Ben Fountain

"Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" tells the story of a young soldier spending Thanksgiving in the early years of the Iraq war with the rest of "Bravo Company" as honoured guests of the Dallas Cowboys as part of a "victory tour" to build support for the war. Billy and the Bravos have been propelled into the spotlight by a Fox News video of a firefight of the Bravos going to the rescue of their comrades that went viral because it gave Americans back home something to cheer for.

As the day goes show more on we learn about Billy through a mix of memories, reflections and slightly stunned reactions to the often overwhelming here and now. Billy Lynn is literally the heart of the book. He's nineteen going on twenty, unassuming, just coming to terms with life and what it holds for him, matured by the war in ways he's only beginning to understand and puzzled and disturbed by the ferocity with which his fellow Americans talk about the war as they thank him for his service.

This is a beautiful book. The language is rich and diverse without being pompous or self-conscious. The themes of war, loss, fear and purpose are handled with a deft, light touch that nevertheless refuses to look away or to pretend.

Billy is real and likeable. He's not a message or a symbol. He's just a guy in a shitty place trying not to screw up and hoping not to get killed today. We share Billy's memory of spending the day before Thanksgiving with his family. Being with them again after experiencing the war finally helps him understand how much he has to lose and how desperately he wants to prevent that loss. Despite this, Billy feels compelled to do what the Army requires of him and return to Iraq to complete the last eleven months of his tour.

The novel is structured so that we get to America and Americans in the context of some of their greatest institutions: Privileged Wealth, American Football, and Hollywood.

In the Dallas Cowboy's VIP suite, Billy and his fellow Bravos are brought face to face with wealthy, powerful people they would never otherwise meet. As these millionaires repeat, with apparent sincerity and sometimes zeal, the same phrases "Honour...Sacrifice...Freedom...911...So proud...These Fine Young Men...911...Finest Fighting Force in the world...Real American Hero... 911...keeping us safe." Billy experiences increasing dissonance. He would follow his sergeant through hell and would die to protect the men he serves with but he finds the behaviour of the civilians he is fighting the war for almost incomprehensible. In a chapter called "We Are All Americans Here" the reader has cause to wonder if this statement is really true and if it is, what it says about America.

American Football is used to give another way of looking at America that contrasts the joy and physicality of an informal knock-around game between the Bravos on the sacred turf and the bloated immensity of the professional game. The Bravos are shown the huge excesses of the equipment used, the pampering of the players, the crappiness of the stadium, the boredom of the game with its frequent stops for referee referrals and commercial breaks, We see the expensive fan paraphernalia that none of the bravos can afford and the elite rooms full of millionaires spending Thanksgiving schmoozing with other millionaires in clichéd VIP suits. We meet the oversized players fascinated by the firepower of automatic weapons. Finally, we meet that most American of inventions, the Cheerleaders as the Bravos take part in the absurd extravagance of the Halftime show with it not-quite-neutered sexuality and its decorative militarism.

Hollywood is pulled into the book because a producer is trying to sell a movie deal for the Bravos, based on their well-known battle in Iraq. Hollywood is used as an example of the disproportionate power of belief, the worshipping of the fake, the unwillingness to see the real because it looks too fake and the power of the millionaire asshole. Hollywood is presented as the self-serving distorting mirror America holds up to itself.

The momentum of the book is sustained by force of Billy's personality. By his questions about what everything he's seeing means. By his desperate desire to live long enough to get together with his hot, Christian cheerleader so that he won't die a virgin. By his hunger to know more, to do more to be more. By his fantasy of having wife and children and leading a quiet life one day. By his unbreakable commitment to the men he serves with.

Hanging over everything that Billy hopes for is the knowledge that, in a few hours he'll be back on base and in a couple of days, back in Iraq for the remaining eleven months of his tour.

Ben Fountain skillfully presents the world through Billy's eyes and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. The message you take from this book may well depend on the opinions you had before you started reading it. It feels real and real life is never simple and never has a single clear didactic message.

I was moved by the way he brought the soldiers to life and made me care about them. They weren't saints. They weren't even unequivocally the good guys. Yet they were doing their job as well as they could and looking after each other like family As Fountain displayed, not unkindly but with unforgiving accuracy, the civilians the Bravos met, I felt the huge gap between the lives of the people at home and the people fighting on their behalf in Iraq.

This is Ben Fountain's first novel. I hope it won't be his last.

"Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" is well suited to being an audiobook. Oliver Wyman narrates the book with great skill. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of his work.

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In a development that seems surreal given all that is said about Hollywood in this book, the novel has been made into a movie by Ang Lee that is due for release in November 2018.

You can see the movie poster and the trailer below. I think turning this book into a good movie while retaining the essence of the book is a challenge but if anyone can do it, Ang Lee can.
Billy Lynn

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUULF...] (less) show less

The soldiers of Bravo Company are on a victory tour after a nationally televised firefight in Iraq. They’re the current national heroes and special guests at the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game, where they meet not only the regular folk, but “the ballers,” the people with money and egos to match, who “if they aren’t quite as flawlessly handsome as models or movie actors, they certainly possess the vitality and style of, say, the people in a Viagra advertisement.”

Much of the show more story is through the eyes of Billy Lynn, considered the hero of the firefight at Al-Ansakar Canal. The soldiers of Bravo realize their fame is fleeting and they may not be alive much longer to enjoy it. There’s a movie deal in the works and they’re accompanied by a producer. Killers, authentic, “they are the Real. They have dealt much death and received much death.” Bravo returns to the war in two days, and “here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.”

The story takes place during the game. The decaying stadium, the hype enveloping the game, and the team itself take many hits as a stand-in for America. The actual game is boring. The coach “stalks the sidelines with the addled look of a man who can’t remember where he parked his car.” The fans have “a kind of clinical, gorillas-in-the-mist absorption,” “fogged in by the general bewilderment of life.”

It all seems false to Billy Lynn, who considers himself a “normal, frustrated ADD grunt whose inner life is mostly overcooked sex fantasies.” He thinks maybe “the realest things in the world these days are the things in his head.” Observations and truths are couched in humor, much as Bravo Company uses humor to survive. “Dude, maybe they don’t hate our freedoms, maybe they hate our fat!”

This is a searing portrait of America at war. Maybe the true value of this book is that it makes you want to not be a hypocritical asshole. show less

The American War Fantasy

Published in 2012 Ben Fountain's award-winning debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk paints a wildly satirical picture of America at war, in this case the Iraq War. It's worth reading now when we find ourselves in a period of rampant and perilous nationalism. Powerful ideas of exceptionalism, of military strength, of unilateralism, of being the chosen ones liberally laced with fear and xenophobia, these heady ideas all thriving today can lead to dangerous and show more deadly missteps, as they did in Iraq, and before that Vietnam.

Succinctly, Bravo Company engages in a brief firefight that Fox News captures on film and that then spreads like wildfire. The soldiers of Bravo find themselves declared national heroes and their short encounter dubbed "The Battle of Al-Ansakar Canal." They are brought home to be fêted in overblown American fashion, as stars of the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day halftime show. The novel focuses on nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn's reactions to the firefight and the American celebration of himself and his comrades.

Depending on your background and political viewpoint, different aspects of Fountain's fierce novel will resonate more with you than it will with others. Veterans will probably relate to most of Bravo Company's experiences. Business types might enjoy the insane path of the movie producer's negotiations to make a film about Bravo's skirmish for live, and resurrect his own career. Readers who like sharp writing will revel in Fountain's wicked way with scenes.

However, what most fascinates and constitutes the merit of the book is Fountain's piercing view of American popular culture, in particular how we cherish and need to reaffirm in our own minds our righteous role in the world. He focuses on this repeatedly until it strikes you as almost absurd, until it rings completely hollow and ultimately sounds like desperation. Because underneath all the protestations of the justice of deposing a dictator and establishing a democracy, lingering in the unconscious of the most avid drum beaters, is the belief (or suspicion in the most invested): we made a terrible and costly mistake invading Iraq. Here's the idea expressed late in the story in the most stark terms:

"Being honored feels a lot like work and it's worse out there on the aisle, sitting point for the Bravo-citizen interface. Yes sir, thank you sir. Yes ma'am, having a great time, absolutely. Billy passes programs down the row for everybody to autograph and has to make conversation while they come back. It's getting better, don't you think? It was worth it, don't you think? We had to do it, don't you think? He wishes that just once somebody would call him baby-killer, but this doesn't seem to occur to them, that babies have been killed. Instead they talk about democracy, development, dubya em dees. They want so badly to believe, he'll give them that much, they are as fervent as children insisting Santa Claus is real because once you stop believing, well, what then, maybe he doesn't come anymore?"

The skin in the game for those greeting the Bravos, and for just about everybody in the country, is American exceptionalism, the justice of the effort, born of the belief that we alone have the answer. And you wonder, what if people had real skin in the game, the same as was had in Vietnam? That is the universal draft (executed tighter than in the Vietnam era) instead of a paid military. That and clear-eyed acceptance of what really happened in Vietnam? Then would those in power be as fast to march off to war? Further, what of today, when bullying and aggression seem to be the approaches most favored by our president and his sycophants? show less

This novel is to the Iraq/Afghanistan generation as Catch 22 was to WW II and Vietnam. Billy Lynn, conscripted by a mean judge into jail or the service at age 19, performs a dramatic rescue during a firefight in Iraq. His Bravo Company, minus the dead, are brought back to the US for a VICTORY TOUR culminating in a halftime appearance at Dallas Stadium for Thanksgiving. It's so ridiculous, even to the naïve Billy, that all the guys get shitfaced and stoned as quickly as possible. And Billy's show more on track to lose his virginity to a Dallas cheerleader. And to perform with Beyoncé at halftime. And then to be shipped back to Iraq.

The hypocrisy, expressed in perfect word clouds, is strong in this one. Laughter and tears are very close. This novel is a triumph that I hope will not be ruined by the upcoming film. YOU MUST READ THIS FIRST. show less