Iraq war heroes, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and Hollywood all meet in this funny new anti-war novel

A review of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Tending to squeamishness as I do, I don’t often read novels about war unless they’re written with a generous dose of humor. Oh, I’ll admit to having read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and a few other classics I remember less vividly, but that was all long ago. More recently, I’ve read and reviewed only Kill Anything That Moves, by Nick Turse, and The Outpost, by Jake Tapper. The war novels I truly cherish and have even been known to re-read are . . . well, anti-war novels, not to put too fine an edge on it. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Richard Hooker’s MASH, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 are all dead serious, of course, but they’re also hilarious from time to time (and Catch-22 nearly nonstop so). I generally find it difficult to deal with the grim side of war without a little help.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk fits very neatly into this latter category. It’s a funny book, beautifully written, and I suspect it conveys about as well as any humorless treatment a sense of the war in Iraq from the perspective of the Americans who fought it face to face with insurgents. It was no surprise to me when I learned after finishing the book that it had won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction. It’s that good.

Billy Lynn is a certified, true-blue, red-blooded American hero, one of eight surviving soldiers in a ten-man squad that engaged a large band of Iraqi insurgents in a deadly firefight. One of the two lifers in the squad, a sergeant Billy idolized, was shot, then grabbed and dragged away by two insurgents. Witnessing this terrible scene, Billy instantly, unthinkingly, leapt into the line of fire, shot and killed the sergeant’s two captors while dodging a barrage of bullets, and then proceeded to kill many of the other enemy fighters with one hand while he tended to the gravely wounded man with his other, finally cradling him in his lap as he died.

Clearly, events like this, though uncommon, were not unheard-of in the Iraq war — but this show of heroism was unique: it was captured on video by a Fox News camera team embedded with a neighboring squad and quickly found its way onto every TV, computer, tablet, and smartphone in America. Suddenly, Billy and his squad — erroneously dubbed “Bravo Squad” by reporters — are national heroes. Two, including Billy, received Silver Stars (though Billy’s commanding officer had recommended him for the Medal of Honor). Donald Rumsfeld’s Army, never slow to notice the possibility of a PR coup, yanks the squad out of Iraq and puts them on a multi-city “Victory Tour” all across the United States. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk tells the tale of the last couple of days of the Bravos’ tour, as they rush through a series of grueling appearances on Thanksgiving Day — prior to returning to Iraq to complete the eleven months left on their tours of duty.

Much of the story revolves around Billy’s interaction with the folks at home, and here’s where Ben Fountain shows his stuff and lays bare his feelings: “All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms. Billy himself never noticed how fake it all is until he’d done time in a combat zone.”

Billy is nineteen years old, a native of small-town Stovall, Texas, and the rest of the Bravos hail from other towns throughout the broad sweep of the American South, from North Carolina to Arizona. They’re white, black, and brown. They’re real.

Ben Fountain has written one previous novel and a slew of short stories and nonfiction pieces for a long list of prestigious publications. He has won an arm’s length of awards for his literary work.

The ugly U.S. war with Iran, past, present, and future

A review of The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran, by David Crist

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

If you were among those who sighed with relief when Barack Obama was reelected because you’d been concerned that a Republican administration would invade Iran, David Crist has news for you. In fact, The Twilight War is full of surprises, even for one who stays relatively well informed about world affairs. The underlying message — the meta-message, if you’ll permit that conceit — is that what we normally consume on a daily basis as “news” is an awkward mixture of critical opinion, wishful thinking, rumor, partisan posturing, self-serving news leaks, and a smattering of hard information.

When it comes to Iran, the purveyors of news have done an especially poor job of keeping us informed. As David Crist makes clear in this illuminating report on the three decades of conflict, tension, miscalculation, and profound misunderstanding that have characterized our two countries’ relationship, we have indeed engaged in what can only be described as war for several extended periods. And when I say war, I mean soldiers, sailors, and air force pilots shooting at one another, laying mines, launching missiles at ships and ground facilities, and generally forcing one or both of the two governments to decide between escalation and retreat. There was even one heart-stopping incident during the Reagan Administration when a rogue, high-ranking U.S. Admiral conspired with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Iran with massive force — and, apparently, was ordered to pull back from the brink largely because the Administration was consumed with covering up the President’s active role in the Iran-Contra affair.

The 2004 Presidential election campaign brought into the spotlight the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been photographed shaking hands with Saddam. Then we learned, some of us for the first time, that the U.S. had supplied weapons and munitions to Iraq. However, what went largely unreported was the extent to which the U.S. military built up its forces in the Persian Gulf to prevent Iran from flanking Iraq or widening the war to the Gulf Arab states, provided combat intelligence that helped Iraq turn back Iranian advances, and even intervened with force on Iraq’s side from time to time.

It was this history — combined with an understanding of the neoconservative design on the region — that led the Iranian leadership to conclude in 2003 that the U.S. invasion of Iraq presaged an imminent attack on Iran itself. The Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions were so frightened of this prospect that they used every backchannel available to them to attempt to get the U.S. to the negotiating table, where they were prepared to arrive at a grand solution to the differences between the two countries. Are you surprised to learn that the Bush Administration flatly rejected the overtures?

In other words, this has been a nail-biting relationship. Even worse, the outlook today doesn’t look any brighter than it ever has.

Author David Crist is a military historian for the U.S. Government, a reserve Marine Corps colonel, and the son of one of the early four-star commanders of CENTCOM, which was created in the 1980s to coordinate U.S. military affairs involving Iran and the Middle East. Given this pedigree, it’s not unfair to wonder whether Crist himself is guilty of some of the same sins I attributed earlier to the news media. Clearly, he’s extremely well informed and had access to military and government archives that  might well be closed to other writers. However, a little poking around on the Web reveals that Crist got at least a few of his facts wrong, and in some places his interpretation of events has clearly been colored by his official associations.

The Twilight War is an especially dense work. The hardcover edition runs to 656 pages, but it reads as though it’s a thousand, largely because Crist (military historian to the core) seems to include a capsule biography of every other officer and combatant engaged in every firefight he reports. Like the epic dramas of Cecil B. DeMille, The Twilight War has a cast of thousands. All in all though, this is a revealing and important book, well worth reading, even if that means slogging through the mud.

Getting to the bottom of the conflict between the U.S. and Al Qaeda

A review of The Longest War: Inside the Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda, by Peter L. Bergen

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

If you’ve been an avid follower of the news about the “war on terror” and the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there’s likely to be relatively little in this book that you don’t already know. What sets it apart, though, is that it presents the story of these closely related subjects from both sides, Al Qaeda’s as well as the U.S.’s, and it brings to the table the perspective of a genuinely knowledgeable journalist and not a participant with obvious self-interest at stake.

The Longest War is an able, one-volume history of the fateful two-decade interaction between Osama bin Laden and his followers with three successive U.S. Administrations. The author, Peter Bergen, is an award-winning journalist who in 1997 produced for CNN the first interview with Osama bin Laden and has been following the story ever since. Perhaps more than any other Westerner, Bergen is the best-qualified person to have written this book at this time.

What emerges from a careful reading of The Longest War is that the U.S. government under both Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr. did a truly execrable job of confronting the challenge raised by Al Qaeda. The Bush Administration’s performance was especially shameful: grounded in a stubborn and irrelevant ideology and managed in an abysmally ineffective manner, the Administration seems to have made a tragically wrong decision at virtually every critical juncture during its eight years in office. First, soon after taking office, by ignoring repeated and passionate pleas from knowledgeable insiders to review the evidence that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack on the U.S. Then, responding to 9/11, deciding that an air war in Afghanistan could destroy Al Qaeda and capture Bin Laden, and quickly ending the effort when it inevitably failed. Later, launching a preemptive war on the grounds that the greatest problem was Iraq and not Al Qaeda . . . ensuring years of civil war there by disbanding the Iraqi Army, pursuing mindless de-Baathification, and imposing on U.S. forces in the field a strategy that ensured they could never keep the peace . . . and pursuing a counterproductive alliance with Pakistan’s Musharraf regime that only strengthened the hand of the extremists and ensured them safe harbor across the border from Afghanistan.

The jury is still out on the Obama Administration’s actions to date.

ASIN: B003WEAI4Y

ISBN-10: 0743278933

ISBN-13: 978-0743278935

Bush II redux: Would you believe things were even worse than you thought they were?

Thoughts on reading The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda, by Peter Bergen

The Longest War is a slow read, because I find myself glowering, grumbling, and occasionally shrieking as I come across passage after passage that reveals the utter incompetence and willful ignorance of George W. Bush and his cronies in the run-up to 9/11, the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their continuing failure to understand the most basic realities about Al-Qaeda as the years went by.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve read a fair amount about the history of Al-Qaeda, U.S. counter-terrorist efforts over the past two decades, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as viewed both from Washington, DC, and from the field. I don’t claim any expertise, but I do think it’s fair to say that I know considerably more than the average guy on the street. And yet I find Peter Bergen’s history of the now two-decade war between Al-Qaeda and the United States to consistently unsettling and occasionally shocking.

For example, I knew that some of the captives at Guantanamo were very likely innocent of terrorism. What I didn’t know, however, was that “only some 5 percent of all the detainees held [there] were ever apprehended by U.S. forces to begin with. Why is that? Almost all of the prisoners there were turned over to American forces by foreigners, some with an ax to grind, or more often for a hefty bounty or reward. After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, a reward of five thousand dollars or more was given to Pakistanis and Afghans for each detainee turned over. While rewards can be a valuable law enforcement tool, they have never in the past absolved law enforcement authorities of corroborating the information that motivated the reward. But the U.S. military accepted the uncorroborated allegations.”

I wonder if this information was what Donald Rumsfeld meant when he spoke of “what we didn’t know we didn’t know.” But I doubt it.

From the stubborn refusal of Condoleeza Rice even to discuss the threat from Al-Qaeda until just days before 9/11 . . . to Dick Cheney and George Bush’s insistence that the “intelligence” they received from that proven liar and crook, Ahmad Chalabi, was more credible than reports from their own CIA . . . to the spectacularly obtuse refusal of the Bush White House and the Pentagon alike to send even four or five hundred more troops to close off Osama bin Laden’s escape routes from Tora Bora . . . the whole horrific misadventure was without any question the most dramatic example of incompetence in the conduct of international affairs in all of American history.

And to think that our federal government is now increasingly falling under the sway of people whose only criticism of George W. Bush appears to be that he spent too much money!

Grrrrrrrr.