Reader Response #5

This past week, I finished reading Fallen Angels, and in the last stretch I found these passages that caught my attention.
“Your friend didn’t make it,” he said.
“Didn’t make it?” I looked at him. “I’m talking about a woman. Her name is Duncan.”
“Yeah, Judy Duncan,” he said. “She got transferred to a field hospital and it got hit. Sorry.”
(Myers 307)
“Judy Duncan. I forgot what part of Texas she was from. I hadn’t known her, not really. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry that Texas was so far away and that nobody there would know about her, how this part of her life had been, what she had seen, or how she had felt at the end. They would get a telegram, and a body, but they wouldn’t know.”
(Myers 307-308)

I found that passage ironic, because Judy said earlier in the book that she wished that she was out in the field. She got her wish, and ended up dead. I wonder if she’d survived if she’d been back at the regular hospital? She was probally in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like most people who die in war. Its kinda sad that Perry points out that no one at home would know her story, or anything about what she’d seen in the war. Perry’s point is correct, since no one can actually know what she’d faced without being there first hand. The family would get a telegram and the body, but they wouldn’t know anything about how Judy died.

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