Do They Smell Blood? - Katharine Schlegel

Overall the soldiers have encountered adoring fans that rave over how much they support the soldiers. This is conveyed through the apparently patriotic words inserted throughout the novel (examples on page 38 and 45). Nearly halfway through Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Bravo squad finds themselves surrounded by elite members of society at the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game. Like everyone the soldiers have run into, these members are excited to see them, “People are pumped; proximity to Bravo jazzes them full of fizzing good spirits, even these, the high-profile and the well-to-do, they go a little out of their heads around Bravo. Is it because they smell blood?” (112). This passage brings to light the differences between perceptions of the war. By using words such as “jazzed” and “fizzing,” Fountain conveys a bubbly atmosphere with Bravo at its center. Because of their surplus, the high-profilers are not inclined to enlist out of desperation like some of the other characters in the novel. Because of this, they are detached from the war and are able to glorify it. Fountain asserts this enchantment of war, “Is it because they smell blood?” He questions what draws the upper class to the soldiers. Because the upper class is so far away from the atrocities of war, they are able to think of it as if it were a movie, or as something fictionalized. Standing next to the soldiers makes the war real for the aristocrats, but because of the enchanted view, the idea of standing with someone who killed another for the sake of freedom excites them, instead of nauseating them. 

Katharine Schlegel

Illusion of Choice (Long Halftime Walk)

Partway through Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, the Bravo company stand in the lower levels of the Cowboys stadium and meet team owner Norm Oglesby. Among the super-rich there, with being able to meet Bravo at their leisure, making him feel bitter and terrified. Billy begins to think, "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" (114). Billy begins to feel more out of place than he has since he returned to America here with these nonchalant rich people. At the same time, he wants to stay. He realizes he's stuck now in a cycle with the military, and this may be his only chance to live in the presence of luxury. As he says, he's simply a poor kid, relying on  the military to help him make ends meet, but now his choice to join has cost him his freedom. Returning to Iraq will simply make him a poorer person than he was. One can imagine he joined the military due to this lack of money, a choice he believed he made, but Billy is now realizing the choice was made for him. He uses the term ghetto to place where in the mind his fear was, connecting his fear, and fear of returning to Iraq and to be stuck returning, in order to enforce that this poverty of being deployed is a hopeless inevitability. The narrator says, then, "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." Basically, he envies that they can choose to speak of terror, from a safe distance. Now that Billy is in the military, every choice is made for him. He can stand here with these people, but he knows he can't choose to stay. Billy is going to stay poor, be sent to the direst poverty in Iraq with no guarantee he'll return, and will always live in that ghetto of the human soul, until he chooses to end it with his life or lets the illusion choose, and choose to stay in service. I believe he wishes to cry here because he knows those are his only options, and his only real choice. "So what does it mean when a good soldier feels this bad?"

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Nicole Gilmer

            In his novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain often describes the media barrage which Billy is subjected to. After a particularly tense interview in front of the Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleaders, Billy reflects that “to talk of such things [as life and death] properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer” and that “silence [is] truer to the experience” (137). This seems to be Fountain’s admission that there is nothing he can write (nor that Billy can say) to give justice to the experience he is trying to describe. Rather than focusing on creating a strong sense of empathy for Billy and Bravo Company, Fountain also tries to create a sense of disgust for the people who cannot or will not empathize with the men. Of course, the reader understands that it is appalling that these men should have to go back to Iraq after they’ve already done so much; but what Fountain also makes clear is that Americans don’t understand the kind of tragedy they all “support” so much. He describes a consumer driven culture that is interested only in the marketability of a person.

            The shop at the stadium where bomber jackets are sold for $679 is a perfect example of the way that Americans love to “support” the winners. The shop worker tells Billy and Mango that they sell about five or six jackets each game but that they sell more when the team wins (31). In the same sort of “no-expense-spared-idol-worship,” copies of Time which Bravo Company has autographed are being sold on eBay while book and movie deals are being bandied about. Billy is easy to like and speaks honestly to both the reader and the other characters in the novel, but the privileged, white Americans surrounding him are unable or unwilling to understand the realities of the war; they are more concerned with buzzwords like “nina leven” and “terror” and how they can own a piece of the tragedy. 

Pivotal Moments of Experience

By Christina Weir Thorpe

Pivotal moments define Billy Lynn’s existential crisis in Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.  These moments outline the soldier’s internal struggle to understand his soul-encompassing fears, the experience of war, and, ultimately, life’s bigger meaning.  During a press conference, reporters question Billy regarding his inspiration to valiantly act in the face of danger.  However,

Billy’s not ready for this, plus he’s having a hard time with inspired…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 (136).

For Billy, at this moment, only the truth of the “experience” matters.  And that truth could only be rendered to its occupants, those inhabitants of the “experience of battle” that are forever locked in it, changed by it.  This pivotal moment becomes their “everything.”  The world looks for the “inspired” answer, but war rarely contains inspiration.  War contains the experience of fear, of pain, of loss.  The soldier, redefined by this experience, must grapple with its influence on his identity, forever trying to comprehend and articulate its meaning.  But how does one sum the whole of life and death in mere words?  There is no short answer.  Therefore, when the world calls on the soldier to describe the sensations, the motivations, or the glory that is war, the answer lies in silence: “silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangle spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug” (137).

The Strategy (Jess Shankland)

The Strategy
by: Jess Shankland

In the chapter "Bully of the Heart" Billy is spending a couple nights back home with his family. During his stay, he learns of all the troubles his family is going through, but then reflects on his "brothers" from the military and their family histories. It's obvious that Billy and his father are not close; that his dad, Ray, is a private and distant man in the household, an "asshole" as most of the kids call him.

"Yes, family was key, Billy decided. If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way towards finding your peace, but for that, the finding, the figuring out, you needed a strategy."
And then:
"Billy thinks he sensed the fatedness of it even then – war was coming and he was bound for the war, and some occult, irresistible father-son dynamic was at work to ensure that this was so." (101)

We can see that Ray is very selfish: the affair, buying the "other" daughter a car, and paying [grand]-fatherly attention to Brian in front of Billy, shooting Billy a "look." This diverted attention cannot actually compare to the horrible things his military brothers have gone through with their families, but to Billy it is all the same. There is a lot of internal thought from Billy, and he keeps referring to a strategy needed to "live with" the family. Soldiers are taught to be strategic. And strategic people make good soldiers. So it seems it is out of desperation to escape or avoid (family, debt, jail), that one joins the military. For on page 73, it is stressed three times: "What else is there."

Take it slow, Billy

In Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, we see a young soldier making a brief return trip home from a brutal tour in Iraq before having to ship back for his victory tour. While he is on leave, it becomes clear that Billy is suffering from the effects of war. While it is common in war novels and narratives for the soldier to have a warped sense of time in the war zone, Fountain gives the perspective of a soldier returned home to a society obesessed with movement and creating new objectives. A soldier is used to being occupied with whatever he/she is tasked with by their CO or having to keep alert during wartime. The life of a soldier involves constant motion, but for different purposes than civilians. On page 86 Billy's mother and sisters try to ask what he wants to do, but he seems content with letting the morning "lazily takes its course" (86). What's interesting is how Fountain uses this seen to really show that contrast between the passage of time in civilian and military life. Billy's military life has caused him to lose track of the calendar days and made life seem to be moving faster, aging in "dog years" (86). Comparatively, this difference between civilian and military conceptions of time allows Billy to be, "if not exactly calm, then still" (86).

Billy's Innocence and the Stripping Away of it Through War

Bethany Douglas

Early in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk we learn that Billy is a virgin. This tactic incites in us the understanding that Billy portrays American innocence, a fact further exemplified by his desire for both an emotional and physical connection, "He'd like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream... and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other's brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connection because anything less is just demeaning" (71-72). The "body-soul" connection is a desire young people are supposed to obtain early on, sex just for sex is demeaning, but sex because of love is meaningful and worthy. Billy also states about his desire for the body-soul connection, "Has the war done this to him, he wonders, inspired these deeper sensitivities and yearnings of his? Or is it just because he's going on the twentieth year of his life?" (72). I would argue, within the framework of this novel, this desire comes from his understanding of what he should be as portrayed by American idealism, an ideal soldier that Billy becomes whenever he is confronted with "fans."
Furthermore, Billy's innocence is shown to be stripped away to some degree by the war during his visit home. If Billy's virginity is a representation of American innocence then Billy's attraction to his sister is a representation of his innocence being stripped away through the war. His sister Kathryn shares the most radical views (save, perhaps, for Billy) in their family about the war, and every time she discusses it with Billy he at some point thinks of his attraction to her. Most people view incest as a taboo, the fact that it even exists is largely hidden away to avoid uncomfortable conversations and thoughts. However, here Billy thinks several times of his sister as someone he's attracted to, "And today, what could be more perfect than lying in the sun, drinking beer with an extremely hot blonde in a bikini? The only problem, of course, being that the girl was his sister, but what was the harm in pretending for a few short hours?" (96). While Billy does not act on any of these feelings, their mere presence contradicts with the idealized version we hold not only for soldiers but also for brothers and young men, while Billy maintains his innocence pre-war, he becomes a contradiction to that innocence upon his return home from the war. This fact is also exemplified by Kathryn's constant discussion of the war, and she being the one Billy is attracted to, she represents his fall from innocence during, and directly because of, the war.

Dehumanization of Self by Sarah Britsch

While Billy is at home, he takes his cousin out to the park and is amazed by how energetic and innocent and entertaining he is.  In this he thinks, “So this is what they meant by the sanctity of life?” and soon concludes that “there’s real power when words attach to actual things.  Made him want to sit right down and weep as powerful as that.  He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good he’d have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all” (83).  There are two things happening in this passage.  First is the clear connection between literature and conflict.  Concepts like war and injustice can only get so far into a person’s mind without an image for the words to describe.  A person can hear about a genocide, but the feelings toward this genocide will likely never be powerful enough to make the person act unless this person sees the results personally.  While literature takes disconnected people a step closer to understanding, there is still a limit as to how far it can take readers.

The second thing is much more personally geared toward Billy.  He is in the midst of actively killing people for the sake of war when he gains full understanding of “sanctity of life,” but because he will soon be back to killing, he forces himself to push it aside, to stay slightly dehumanized and uncaring so that he can continue his job as is expected of him.  This passage may be the clearest example of how war affects its soldiers: they are forced to lose or ignore parts of themselves in order to remain desensitized.  They have to compartmentalize their empathy toward others and their value on life, or, as Billy said, “not to mentalize it at all.”  Sometimes, for a soldier, the best option is to completely forget about the sanctity of life in order to retain personal sanity.  One has to wonder, though, whether Billy will be able to meditate on this later or if, by the deployment’s end, this part of himself will be lost forever.

Enchantment and the Criminal Justice System by Deborah Rocheleau

In chapter five of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Billy draws an interesting comparison between an act of vandalism he committed—the crime for which he was forced into the military as punishment—and his “deed on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal” (Fountain 91), one of the most violent acts he performs as a soldier. Early on, we learn that Billy was forced to join the military as punishment for the destruction of his girlfriend’s ex-fiancé’s car. In an under-the-table deal, Billy is offered the military as an alternative to prison, the usual means for reforming violent individuals into upstanding citizens.  

Interestingly, in the military Billy must perform acts much more violent than the crime for which he is punished, most prominently the extremely violent “deed on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal.” However, because of the enchanted way the military and the public view violence performed by soldiers, Billy is applauded for his violent acts as a soldier as much as he is condemned for his violence as a citizen. It seems that the military, rather than reforming his violent tendencies, as prison would, instead only trains them toward more acceptable violence—that is, politically-approved violence.

In chapter five, these two acts come together for Billy in a way which undermines the “reform” he would have experienced in prison. Rather than seeing the vandalism as delinquent and the Al-Asakar Canal deed as heroic, he begins to consider both “the bravest thing he ever did” (91). In enchanting the violence of war, it seems, the military has trained Billy to reconceptualize his vandalism as transformative, a “digression” from the “futility and pointlessness” (91) that was his ordinary, pre-vandalism life. It seems that the “enchantment” of violence can work both ways, enchanting violence on a political scale while at the same time enchanting the personal violence of one citizen against another. In this way, Billy’s time in the military does not reform his violent tendencies toward more politically acceptable expressions of violence, so much as teach him—at least in this chapter—to view all violence as enchanted, regardless of its political acceptability. 

Truely American By Jacob Nolin

Billy finds himself in the company of rich people and feels out of place. They are described by Fountain as such.

"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 millionares" (114).

Here Fountain's words are able to contrast both well- off people and poor individuals. Words like "vitality", "multitude of pleasures", and "company of millionares" put these rich people at the pinnacle of society. Fountain is able to show variety between these rich people in the first line which allows him to make them feel like a varied elite group. These wealthy people could not contrast anymore than with Billy here. Fountain described him as "bitter, terrified, and "like a shabby homelesss kid." This language is straightforward in it's image, but it creates another contrast here that doesn't invole money or class as greatly.

Fountain giving Billy these thoughts shows his internal conflict. He does not see the role of a soldier as heroic or even "American", instead these people are the real Americans, the models and stars and actors who live in a paradise as opposed to the soldier who fights under the flag and is in fear of death every day. Such a contrast is powerful because it shows that even with Billy's status as a soldier he will never be as "American" as these rich people. Instead he will simply be a soldier. This is ironic because war movies depicting American soldiers as herioc are often done using actors and models who are as affluent and well off as the ones that Billy is talking to.

Meanwhile, In Billy’s Head by Abby Booher

Ben Fountain’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” provides an interesting perspective on ideas of war. While the book can look specifically through the eyes of Americans in terms of war, the novel can also describe very broad topics concerning war as well which play off the irony of the American perspectives. One idea in particular is the sensation of fear which rattles around Billy’s head. Fountain writes, “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” (p. 115). Here, the narrator focuses on how simply being afraid of fear that comes from war can be the most terrifying of all. The speaker likens it to a CD which repeats over and over again. This kind of description is not foreign to novels concerning war. Bausch’s “Peace”, for example, provides an insight to this kind of fear when one of the characters reacts to the war with nervous itch. When the sensation of fear rises within this character, he begins to itch furiously on his arm for no reason. The narrator in Fountain’s novel also notes that it is like a “form of madness”. The fear could almost drive the characters to odd behavior or even insanity. It is also interesting to note how the narrator transitions to the next paragraph in the novel, “So these are Billy’s thoughts while he makes small talk about the war” (115). While this might seem to be a minor sentence, the context gives it great meaning. After all of Billy’s horrid thoughts of fear in war, Billy’s mind returns to the present which consists of Americans lightly chatting about the very thing which could drive him mad. This almost flippant tone causes the reader to pause and notice a message the novel is trying to make in how war, through some people’s eyes, lacks weight and a real respect for its cost.

Billy Lynn and the ubiquitous, omnipotent Man

Andrew Hurst

            Near the middle of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the audience is introduced to the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Norman Oglesby. He gives a speech before the assembled media. In his speech, he criticizes Saddam Hussein’s government and rule, citing Hussein’s lavish spending at the expense of Iraq’s school system, his personal spending at the expense of Iraq’s healthcare system, his armament spending at the expense of infrastructure, and the corruption and crony politics that ran rampant throughout his government at the expense of the wealth of the people (130). He finishes the speech:

Because what is America for, if not to fight this kind of tyranny, to promote freedom and democracy and give the peoples of the world a chance to determine their own fate? This has always been America’s mission, and it’s what makes us the greatest nation on earth (131).

Obviously, this speech is saturated with irony: America’s faltering public school structure, lack of an easily understood and cheap healthcare system, crumbling infrastructure, and political corruption have been chief criticisms from the American Left and Center for the past decade and a half, if not longer. Through this irony, Fountain wishes to call his readers’ attentions to the blatant double-talk and shallowness of the sort of jingoism that numerous citizens respond to with patriotic fervor.

Moving deeper into Fountain’s message, past the surface irony, he is emphasizing, in this quotation, the ethos of American politicians and the inaction of the general public, especially given Lynn’s reaction, “If there’s a grating artificiality in the performance . . . it’s no worse than any other fixture of the public realm. Billy has noticed that audiences don’t seem to mind anyway” (131). The American public seems content throughout the novel to listen to these types of speeches and parrot buzzwords such as “freedom” or “democracy,” (the pages in which such words fall pell-mell across the book symbolize this phenomenon) so as long as, like Lynn’s own father, their intellects are affirmed: America is the greatest country in the world, America is for fighting tyranny.

Despite the obvious shallowness of these words, Fountain argues that the audience does not care to question them. In the first section of the book, there’s a very Pynchonian section that clues the reader in on the comfort that the public, including even Billy who had previously noted his place as it relates to the system of outside controls (121), feels in being a part of something, a cause, a country. Billy watches the Cowboys’ punter kick a ball, and in watching the parabolic arc, notes the “aspect of surrender, of grateful relinquishment as it yields to gravitational fate” (35) with a sense of tranquility and “relaxation of self-awareness” (36). While Fountain notes the public’s fondness for gullibility, he also mentions Billy’s sense of “intense pleasure” (35) that he gets as the ball reaches the top of its arc, signifying some anticipation at the prospect of breaking out of the fatalist parabolic structure. Perhaps Fountain has hope that politicians and people like Oglesby will no longer have a hold over the public at some point in the future.