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Monday, 04 February 2013 11:55
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Rod Davis
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Reviews
In memory of "American Sniper"
Chris Kyle:
“It
is so hard becoming a civilian," Kyle said. "When you are in the
military, everything you do is for the greater good. And as a civilian,
everything you do is for your own good.
“When you’re in the
military, you are facing life and death every day. And then you come
home and hear people who are unhappy about the little things. And you
think, are you kidding me? Two weeks ago, I was shot. And this is your
problem. … They train us how to become warriors, but then they don’t
teach us and train us how to become businessmen.”
– Dallas Morning News, Feb. 3, 2013
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I am late getting to the party on Ben Fountain’s acclaimed, relentless novel that is
not a war novel but a
combattere interruptus
about what happens to soldiers when they return home. And then have to
go back. And maybe not come home. I don’t actually know if that’s a
literary (or Latin) term, any more than I know why
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk didn’t win the National Book Award. I’ll let the writing speak for itself, after these digressions.
First,
a confession. When I started reading, I was immediately taken with how
much the language of young warriors rang true and has remained so
constant over so many conflicts. Direct and no-bullshit, it is chiefly
concerned, in no special order, with sex, chow, bitching, getting
wasted, dumbasses, boredom, loneliness, and not getting killed. In this
complex military world both truncated and expansive, terrible things
become comic. The mundane leads to transcendence. Even vulgarity is
destroyed and reborn holy. Consider the word “fuck.” Among troops, it
assumes any syntactic form, always with complete precision. You could
make whole sentences out of fuck. Fuck knows I’ve fucking heard them. I
thought, this fucking guy fucking knows his shit. When the fuck did he
serve?
Of course, the Dallas-based author didn’t, and never said he did. I
put the book down when that dawned on me, feeling a little duped but
mostly stupid for my assumption. I thought there was a rule about this.
But I had an honest moment with myself: this book wasn’t about Iraq any
more than
The Sun Also Rises was about World War I. And how in
any event it is the task of the writer of fiction to elicit the truths
that lie deeply embedded inside illusions of “reality.” Especially
concerning the fog of war. I had to finish the novel. Some in the
military may disagree, but I think Fountain did his job and got it
right.
The story vehicle is that of a small squad nicknamed the Bravos,
whose 15-plus minutes of fame follow a deadly firefight that was caught
by a network news crew and became a viral video. The Bravos are brought
home for a two-week leave and publicity tour culminating in an
appearance at Cowboy stadium (the old one) as halftime stars at the
Thanksgiving game. The day is witnessed through the acutely reflective
mind of Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old Texan who lost two friends and won a
Silver Star in the action and is at once both innocent and older than
Homer.
Billy and his buddies pass some edgy time before the game
drinking, eating, bitching, and fantasizing over hooking up with the
halftime act, Destiny’s Child. They’re also in surreal talks with a
semi-famous Hollywood producer, trying to land a movie deal based on
their experiences. He’s got Hilary Swank interested if she can play the
role of the macho intellectual squad leader, Sgt. Dime. Some investors
will only sign on if the story can be re-cast in World War II, because,
you know,
that was the greatest generation. Cowboys owner Norm
Oglesby also may deal himself in, but only if he can get the Bravos to
take an obscenely huge cut in their share of the potential deal, from
$100,000 each down to $5,000. Everybody has to make sacrifices, Norm
reminds them, as Mr. Jones, his armed bodyguard, stands by.
At
every turn, Billy and his comrades confront a volatile mix of
admiration, fear and ignorance. His sister, one of the book’s strongest
characters, wants him to run away to an anti-war sanctuary. A Cowboys
cheerleader from his hometown wants him to come back to her. Which Billy
knows will never happen. The fans at the game treat the Bravos like
sacred souvenirs. Everybody wants a piece of them and no one knows why.
It makes for a cold schooling: Soldiers, like artists, are heroes in the abstract, and problems in the flesh.
Here’s how Billy sees it:
- “Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he’s come to
believe that loss is the standard trajectory … The war is fucked? Well,
duh. Nine-eleven? Slow train coming. They hate our freedoms? Yo, they
hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know
better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on
extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of
self-justifying pity.”
- “No one spits. No one calls him baby-killer. On the contrary,
people could not be more supportive or kindlier disposed, yet Billy
finds these encounters weird and frightening all the same.”
- “It seems to Billy a flat-out miracle that any of them are still
alive. So they’ve lost Shroom and Lake, only two a numbers man might
say, but given that each Bravo has missed death by a margin of inches,
the casualty rate could just as easily be 100 percent. The freaking
randomness is what wears on you, the difference between life, death, and
horrible injury sometimes as slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on
the way to chow, choosing the third shitter in line instead of the
fourth, turning your head to the left instead of the right… Billy sensed
the true mindfucking potential of it on their first trip outside the
wire, when Shroom advised him to place his feet one in front of the
other instead of side by side, that way if an IED blew low through the
Humvee Billy might lose only one foot instead of two.”
- “Billy spots Mr. Jones [Oglesby’s bodyguard] nearby, discussing
the line with several other suits. Cowboys by four? ’Boys by three? They
chuckle like men comparing the talents of a carnally shared woman, and
Billy would like to go over there and beat their faces in. He doesn’t
know why he’s so offended, but he is, maybe it’s Mr. Jones’ gun that
sets him off, something about the presumption of it, the ignorance, the
sheer fucking ego of carrying around an instrument of deadly force. Like
you know? You wanna see what deadly force can do? Bravo can show you,
Bravo does deadly like you wouldn’t believe, the kind that will break
your mind and make you wish you’d never spilled out of your mother’s
crack.”
- “Maybe it’s not as much as you were hoping for, [Norm Oglesby
says] but I think most people would agree, something is better than
nothing.”
“Something would be nice,” Dime says. “Something would be
great. But it’s”—he breaks off with a choking gasp—“it’s just, I don’t
know it’s just so sad, sir. We thought you kind of liked us.”
“But I do!” Norm cries, lurching upright in his chair. “I do like you! I think the world of you fine young men.”
Dime
clasps his hands to his heart. “See?” he gushes to Billy? “He does like
us! He likes us so much he’s going to fuck us in the face.”
- “For the past two weeks he’s been feeling so superior and smart
because of all the things he knows from the war, but forget it, they are
the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream
is the dominant force. His reality is their reality’s bitch; what they
don’t know is more powerful than all the things he knows, and yet he’s
lived what he’s lived and knows what he knows, which means what,
something terrible and possibly fatal, he suspects. To learn what you
have to learn at the war, to do what you have to do, does this make you
the enemy of all that sent you to the war? … Thank you! the nice people
call after him. Thank you for your service!
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, By Ben Fountain, HarperCollins, 2012, is available here.
Rod Davis is a literary columnist for Plaza de Armas.
