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?"