Rainbows. Flowers. Puppies and unicorns. These images are the opposite of what you'll encounter in the pages of Walter Dean Myers' acclaimed Vietnam War novel, Fallen Angels. So let's set the right mood here by telling you a sad story. Got your hankies? Let's go.

Before Myers became a giant among Young Adult authors, he was a kid, struggling in Harlem. He was poor and his home life was a mess, so he dropped out of high school in 1954 and joined the army. They sent him over to Vietnam, to train South Vietnamese soldiers. This was before the "Vietnam War" was a thing.

Myers' younger brother Thomas heard his war stories. Myers even showed him some bullets he brought back. Thomas looked up to his brother, so he joined the army and was sent to Vietnam.

He was killed on his first day in combat.

You can only imagine the tremendous guilt Myers must have felt. As he became a writer, he wrote two short stories about the war, but kept feeling like he had more he wanted to say:

"I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings. My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In Fallen Angels I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic."

If you've already cracked open Fallen Angels, you might have noticed the dedication on the front page: To my brother, Thomas Wayne "Sonny" Myers, whose dream of adding beauty to this world through his humanity and his art ended in Vietnam on May 7th, 1968.

Fallen Angels was published in 1988, twenty years after Sonny had died, but Walter wrote it for, and because of, his brother.

Not everyone has loved Myers' gritty, non-heroic depiction of Vietnam. The book is in the top 20 of the American Library Association's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1999-2000, mostly for the profanity.

Let's put it this way: the soldier characters in this book aren't about to win any politeness contests. They've got other things on their minds.

But Fallen Angels is also one of Time's 100 Best YA Books of All Time. And it won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1989—an award for outstanding African American stories for young people. So, sure, it's been banned, but it's also outstanding and important.

Fallen Angels is not for the faint of heart. But that's because it doesn't shy away from any part of the war: the gruesome violence, the depressing moments, the racism. That's because Walter Dean Myers doesn't want you walking away with any "romantic notions" of war. Instead, he gives you a real sense of what it was really like for an average soldier in Vietnam.

Fallen Angels is the kind of book that you forget is set in the past—at least, until you hit the occasional scene where the soldiers complain about hippies or marvel at the idea of an organ transplant. But these scenes are few and far between. Most of the time, the story feels modern, or even out of time.

Myers clearly created that feeling for his readers on purpose. The characters call everywhere but Vietnam "the World," with a capital W. It's as if while they're at war, they aren't even on this planet—or maybe not even alive at all. By the end, that's how the main character feels:

"We're all dead over here, Monaco," I said. "We're dead and just hoping that we come back to life when we get into the World again." (23.21)

Spooky, right? And sure, maybe you've heard the whole "war is hell" cliché before. But this book is not a cliché. It's vivid, immediate, and intense. And it shows the impact of war—any war—on individual people.

Think about it: there are soldiers returning to America now, from more recent conflicts and wars. And there are Vietnam veterans across our country who still need care, some of them homeless or sick. Maybe that's why this book doesn't feel like it's set in the past.

Why do these people need care or services? What exactly happened to them? Through the story of one low-level soldier, Fallen Angels sheds light on the experiences of American veterans today.