Best Fallen Angels Quotes by Walter Dean Myers

"Somebody must have told them suckers I was coming."

"I think somebody figures if I see Nam first, everything else is going to look good to me."

"Now I ain’t about to let neither one of you fools kill me, you hear?"

"Protect us, O Lord, and be merciful unto us."

"If the man give me a job back home I wouldn’t be doing this job over here."

"We made a hundred war movies, and we brought all the Germans over and gave them nice little bit parts, and they were very happy."

"Just because I don’t have my serial number tattooed on my genitals does not mean I’m a fag."

"I thought black guys from New York were supposed to be smart? Nobody pays to see anything natural. You pay to see unnatural things look almost natural."

"How come when you say ‘gooks’ it sounds like ‘nigger’ to me?"

"Every time I go to the bathroom, take two of these. Sometimes it helps, but usually, it don’t."

"What's that mean? How I know? All I know is my time is getting short."

"Nobody in our squad got mail but Johnson. He got a bill from the telephone company."

"I was so scared I didn't even see them until it was over."

"The war was different now. Nam was different."

"That little dude is three times older'n me and ain't got a scratch on him."

"People back home didn't want to know about the war, I knew that. But Mama was used to hard times, I thought it would be okay to tell her."

"Dear Peewee, Richard has told me all about you and you sound like a very fine boy. I wish you all the luck in the world and hope you get the chance to go home to your family."

"It made me sad that Mama had written to Peewee to say that she loved me. She hadn’t even told me that when I was leaving."

"Now all I could think of was how much I needed her."

"Sometimes standing alone seemed to be the hardest thing in the world to do, even when being in the crowd meant you could be killed."

"I was scared again. Wasn't there ever going to be a time when I wasn't scared?"

"Maybe the time had passed when anybody could be a good guy."

"The only thing I could think about was that I was glad it was Turner, and not me. It wasn’t what I wanted to feel, or what I thought I was supposed to feel."

"The war was not a long way from where we were; we were in the middle of it, and it was deeply within us."

"It wasn't the time for comforting each other."

"We could have killed as easily as we mourned. We could have burned as easily as we put out the fires."

"In all the inhumanity about us, he let us be human again."

"The sight of all the bodies lying around, the smell of blood and puke and urine, made my head spin, pushed me to a different place."

"The war hadn’t meant anything to me then, maybe because I had never gone through anything like it before."

"And now all the dying around me, and all the killing, was making me look at myself again, hoping to find something more than the kid I was."

"Maybe I could sift through the kid’s stuff, the basketball, the Harlem streets, and find the man I would be."

"I dreamt about being in the hut, and hearing the VC trying to get his rifle to work. In the dream, he smiled as he worked it and I stood there crying, knowing that eventually it would work and that he would kill me."

"Saying that you were trying to stop Communism or stuff like that was different than shooting somebody. It was different than being scared and looking at somebody who was maybe as scared as you were."

"Being a good soldier meant doing your job. For the guys in the squad, it meant killing the enemy."

"You ever go into combat?"
"Into combat? Yes. I've never fired a weapon at anyone, though."
"You figure if you don't shoot at anybody, God's going to take care of you?"
"I don't know," he said. "I sure as hell hope so."

"Sometimes, even when I wasn’t thinking about him, or at least when I didn’t know I was thinking of him, I would find myself crying."

"Having people care about you was probably the only thing that made any of it right. Having them not care made your whole life wrong."

"Maybe it was right. But it meant being some other person than I was when I got to Nam. Maybe that was what I had to be. Somebody else."

"The woman’s other child stood for a long moment, knee-deep in water and mud, before it, too, was gunned down."

"I don’t talk that shit. A man in Nam fighting by my side is a man fighting by my side. I don’t care what he doing in bed."

"It must have cost ten thousand dollars to kill him."

"What it is, is a small hill overlooking a village called Phuoc Ha Two."

"First we choppered into a hot LZ and the pilots jerked us out and took us out of there and into the valley itself, which didn’t seem hot."

"I was jumping through bushes, hoping I didn’t hit any booby traps."

"If I don’t get out this shit you go get that coin."

"I’d be gone, like Lieutenant Carroll. Over. Out."

"We listened to Sergeant Dongan talk about how hard things had been in the Korean war."

"Gearhart sat on it. I didn’t think Lieutenant Carroll would have done that."

"We kept moving. We kept slipping in the mud."

"I wanted to be hit and not even realize what was happening."

"I looked back at the throat wound, the bubble of blood still rose and fell rhythmically."

"It was time for the rest of us to get up, to charge again."

"We waited until almost 1200 hours before Gearhart signaled for us to move out."

"We had to have so many squads in the field, even if it was only on paper."

"You shoot some guy and he falls down, you’ve killed him. Pure and simple."

"I wished I had a wife and kids. I mean I really wished I had a wife and kids, somebody somewhere that loved me in a way I could look forward to going back to the World to."

"The ground pushed your feet away and the vines clutched at your legs while the trees chortled and shook with silent laughter."

"Couldn’t I just watch the rest of this damned war?"

"What you thought about, what filled you up more than anything, was the being scared and hearing your heart thumping in your temples and all the noises."

"The only reason to get the paper from him is to have something to read while you’re having breakfast."

"Gearhart wrote three letters to his wife. He gave one to me, one to Walowick, and he kept one."

"We're all dead over here. We're all dead and just hoping that we come back to life when we get into the World again."

"We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us."

"I had never been in love before. Maybe this was what it was like, the way I felt for Monaco and Peewee and Johnson and the rest of my squad."

"They would get a telegram, and a body, but they wouldn't know."

"It wasn't the wounds that kept us bent, that tugged at our shoulders, so much as it was the fatigue. We were tired of this war."