Fallen Angels: A Young Adult Book by Dean Myers

This Young Adult title moves at the accelerated pace of an ADD teen mind. Sometimes I pick up a YA title just because they're a fast read. There are times when I don't want to feel I'm the main character in one of James Joyce's oeuvres, Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses. So I picked up a YA title called Fallen Angels.

After clearing the first hurdle of prosaic scene setting, I started to read with something approaching pleasure. What little remained of my adolescent brain was keen for action. I voraciously turned the pages looking for bad things to happen.

YA writer extraordinaire, Walter Dean Myers, was never a soldier in Vietnam but it's not so you'd notice. He has the jargon, the scene, the set, and he has the characters. I wish he'd expended a little more energy on naming his characters. "Pee-Wee" doesn't quite get it with me, though that character is comic, boastful, brazen, annoying, and you hope there's one in every outfit. Troops like 'Pee-Wee' are much in demand for entertainment value during those inevitably boring moments in the military where you're waiting to go from Point A to Point B.

Point B is Vietnam, of course. There's a bit of corny irony in that fact that main character and narrator, Richard Perry, shouldn't be in Viet Nam because he has a 'medical profile'. In places where people are dying, no one cares too much about a bad knee. No one cares much about anything, in fact, except staying alive and out of harm's way. But Perry's outfit has an ambitious captain, bucking for Major, who keeps volunteering his company for extra patrols.

Political reporters familiar with tales of jungle warfare in Vietnam believe that there was an obsession with 'body count' in Vietnam. The metric of body counting came more from the politicians back in the U.S who didn't understand how to measure war except by the number of people killed.