ThemesThe Loss of Innocence- The title of the novel Fallen Angels immediately highlights the theme of youth and innocence. As Lieutenant Carroll explains in chapter 4, all soldiers are “warrior angels,” because soldiers are still kids and innocent like angels. In calling the novel Fallen Angels, Myers implies that the youth and innocence of the soldiers are more important than any other aspect, such as religion, ethnicity, class, or race. The novel is first and foremost the story of the lost innocence of a team of soldiers during the Vietnam War. Richie is only seventeen when he enters Vietnam, and Peewee and the other members of the team are also teenagers: Peewee can't even grow a moustache. His three immature life goals are to drink wine from a corked bottle, smoke a cigar and make love to a foreign woman. Richie and Lobel are both virgins and fantasize endlessly about their first sexual experiences. Although the soldiers enter the war as naïve youths, the war quickly changes them and forces them to become young men. Surrounded by death, they are forced to contemplate the fragility of their lives and stripped of the carefreeness and brazenness of youth. The unspeakable horrors that surround the boys force them to contemplate a world that does not conform to their childish and simplistic ideas. Where they want to see only a separation between right and wrong, they instead find moral ambiguity. Where they want to see order and meaning, they find only chaos and meaninglessness. Where they want to find heroism, they find only the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These beliefs destroy the innocence of children, pushing them prematurely into adulthood. The unromantic reality of war - Like all the other soldiers in Fallen Angels, Richie joins the army under the illusion of what war is. Like many American civilians, he learned about war from films and stories that depicted battle as heroic and glorious, the army as efficient and organized, and war as a rational endeavor dependent on skill. What soldiers actually find in Vietnam bears almost no resemblance to such a mythologized and romanticized version of the war. The military is highly inefficient and fallible. Most officers are far from heroic and think only of their own lives and careers rather than those of their soldiers. In the heat of battle, soldiers think only of self-preservation and how to personally survive the onslaught of chaos and violence..