Fallen Angels

It is 1967 and seventeen-year-old Richard Perry, a black high school graduate from Harlem, joins the army. He has few other choices: though he is very intelligent, his single mother, abandoned by her husband years ago, cannot afford to send him to college. Rather than remain in the slums of Harlem, Richie enlists in the army amid rumors of impending peace--he thinks that the Vietnam War will end before he even has to fire a gun. While in basic training, he injures his knee playing basketball, earning him a medical profile that should keep him out of combat. However, due to a paperwork mishap, Richie's file is not properly processed, and he is sent to Vietnam anyway. His captain assures him that the file will soon be processed and that he will be sent home without ever seeing actual combat.

On the trip over, Richie befriends Judy Duncan, an army nurse, and Harold Gates, a cocky young black soldier from Chicago whom his friends call Peewee. The plane stops overnight in Osaka, Japan, and due to another bureaucratic mishap, the soldiers are forced to pay for their own dinners and sleep on benches in the airport. Richie feels unease at these signs of what he sees as the army's general incompetence. He buys a souvenir for his younger brother, Kenny. When he finally arrives in Vietnam, Richie is separated from Judy Duncan, but is assigned to the same barracks as Peewee. Though the sound of artillery in the distance makes him anxious, Richie is somewhat comforted by the fact that the camp in Vietnam looks exactly like his basic-training facility back in Massachusetts.

All the other guys in the neighborhood 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. Lying in bed, Richie reflects that he joined the army in part to earn money to send home to Kenny, and in part to avoid tough questions about his impossible dreams for the future. Over breakfast the next morning, Peewee tells Richie that he likes the army because for the first time in his life he has exactly what everyone else has--the same clothing, shoes, food, and so on. A large African-American soldier named Rings approaches Richie and Peewee and asks them to cut their skin so that they can all become blood brothers. He explains that they need to stick together as fellow blacks. When Richie and Peewee refuse to do as Rings asks, he calls them Uncle Toms.

Later in the day, Peewee and Richie speak