Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“You were at the White House,” one man queries him.

“That’s right.”

“You met George and Laura?” the man’s wife says hopefully.

“Well, we met the president and Cheney.”

“That must have been such a thrill!”

“It was,” Billy says agreeably.

“What did yall talk about?”

Billy laughs. “I don’t remember!” And it’s true, he doesn’t. There was a certain amount of joking around, good-natured guy stuff. Lots of smiles, lots of stage-managed posing for pictures. At some point Billy realized he was expecting the president to act, well, embarrassed? Ashamed? For how fucked up everything obviously was. But the commander in chief seemed well pleased with the state of things.

“You know,” the woman says, leaning close like she’s divulging privileged information, “we sort of claim George and Laura as our own. They’re moving back to Dallas when their time in Washington is up.”

“Ah.”

“We were at the White House a couple of weeks ago,” the man says, “they had a state dinner for Prince Charles and Camilla. Listen, those royals are just the finest people, no pretensions whatsoever. You can talk to Prince Charles about anything.”

Billy nods. There’s a silence. Just in time he asks, “What did you talk about?”

“Hunting,” the man answers. “He’s a bird man like me. Grouse and pheasant, mostly.”

Several tanned, glamorous couples have engaged Major Mac in intense conversation. The major nods, frowns, purses his lips — he does an expert mime of undivided attention. Dime and Albert have been absorbed into Norm’s entourage, and Billy finds it reassuring, this proof that Dime’s stuff is so strong that it flies even at these lofty altitudes. Americans, he says to himself, gazing around the room. We are all Americans here —it’s like suddenly becoming aware of your tongue inside your mouth, an issue where there was none before. But they are different, these Americans. They are the ballers. They dress well, they practice the most advanced hygienes, they are conversant in the world of complex investments and fairly hum with the pleasures of good living — gourmet meals, fine wines, skill at games and sports, a working knowledge of the capitals of Europe. 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. Special time with Bravo is just one of the multitude of pleasures available to them, and thinking about it makes Billy somewhat bitter. It’s not that he’s jealous so much as profoundly terrified. Dread of returning to Iraq equals the direst poverty, and that’s how he feels right now, poor, like a shabby homeless kid suddenly thrust into the company of millionaires. Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars. This is what he truly envies of these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and cry.

I’m a good soldier, he tells himself, aren’t I a good soldier? So what does it mean when a good soldier feels this bad?

Don’t be scared, Shroom said. Because you’re going to be scared. So when you start to get scared, don’t be scared. Billy has thought about this a lot, not just the Zen teaser of it but what exactly does it mean to be scared out of your mind. Shroom, again: Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and as every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. Spend any amount of time in the realms of deadly force and you will witness certain of its fraught and terrible forms. Billy has seen men shrieking with the burden of it, others can’t stop cursing, still others lose their powers of speech altogether. Loss of sphincter or bladder control, classic. Giggling, weeping, trembling, numbing out, classic. One day he saw an officer roll under his Humvee during a rocket attack, then flatly refuse to come out when it was over. Or Captain Tripp, a pretty good man in the clutch, but when they’re really getting whacked his brow flaps up and down like a loose tarp in a high wind. His soldiers might feel embarrassed for him, but no one actually thinks the worse of him for it, for this is pure motor reflex, the body rebels. Certain combat-stress reactions are coded in the genes just as surely as cowlicks or flat feet, while for a golden few fear seems not to register at all. Sergeant Dime, for example, an awesome soldier who Billy has seen walking around calmly eating Skittles while mortars rained down mere meters away. Or a man will be fearless one day and freak the next, as fickle and spooky as that, as pointless, as dumb. Works on your mind, all that. The randomness. He gets so tired of living with the daily beat-down of it, not just the normal animal fear of pain and death but the uniquely human fear of fear itself like a CD stuck on skip-repeat, an ever-narrowing self-referential loop that may well be a form of madness. Thus all our other emotions evolved as coping mechanisms for the purpose of possibly keeping us sane? And so you start to sense the humanity even in feelings of hate. Sometimes your body feels dead with weariness of it, other times it’s like a migraine you think you can reason with, you bend your mind to the pain, analyze it, break it down into ions and atoms, go deeper and deeper into the theory of it until the pain dissolves in a flatus of logic, and yet after all that your head still hurts.

So these are Billy’s thoughts while he makes small talk about the war. He tries to keep it low-key, but people steer the conversation toward drama and passion. They just assume if you’re a Bravo you’re here to talk about the war, because, well, if Barry Bonds were here they’d talk about baseball. Don’t you think… Wouldn’t you agree… You have to admit… Here at home the war is a problem to be solved with correct thinking and proper resource allocation, while the drama and passion arise from the terrorists’ goal of taking over the world. Ire way of life. Ire values. Ire Christian values. Billy can feel his head emptying out.

“Excuse me,” a Cowboys executive interrupts, “our soldier’s looking a little dry there. How about a refill?”

Billy rattles the ice in his cup. “Thank you, sir. Another Coke would be nice.”

“Come on. Excuse us, folks.” The executive rudders him by the elbow toward the bar, a take-charge guy. It is apparently the Cowboys’ corporate culture that all executives must resemble sales managers at a Ford dealership, and this one — he introduces himself, Bill Jones — fits the mold. Plain, balding, full in the face, with a second-trimester heft to his middle, yet he radiates a vibe that Billy feels at once, a good working tool of controlled aggression. A rubbery impatience seems to flow through all his movements.

“Enjoying yourself?”

“Yes sir.”

Mr. Jones laughs. “You looked like you could use a change of scenery back there.”

Billy smiles, shrugs. “They’re nice people.”

Mr. Jones laughs again, rather more harshly this time. “Yes indeed, they certainly are. And they’re thrilled to meet you fellas. You’re an impressive group.”

“Thank you.” Billy notices a bulge in the vicinity of Mr. Jones’s armpit. He’s packing. Billy resists a brief but powerful urge to smash Mr. Jones’s esophagus into the back of his neck and disarm him, just for safety’s sake.

“You won’t find many dissenters in this group. They’re strong for the war, strong for America. And not at all shy about speaking their minds.”