Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers

Unsure of his future, Richie Perry goes to Vietnam at seventeen years old to fight in the U.S. Army. His medical profile for his knee is not put in yet, so Perry is forced to go out on the battlefield with his company alongside friends that he has made like Peewee. He experiences terrifying moments where he has fortunately escaped from, but encountered deaths of fellow squad members and witnessed extreme levels of destruction and brutality. Perry ponders on going back to “The World” due to these horrific and life-threatening events but knows he won’t be able to take care of his brother and mother since he doesn’t have a good education. After getting injured badly in a battle, he returns from the

Going through an era when the Vietnam War was a smash hit in your town, many high school senior boys would be drafted out if their number was on the list of people. The men drafted had to leave behind their families and aspirations. Tim O’Brien uses different perspectives in The Things They Carried to show if something tragic happens in life, consequently dealing with it may be hard. Moving on will help in the future.

In the Pulitzer Prize winning civil war novel Killer Angels, Michael Shaara covers five days of the historic battle between the Northern and Southern United States at Gettysburg. Both the North and the South fought for freedom, although they did not have equivalent definitions of freedom. The North and the South were unwavering in their beliefs and their hope for a better United States, but what the two butted heads the most on was slavery. The South was a primarily agrarian region which relied heavily on the agriculture of crops like cotton and sugarcane, both of which required intense manual labor, unlike the North who was more so industrialized; however, as William Preston said, it was not cotton that was “the south’s king” but it was slavery that made them so prosperous. The South relied on slavery because having many workers to tend to these cash crops without having to pay them saved farmers and plantation owner’s money that they could use to buy more slaves that put out more work leading to more land for more crops, or to have more money to pay their taxes. Many Southerners like William Preston thought that owning other people was their divine right as white men. The Civil War was started over the North and South’s conflicting views on whether they had the “civil” right to own or not own slaves. The Northern and Southern states developed themselves much differently than one another because of their agrarian versus industrialized economy. As the states developed they

Richard Perry was a young seventeen-year-old black boy from Harlem. He did not have the money at go attend college so he decided to join the military. Perry played basketball throughout his life which resulted in a knee injury, but that did not stop him. On the way to Vietnam and at the beginning of his time there, Perry did not expect the events that were about to happen. “We spent another day lying around. It seemed to be what the war was about. Hours of boredom, seconds of terror.” (Myers 132). Perry and the rest of the men in Vietnam were put into hard positions and had to go through tough things. Perry had his friend, his leader, and was put into the hospital twice. Jenkins was the first to die among Perry’s friends. After the death he was hurt, but had to continue of and fight for his country. His lieutenant was the next of his close friends to die. Everyone was devastated about the loss of their lieutenant. The war had barely began, everyone had to still fight their hardest and not leave their guard down for anything. Many questions and prayers were spoken throughout the time in Vietnam. “I really wasn't pissed, because I knew the real

The Vietnam war, also called the Indochina War , may be said to have started in 1957 when Communist-led rebels began mounting terrorists attacks against the government of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The rebel forces, commonly called the Vietcong, were later aided by troops of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). American combat personnel were formally committed to the defense of the South in 1965. An agreement calling for a ceasefire was signed in January 1973, and by March the few remaining U.S. millitary personnel in Vietnam were withdrawn. However, the war between the two Vietnamese sides persisted inconclusively for two additional years before South Vietnamese resistance

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

The book The Killer Angels was published in 1975 by the Ballatine Booksand was written by Michael Shaara. The Killer Angels is a historic novel about the time of the American Civil War, more specifically The Battle of Gettysburg. Shaara wrote this historical masterpiece with the sole purpose of letting the reader know exactly how the war was for the men actually putting their lives on the line to get this great country of America to the stature it is today. In order to accomplish his goal of creating the ultimate historic journal of The Battle of Gettysburg, he went straight to the source. He went back and retrieved letters and documents written by the men themselves, who were I the war. What better way to tell a story about one of the most significant battles of American history, then getting the information straight from the warriors who were fighting in the tranches? The book is written from the viewpoints of Robert Edward Lee, James Longstreet, and a couple of other men who were in the war. Robert E. Lee was fifty-seven at the time of the war. He was a highly respected general of the Confederate Army. He was an honest, God following man who had great morals which made a great leader (Killer Angles XVI). He didn’t drink or smoke and would stay away from reading novels and plays because he felt it would make him weak minded for battle (Killer Angles XVI). This is what made him such a great leader, the fact that he lead by example of how a true gentleman and general should

A small country such as North Vietnam was able to win a war against a superpower like the United States of America, through, namely, tactics – such as Guerrilla Warfare -, the ignorance of their enemy, the attitude of the South Vietnamese, as well as a strong leader such as Ho Chi Minh. The Vietnam War was a major conflict (of the Cold War) which lasted from 1959 to 1975 , with US involvement from 1964 to 1973 . US reasons for their involvement in the war was their fear of “The Domino Effect” - or – the US fear that communism would spread to Vietnam and Southeast Asia, making them a major threat to national security. The Fall of Saigon marked the end of the war in 1975.

The Killer Angels was published in 1974 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The author, Michael Shaara, was teaching at Florida State University and writing many science fiction and other subjects of stories at the same time. After publishing many science fiction stories and boxing subject novel, The Broken Place, he chose a different subject to work on, which was history about Gettysburg. He did research on first-person memories, diaries and letters, and spent seven years to finish The Killer Angels. The following review will include some main arguments of this book along with sources and evidence.

Fallen Angels is an impressive illustration to some truths about being in the military and in war. It is about Richie, the main character, who enlist into the military and goes to the Vietnam War and finds out war isn't what he and his younger brother thought it would be. Myers also includes in this novel little pieces of racial discrimination that occurs in the military. Richard "Richie" Perry fresh out of high school decides to enlist into the military to get away from the "questions" of his friends in Harlem, "All the guys...thought I was going to college. I wasn't, and the army was the place I was going to get away from all the questions"(15). Richie hurts his knee while playing basketball in basic training and is given a medical profile

At 12 years old, his father began leaving him in charge of his automobile repair shop.“I got to do things that were probably ahead of most kids today.” With a smile on his face, he described how he gained confidence from working in his Dad’s shop, and how his community had a similar attitude concerning responsibility. “Those kids were growing up on the farm. My uncles at 8 years old, were driving the cows 3 miles!” “My mother at 8, was babysitting her 2 year old brother!”. This work in the shop made Dennis feel as though he was growing up, and that he could handle himself like an adult. The fact that his father was incredibly loose, and allowed him to work at such a young age, taught Dennis about work ethic and responsibility. These experiences would make him the confident and nimble leader he would need to be, later on in the Vietnam

The Vietnam War began in the year 1954, after the ascension to power of Ho Chi Minh, who was a communist leader in North Vietnam. The leader was spreading communism, and because the United States wanted to stop the spread, it sent military troops to aid South Vietnamese to stop this vice. The war saw about 3million people die with the inclusion of 58,000 American soldiers. About 150,000 people were wounded during the war. In 1975, South Vietnamese government surrendered the war after the communist forces forced them to surrender. Vietnam unified communism and became a Socialist Republic. Although decades have passed since the occurrence of the Vietnam war, the American culture, which was partly born as a result of this war, is celebrated

The Vietnam War escalated from a Vietnamese civil war into a limited international conflict, in which the United States was deeply involved. The Vietnam War was fought in South Vietnam between government forces aided by the United States and guerilla forces aided by the North Vietnamese. Despite increased American military involvement and signed peace agreements in 1973, the Vietnam War did not end until North Vietnam's successful invasion of South Vietnam in 1975. The Vietnam War may have been the longest war in American history, but after South Vietnam collapsed, America was left to question their highly controversial involvement in a lost cause.

In 1958, Communist-led guerrillas, eventually known as the Viet Cong, began to battle the government of the South Vietnamese. The United States then sent 2,000 military advisors t support South Vietnam’s government. This number grew to 16,3000 by 1963. The military force slowly deteriorated. By 1963 the fertile Mekong Delta was lost to the overpowering Viet Cong. The war rose in 1965, when President Johnson issued commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and ground forces, which had risen to 536,000 by 1968. The Tet Offensive by North Vietnam turned many Americans against the waging war. President Nixon, following Johnson, promoted Vietnamization, the withdrawing of American troops and handing over the great responsibility of the war to South Vietnam. Protesting of the war dramatically increased, especially after Nixon’s attempt to slow North Vietnam forces and supplies into the South by sending American forces to destroy supply bases in Cambodia in 1970, which violated Cambodian neutrality. This provoked antiwar protests on many of the United Stats’ college campuses. In 1968 through 1973 attempts were made to end the ongoing conflict through diplomacy. Then in January 1973, an agreement was reached. U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam and the U.S. POWs were released. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the North and Vietnam was once again united. The Vietnam War ended, but it took the lives of 58,000

Tim O’Brien tells the story of him and his platoon in Vietnam as well as a little about what each had experienced before and after the war. He tells each story in different way to elaborate on different things that happened around the same time. This complicated method emphasizes how he and each of his platoon member felt together while in Nam.It may jump from tale to tale in the stroy, but it has a clear message. In the story The Things They Carried O’Brien explains in different ways about being away from home can cause dramatic changes to someone in an alienating or a beneficial way.