The bugs,' Peewee said. 'You go to sleep at night they right there. You wake up in the morning, they right there. They better than a damn dog.' "

Peewee Gates, a kid from Chicago, provides the comic relief. He and Richard Perry, a talented young writer from Harlem who narrates the story, lead an ensemble cast in Walter Dean Myers' FALLEN ANGELS, one of the perennial Top Ten banned books in America. This distinction is not a surprise.

"It's always the old to lead us to the war

Always the young to fall."

--Phil Ochs, "I Ain't Marching Anymore"

There are certainly some powerful people in America who don't want you or your kids reading a book like this. And it has nothing to do with the occasional four-letter word. I'd hazard to argue that if as many students over the past decade had read or listened to FALLEN ANGELS as had experienced CHARLOTTE'S WEB or HARRY POTTER, then there'd be less of a national memory loss about what war is really about, and there would have been a much more spirited debate about letting "the old" con our country into this generation's equivalent of Vietnam.

(Remember those WMDs?)

"I wanted to say more to him. I wanted to say that the only dead person I had ever seen before had been my grandmother. I wanted to say that when I saw her I was ready, walking into the darkened church with the family and sitting in the first pews. But Jenkins was different. Jenkins had been walking with me and talking with me only hours before. Seeing him lying there like that, his mouth and eyes open, had grabbed something inside my chest and twisted it hard.

"The neat pile of body bags was waiting for the rest of us. There were enough there--the supply clerk had reached for the top one without even looking--to know that they expected that many of us would be going home in them.

"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."

Richard Perry had no strong desire to join the army and go fight in Vietnam. He really had no idea what he was getting himself into. There wasn't money for college so he decided to get away from Mom and Harlem.

"The mortar shells landed behind us. They were long again. Long but walking. They had spotters who saw where the shells were landing, and who were directing the fire. They kept shortening up the range to get closer and closer to us. And the shells were coming fast.

"The noise was terrible. Every time a mortar went off, I jumped. I couldn't help myself. The noise went into you. It touched parts of you that were small and frightened and wanting your mommy. Being away from the fighting had weakened my stamina. It did even more to my nerves. I was shaking. I had to force myself to keep my eyes open."

It is so impressive to discover upon close scrutiny that a book written almost two decades ago would not require a single word edited differently if it were being published for the first time in 2005. That is the quality and timelessness of the writing. And it is not just the graphic depictions of battle that will cause readers to keep thinking about this book for a long time afterward. It is also those thought-provoking scenes such as Brew talking about how he got his draft notice and thought about going to Canada but didn't have the nerve.

But anytime things start getting too intense there is always Peewee:

" 'Everybody in New York is white,' Peewee said.

" 'Perry is from New York, and he sure ain't white.'

" 'Yes, he is, he passing!'

" 'You know, we had something like you back in Galesburg,' Walowick said. He spoke carefully, as if he wasn't sure of the language. 'We cut it up and put it in formaldehyde.'

" 'Didn't that leave your daddy lonesome?' "

In this utterly profound yet thoroughly entertaining classic story that he dedicated to the brother that he lost to military madness in 1968, Walter Dean Myers leaves us all thinking about the fifty-eight thousand Americans--and the millions of Vietnamese people--lost in the Vietnam "conflict," one of the endless stream of humanity's senseless wars.

"I was afraid of the dead guys. I saw them, arms limp, faces sometimes twisted in anguish, mostly calm, and I was afraid of them. They were me. We wore the same uniform, were the same height, had the same face. They were me, and they were dead. No one looked into the faces, into the often still-open eyes. We did what we had to do, and turned away."

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com