Yes, Fallen Angels Is Banned!

Richie Perry is seventeen, from Harlem, and enlists in the Army because he can’t afford college. He ships out to Vietnam in 1967 and discovers that nothing anyone told him about the war matches what he sees. His platoon is a mix of Black and white soldiers, city kids and country boys, and they’re all trying to survive a conflict they barely understand. Walter Dean Myers drew on his own brother’s Vietnam experience to write one of the most searing war novels in YA literature.

Fallen Angels ranks #11 on the ALA’s list of most banned books from 2000-2009 and has been challenged constantly since its publication. Franklin Central High School in Indianapolis banned it over profanity. The Fairfax County, Virginia Parents Against Bad Books in Schools group challenged it for “profanity and descriptions of drug abuse, sexually explicit conduct, and torture.” An Arlington Heights, Illinois school board member elected on promises of “Christian values” had it removed in 2006 based on excerpts she’d read online. Danbury Local Schools in Ohio challenged it in 2014.

Why You Should Read This

Myers wrote about war the way soldiers talk about it: profane, confused, and punctuated by moments of absolute terror. The language that gets the book banned is the language kids actually used in the jungle. Cleaning it up would be a lie, and Myers refused to lie about what Vietnam was.

The novel works because it stays close to Richie’s experience. He doesn’t understand the politics. He doesn’t have grand theories about American foreign policy. He just wants to live through his tour and go home. The deaths around him are sudden, random, and senseless, which is exactly how combat works. Myers respected his teenage readers enough to give them the truth, and that respect is what makes Fallen Angels one of the best YA novels ever written. War isn’t clean, and books about war shouldn’t be either.