About Perry

Authors Note: This is a character development piece on Perry from the book, Fallen Angels.

Everyone in the Army is somewhat brave, but Perry isn’t very brave. In the book, Fallen Angels, Perry entered the Army because he thought that he was a tough person. He meets many people and becomes really good friends with a person named Peewee. They are in the same squad and execute missions together. From the very first mission, Perry knew that this wasn’t what he was expected.

Perry is a nice man who entered the war in Vietnam. He learns that war takes a lot of toughness and determination. He also realizes that you must be very disciplined and alert all of the time. In this book, I consider Perry to be a dynamic character because in the start of the book he sounds brave and strong, but towards the end of the book you can tell that war scares him a lot.

In part of the book, Perry is ambushed by the enemies and doesn’t know what to do. He just fired at random, not seeing or knowing where the enemies stood. Then when he got orders from the sergeant that they were moving to the top of the hill to try to overwhelm the enemy, Perry was reluctant to do it because it put his life in danger. When they got to the top of the hill, they got the surprise of their lives. They were waiting for them. All around Perry there was bullets going past him. Then described in the book, Perry’s legs gave out and he got hit by 3 bullets. His actions of being scared and cowardly almost got him killed.

This reminds me of the movie Act of Valor because one of the side characters chickens out in the middle of a mission and instead of getting wounded, he got gunned downed and died. At the start of the book, Perry seemed like the main character in Act of Valor who would put his life in danger to save his fellow squads. Also the main character in Act of Valor jumped on a grenade and killed himself so that the people around him would survive the grenade.

In conclusion to this, I believe that Perry thought that war was easier than it really was. He thought that everyone could make it into the war and be good. I related Perry to the main character of Act of Valor because their characteristics seemed about the same. But that is what Perry sounded like in the beginning of the book, but towards the ending you can tell that Perry would be too scared to do the things the main character in Act of Valor did.