ThemesThe Loss of Innocence - The title of the novel Fallen Angels immediately emphasizes the theme of youth and innocence. As Lieutenant Carroll explains in Chapter 4, all soldiers are "warrior angels", because the soldiers are still young boys and still as innocent as angels. By titling the novel Fallen Angels, Myers implies that the soldiers' youth and innocence are more important than any of their other aspects, such as their religion, ethnicity, class, or race. The novel is above all the story of the loss of innocence of a squad of soldiers during the Vietnam War. Richie is only seventeen when he enters Vietnam, and Peewee and the other team members are teenagers as well – Peewee is unable to even grow a mustache. His three immature life goals are to drink wine from a corked bottle, smoke a cigar and make love with a stranger. Both Richie and Lobel are virgins and constantly fantasize about their first sexual experiences. Although the soldiers enter the war as naive young people, the war quickly transforms them and forces them to become young men. Surrounded by death, they are forced to contemplate the fragility of their own lives and stripped of the carefreeness and boldness of youth. The unspeakable horrors that surround the boys force them to contemplate a world that does not conform to their childish and simplistic notions. Where they want to see only a separation between good and evil, they instead find moral ambiguity. Where they want to see order and meaning, they find only chaos and senselessness. Where they want to find heroism, they find only the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroy the boys' innocence, propelling them prematurely toward manhood. The Unromantic Reality of War - Like every other soldier in Fallen Angels, Richie joins the army with illusions about what war is. Like many American civilians, he learned about war from films and stories that depict battle as heroic and glorious, the military as efficient and organized, and war as a rational effort that depends on skill. What the soldiers actually discovered in Vietnam bore almost no resemblance to such a mythologized and romanticized version of the war. The military is very ineffective and fallible. Most officers are far from heroic, only caring about their own lives and careers rather than those of their soldiers. In the heat of battle, soldiers only think about their own survival and how to personally survive the onslaught of chaos and violence..