Throughout the book Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Meyers, Perry’s exposure to the stress of the Vietnam War causes him to lose personal power and drives him towards increasingly erratic behavior.
In writing this series of letters, I wanted to show that Perry was losing control of his situation gradually because of the stress of fighting in a war. My first idea was to have it be just a fictional piece from the point of view of Peewee, Perry’s best friend, showing his loss of self control throughout the story. But I felt that it would be difficult to encompass all the events that add up to Perry’s loss of power in a short fiction without it being fragmented, so I came up with the idea of having Peewee write back and forth with Perry’s mother.