Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“It’s too hot for sports.”

What do you do during your downtime, for fun?

MASTURBATE!!! they all shriek, or would, except Dime would slowly kill them one by one. “The Army’s real good at task saturation,” he says, “so we don’t have a whole lot of downtime. Most days we’re putting in twelve, fourteen hours, lots of days more than that. But when we do get some kick-back, I don’t know. Guys, what is it we do for fun?”

Play video games.

Lift weights.

Buy stuff at the PX.

“I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women,” Crack says in a lumbering German accent. The room freezes, then exhales a laugh when he adds, “That’s from Conan . I just always wanted to say that.”

Billy and his cheerleader continue their face work — glances, smiles, brow-scrunching mugs, then this amazing soulful stare that lasts for several seconds. He feels strangely porous, as if his vital organs have turned into Nerf balls.

What was it like meeting the president?

“Oh the president,” Dime enthuses, “what a totally charming guy!” The rest of the Bravos strain for studiously blank expressions, as Dime’s loathing for the Yale brat — his words — is well-known within the platoon. When their deployment began, Dime soaped “Bush’s Bitch” on the front passenger door of his Humvee with an arrow shooting up to the window, where he, Dime, usually sat, but the Lt. finally noticed and made him wash it off. “He made us feel incredibly welcome and relaxed, like, say, if you went down to your local Chase branch to get a car loan, he’s the nicest banker you’d ever hope to meet. He’s friendly, easy to talk to, you could sit down and have a beer with this guy. Except, hunh, I guess he doesn’t drink anymore, does he.”

This evokes a few sniggers from the medias, a few hostile stares, but mostly it’s business as usual.

What’s the food like over there? Do you have Internet? Cell service? Can you get any sports channels? The Bravos have this much in common with POWs, they are asked the same questions over and over. Someone asks about the day-to-day challenges of life in Iraq. Crack tells them about the camel spiders, A-bort talks about the horrible biting fleas, then Lodis gets off a free-associative riff about his skin problems, “how my skin dry out and get all crack and ashy, my boy Day always on me about moisturizer an’ I’m like snap, den gimme somma dat Jergens, dawg!” This goes on for a while.

Would any of you say you’re religious?

“Each of us in our own way.” Dime.

Have you become more so in your time over there?

“Well, you can’t see some of the things we’ve seen and not think about the big questions. Life, death, what it all might mean.”

We keep hearing they’re going to make a movie about you. What’s up with that?

“Yeah, right, the movie. Let me just say, we call Iraq the abnormal normal, ’cause over there the weirdest stuff is just everyday life. But based on what we know of Hollywood so far, that might be the one place that out-abnormals Iraq.”

Laughs. Big laugh. Albert shoots them the high sign without looking up from the BlackBerry. Please, God, Billy prays, do not let it be Swank. Then a reporter asks what “inspired” Bravo to do what it did that fateful day at the Al-Ansakar Canal. Everyone looks to Dime, and Dime looks to Billy, and all eyes follow Dime’s.

“Specialist Lynn was the first to recognize what was happening out there, and he was the first to react. So I think he’s the appropriate one to answer your question.”

Oh for the fuck of shit. Billy’s not ready for this, plus he’s having a hard time with inspired . Inspired? This seems like a prissy way to put it, but he tries, he’s anxious to answer properly, to correctly or even approximately describe the experience of the battle, which was, in short, everything. The world happened that day, and he’s beginning to understand he will spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out.

Everyone’s staring, waiting. He starts talking just before the silence gets weird. “Well, ah”—he clears his throat—“to tell you the honest truth, I don’t remember all that much about it. It’s like I saw Shroo— Sergeant Breem, and, ah, just seeing him there, basically at the mercy of the insurgents, I don’t know, it was pretty clear we had to do something. We all know what they do to their prisoners, you can go into any street market over there and buy these videos of what they do. So I guess that was on my mind, in the back of my mind, not like I clearly had a conscious thought about it. There wasn’t much time to think about anything, really. I guess my training just kicked in.”

He feels like he talked too long, but at least it’s done. People are nodding, their faces seem sympathetic, so maybe he didn’t sound too much like an idiot. But they are coming at him again.

You were the first person to reach Sergeant Breem?

“Yes. Yes sir.” Billy feels his pulse starting to shred.

What did you do when you got to him?

“Returned fire and rendered aid.”

He was still alive when you got to him?

“He was still alive.”

The insurgents who were dragging him away, where were they?

“Well.” He glances to the side, coughs. “On the ground.”

They were dead?

“That was my impression.”

The medias laugh. Billy hadn’t meant to be funny, but he sort of sees the humor in it.

You shot them?

“Well, I had engaged those targets in route. There were several exchanges of fire. They basically dropped Sergeant Breem so they could engage, and we exchanged fire.”

So you shot them.

A rank nausea is spreading out from his armpits. “I can’t say that for sure. There was a lot of fire coming from a lot of different directions. It was a pretty crazy time.” Billy pauses, gathers himself; the words take so much effort. “I mean, look, it’s fine with me if I did shoot them—”

He means to say more, but the room erupts in thunderous applause. Billy is stunned, then worried that they have missed the point, then he’s sure they’ve missed the point but is too unconfident of his communication skills to try to force a clarification down their throats. They’re happy, so he will leave it at that. The flash cameras are really going now, and like so much of his nineteen years’ experience of life it has become mainly something to get through, then the applause dies down and he’s asked if he’ll be thinking of his friend Sergeant Breem during the playing of the national anthem today, and he says yes just to keep it upbeat and on track, Yes, I sure will, which sounds obscene to his ears, and he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody’s always talking about. They want it to be easy and it’s just not going to be.

“I’m sure we’ll all be thinking of him,” he adds, a final dollop on this big steaming turd of sentiment. Bitch of it is, he will be thinking of Shroom. And he loves the national anthem as much as anybody.

Who’s going to win today?

“Cowboys!” yells Sykes, and the cheerleaders shout their approval, and with his maestro’s feel for the ripeness of things, Norm stands and brings the press conference to a close.