http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/veteran-reports-of-recruitment-tricks-and-trauma-m/nWxRF/

Veteran: Reports of recruitment tricks and trauma misleading

By Chris Hernandez

Two years ago I attended a presentation by a woman who advocates “selective conscientious objector” status. In other words, she believes service members should be able to say, “I’ll go to war in Afghanistan because it’s moral, but I won’t go to Iraq because it’s immoral.”

The woman, a former college professor, gave an interesting speech. She showed a good grasp of the difficulties we faced in Iraq, and gave solid reasons why troops could morally object to a specific war. I had initially been against her proposal, but once she explained it I wasn’t opposed.

Then the question-and-answer session began. An audience member asked, “Why should any of these troops be conscientious objectors? They all volunteered. The draft ended decades ago.”

The woman’s answer was like nails on chalkboard. “Well, there still is a draft. There’s the poverty draft, where the military sends poor kids to war. And the stop-loss draft. And there’s also,” she said, just before plunging a knife directly into my gut, “the National Guard draft. Those people are supposed to be helping out during hurricanes and tornadoes, they don’t join the military to go to war.”

At that point my wife had to calm me down. I’m a 17-year National Guard soldier and served six years in the Marine Corps Reserve before that. I voluntarily went to Iraq in 2005 and volunteered for Afghanistan in 2008. I went to war, twice, with many thousands of National Guardsmen and never heard even one say, “We’re not supposed to go to war.”

I met her outside and argued against her depiction of our service as a draft. It’s not only poor kids in the military, and the possibility of being stop-lossed — having one’s term of service involuntarily extended — is spelled out in the contract when we join. Calling anyone’s service today a “draft” is at best ignorance, at worst an outright lie.

Specifically though, I wanted to argue with her about the alleged National Guard draft. We in the Guard are volunteers just like all other soldiers. And the Guard has almost all the backup combat arms units, which aren’t very effective at fighting natural disasters. No matter how many rounds they fire at a hurricane, tanks and artillery can’t stop it.

The woman insisted that people who join the Guard don’t want to go to war. Several other audience members joined in on her side. Eventually I found myself in a circle of about eight people, none of whom had ever served in the Guard (only one said he had served in the military, but claimed to have been a Navy SEAL, so take that for what it’s worth). All of them insisted to me, the only National Guard war veteran among them, that people join the Guard so they won’t go to war. And gosh darn it, didn’t I realize they were trying to help me, trying to make sure I didn’t get sent to war again?

In the years since that depressing, frustrating conversation, I’ve heard many comments from people who seem to have similar thoughts about us. We’re poor minorities who joined the military because we had no other options. We couldn’t find a job in this economy. The Army tricked us into going to Iraq. We didn’t want to be there.

Last year, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” was published. This novel about soldiers serving in Iraq, written by someone who never served in the military, became an award-winning best-seller. All the soldiers in the book — every one — come from tragic backgrounds. The author even uses the phrase “bottom third percentile” to describe them.

Recent media stories about veterans overwhelmingly focus on two things: post-traumatic stress syndrome and suicides. Both are serious problems and legitimate concerns. But the constant stories about those two subjects completely overshadow stories about successful veterans, and hide the fact that the vast majority of us aren’t suffering any ill effects from our wartime service. The public might be forgiven for thinking we’re all traumatized to the point of suicide by the wars. Newspapers and television constantly remind them that we’re damaged, broken, desperate for any way to stop the suffering. We’re victims, after all.

A few months ago filmmaker Michael Moore wrote, “I understand why so many (troops) enlisted after 9/11. Sadly, many of them were then trapped and sent off to invade Iraq. I felt for all of them. I understood those who joined because of a lousy economy.”

Us poor, pitiful saps. We mass of desperate, victimized children, unable to do anything worthwhile with our lives, were trapped by the military and sent to war against our will. Oh, the tragedy.

Of all the misconceptions surrounding the Iraq War, none is more frustrating to me than the “soldiers are victims” myth. It’s a lie I want to dispel, right now. The American public should make no mistake about this: We chose this fight. We chose this war. We’re responsible for putting ourselves there.

Some people will undoubtedly disagree with this. Someone will bring up their friend who joined the military just for college money, or a cousin who only wanted to be a mechanic, or someone who was “tricked” by their recruiter and never expected to go to war. Simply put, those stories mean nothing. We joined the military as free men and women. We wore camouflage and helmets in training. We fired rifles and machine guns. We threw grenades. We trained with bayonets. We knew we would do those things when we joined. We didn’t suddenly discover, to our horror, that we had joined a warfighting organization. Volunteering for an organization dedicated to fighting wars, and then complaining about being sent to war, is either moronic or cowardly or both. Those opinions are worthless to me.

My true feeling about the wars, which I don’t always express, is this: I can’t imagine having missed them. My life would have been diminished without them. The IED close calls, bullets that almost hit, supercharged radio calls of troops in a firefight, sudden orange flashes and shocks of adrenaline that meant an explosion had missed us, mind-crushing responsibility for the lives of others, all these things enriched my life.

When I tell people an Iraq or Afghanistan war story, the reaction I usually get is, “It must have been horrible to experience that.” Yes, sometimes it was. But missing those experiences would have been worse. Never leaving the wire with a group of men who would rather die than let each other down would have been worse. Never feeling a survivor’s adrenaline rush would have been worse. Never defending my values and country with my life would have been worse. I’m proud I did those things. I’m happy I was in the wars. Sometimes I take in the complicated stresses of marriage, children, finances and work, and long for the simple stress of avoiding bullets. Non-veterans probably won’t appreciate the beautiful purity of having life’s myriad worries reduced to just three: trying to kill the enemy, trying not to get killed, and trying to defend your brothers.

The public is constantly reminded of how much we veterans are suffering for our service. I’m here to remind the public of a counterpoint. We benefited from our service, and not just financially. We learned important lessons about the country, the world, our fellow soldiers, and most importantly, ourselves. We know what we’re capable of. We know some things are worth risking your life to defend, and we backed our words with action.

Nobody needs to pity us for that.

Note added 3/28/13: In the essay published by the Statesman there were several minor mistakes that I missed when I submitted it. When I reposted it here I first decided to leave all the mistakes in, but they’ve been bothering me so much I had to correct them. I figured the Statesman would have edited them out, but was surprised to see they left my essay exactly as screwed up as I wrote it. Lesson learned, if any more newspapers want to print my stuff I need to make sure and get it edited myself.

I did my best to be openminded as I read it. I was told that I would probably feel differently about the book after I read it. So I finished it, and reached some conclusions:

First, nothing in the book violates the laws of physics. That’s good. Just about everything in the story [infantry sergeant pins a private to the wall and kisses him lovingly on the mouth after a firefight/Billy almost has sex with a Cowboys cheerleader in the stadium during the game/stadium cops treat the soldiers like crap/fans make fun of the troops and nearly provoke a fight/troops are forced to participate in the Destiny’s Child halftime show – and get all freaked out from PTSD!] is severely unrealistic, but, I suppose, not impossible.

Second, I was wrong when I said the soldiers were portrayed as morons. They’re not – exactly – morons. Losers with no self control is a better description.

Please keep in mind that none of what follows is a criticism of Fountain’s writing. The man is a good writer, and his nearly twenty years of dedication and perseverance show. Despite the fact that I had to hold my nose at the subject matter, I actually enjoyed parts of it and finished it in about a day and a half. I even laughed out loud at one line of dialogue where the squad leader, Sergeant Dime, messes with a Hispanic soldier about the Battle of the Alamo.

Unfortunately, other than that and a few other lines, Fountain displays almost no understanding of our troops. I was told by more than one reviewer that Fountain shows the troops to be intelligent and fully aware of their situation; unfortunately, this partial list of incidents/descriptions seems to refute that.

-Two soldiers get into a wrestling match on the floor of a gift shop, in their dress uniforms
-Two soldiers get high on marijuana with a waiter at the football stadium just before making a public appearance at the game
- A soldier tells his mother to buy a $100,000 vehicle because he might be part of a movie deal (and of course she buys it, because she’s a dumbass too)
- The entire squad runs around an end zone throwing passes and tackling each other, without permission from the stadium personnel, in their dress uniforms
- The entire squad gets into a fistfight with a crew of roadies in front of 70,000 people, again in their dress uniforms
- A soldier chokes out a fan in front of thousands of people in the bleachers
- A soldier gets high on Valium and sings out loud to passing strangers (in his dress uniform, in the stadium)

And so on. I may be the only person who feels this way, but if I saw a group of soldiers acting like that I would be embarrassed for the Army.

On the other hand, I guess when you assume all soldiers come from the lowest rung of society, you expect or forgive moronic behavior. Once again, I was told that Fountain did not describe soldiers as being low class losers. Then I ran across this passage, describing the backgrounds of soldiers in Billy Lynn’s squad:

“On Holliday’s last visit home before shipping out, his brother told him, I hope you f**king die in Iraq. When Mango was fifteen his father cracked his skull with a wrench, and Mrs. Mango’s comment was, So maybe now you’ll stop pissing your father off. Dime’s grandfather and one of his uncles were suicides. Lake’s mother was an OxyContin addict who’d done time, his father a dealer who ditto. When Crack was eleven years old his mother ran off with the assistant pastor of their church. Shroom, he barely had a family. A-bort’s father had been the deadbeat poster dad for the state of Louisiana, and Syke’s father and brothers blew up their house cooking meth.”

As I mentioned in my previous post about this book, Fountain said, “I don’t doubt that there are plenty of current and former soldiers who’ve read a couple of pages and chucked it aside in disgust or boredom.” When I read the passage about the soldiers’ backgrounds, coming soon after Billy Lynn’s “Go to prison or join the Army” story, I almost threw the book aside in disgust. If I needed confirmation that Fountain portrayed soldiers as the “bottom third percentile” (he does in fact use that line toward the end of the book), I believe I’ve found it. And it is an insult.

Before anyone says it; yes, there are many soldiers who come from rough backgrounds. But it’s not all of us. There are actually people in the military from wealthy families, who have no criminal background, who didn’t grow up around violence, who had every opportunity in the world to do what they wanted and chose to serve. The military is a true melting pot. An honest portrayal of soldiers would show the blend of backgrounds, not highlight only those with tragic childhoods. I’m sure Fountain would scoff at a fictional squad of soldiers who are all saints determined to enter the priesthood, but his version of our troops is just the other side of that same unrealistic coin.

My instinct tells me that Fountain did in fact speak to a few soldiers about the Army and Iraq, and learned a few bits and pieces of truth from them. But when they left information gaps, Fountain simply filled those gaps with old Vietnam stereotypes (see the references to choosing prison or the Army, casual drug use and dead-end childhoods). While reading this book, my head was often filled with the immortal Paul Hardcastle’s words, “In World War Two the average age of the combat soldier was twenty-six. In Vietnam he was nineteen.” I was reminded of this every time Fountain reminded the reader that poor Billy Lynn was only “nuh-nuh nuh-nuh nineteen!” And when Billy’s sister begs him to desert the Army and allow an anti-war group to hide him.

I guess the whole deserting the Army thing is realistic. After all, just as the Vietnam War produced thousands of draft-dodgers and deserters, the Iraq War produced a handful of celebrated cowards who refused to honor contracts they voluntarily signed. Sure. It’s the same thing. And your average soldier would seriously consider becoming a deserter, just like Billy Lynn did. All of us draftees truly hate the Army and the war, and just want to escape, right? Actually we’re volunteers, and many of us went to great lengths to have an opportunity to serve in combat. But let’s just ignore that irritating little truth.

I should point out that not all the flaws in Fountain’s description of our troops relate to Vietnam stereotypes. He did get ambitious and reach all the way back to World War II at one point. This bit of nostalgia arises as Billy casually mentions that before going to Iraq, his unit was briefed that they should all expect to die.

Folks, there are certain things we say about survival in the military, such as we don’t train to die, don’t ever give up, and nobody’s dead until the medic says he’s dead. Maybe certain individuals get fatalistic, and the whole “they told us we’d die” thingy sounds really cool and ominous and all, but it’s just stupid. Any commander who said that to his troops would/should be kicked out of the Army in disgrace. It’s one thing to acknowledge a hard reality, that a unit should expect casualties. It’s another thing to tell your Joes you expect them to die. That’s just wrong. But on the plus side, we know that Fountain watched that neat-o scene from Band of Brothers where the crazy lieutenant tells a soldier he should consider himself dead already.

To be fair, Fountain doesn’t only insult and caricaturize soldiers. He shares the wealth with many other groups as well. In this story,

- Conservatives are IDIOTS
- Wealthy people are IDIOTS
- The general public is made of IDIOTS
- People who watch Fox News are IDIOTS (Billy’s father, perhaps the most odious character in the book, does nothing but watch Fox News from his wheelchair)
- Devout Christians are IDIOTS
- NFL players and fans are IDIOTS

Many fans of Ben Fountain probably read that list and said, “Yeah, that’s all true” (which sort of proves the point I’m about to make). I don’t want to argue about all of it, but the last two points deserve some elaboration. I’m agnostic, no fan of religion. But throughout my life I have known and trusted a great many people who were devout Christians, Jews or Muslims. I don’t believe for a second that having faith requires low intelligence, or that it’s a simplistic mindset. While I can argue logic against faith, I understand why people have faith and how important it is to them. In Fountain’s book, I don’t recall a single reference to faith that wasn’t a backhanded insult.

Regarding the depiction of the NFL, I have to admit something: I liked it. I’ve never been a football fan, and never understood why athletes get paid such ridiculous amounts of money for tossing a ball around. Whenever I see two pro teams playing on TV, I hope they both lose (although I do like the Texans, mostly because they’re underdogs and thus far the players aren’t running around acting like spoiled bozos). So when Fountain has three football players in the locker room ask if they can go to Iraq for three weeks to “help”, then get angry when Billy tells them they’d have to join the Army (“We got jobs, this here our job, how you think we gonna quit our job and go join some nigga’s army? Fah like what, three years?”), I think it’s funny and real. It’s probably not real, it’s a caricature, it doesn’t paint an accurate picture of NFL players. But I like it BECAUSE I’M ALREADY PREJUDICED AGAINST THEM.

Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s a phenomenon I’ve already identified.

1) Reader has a biased, unrealistic view of a certain, anonymous group of people. [cough **soldiers!**cough]
2) Reader reads Billy Lynn and sees a caricature that confirms his biased, unrealistic view.
3) Reader thinks, “Gee, this book is so real!”

I know I’m biased against pro athletes. I understand I have a skewed view of the NFL. Therefore, I won’t write a review saying, “Fountain captured the football players perfectly”. He didn’t. Instead, he played to my prejudices. He preached to the choir. Aside from all the other complaints I have about unbelievable nonsense in this book, Fountain’s habit of preaching to his choir bothered me the most.

To sum things up: If you secretly think our troops are losers but won’t admit it except to your liberal friends, are anti-bush, anti-war, anti-religion, and feel the bulk of America’s population is made of morons who are far beneath you, you will love this book. You’re Fountain’s choir, and this book was written for you. But if you have a true, multi-dimensional view of our troops, if you see the flaws of our war effort but still support the cause, if you think this is a pretty damn good country all around, then don’t bother with this book. Because it’ll just make you angry.

One incident in Afghanistan had the capacity to scar me for life. Late one night I received a report about an IED that Afghan police found in a village. I’ll call the village Loy Kalay. My job was to make sure everyone in the that area was warned about the danger. This was a routine occurrence, so I took the normal steps of notifying the Americans at the command post, then notifying the French, then sending written reports. I went to sleep that night unconcerned; as far as I knew, everyone who needed to know about the IED had been warned.

The next morning, just after I woke up, one of my soldiers walked into the tent and asked, “Did you hear the French got hit by an IED?”

I hadn’t heard. He told me, “It’s really bad. An armored vehicle was completely destroyed and burned. One French Marine was killed, some others are probably going to die, and a bunch of other guys were wounded.”

I asked him, “Where did it happen?”

“Loy Kalay.”

I froze. For one of the only times in my life, I was completely unable to speak. Oh my f**king god, I thought. I f**ked up. Who did I miss? Who didn’t I tell about the IED?

I finally managed to force out more questions. After about ten seconds of keeping me in near-panic, my soldier shook his head, blinked and said, “Oh yeah, it was Loy Alkay, not Loy Kalay. Sorry.”

Loy Alkay was hours from Loy Kalay. I hadn’t messed up. The French weren’t hit by an IED that I failed to warn them about. In that moment I should have felt nothing but concern for my French brothers who were lost and wounded, and I did. But I also felt selfish relief at the knowledge that it wasn’t my fault. To this day those ten seconds, when I thought I had gotten soldiers killed, haunt me.

This happened about a month after a firefight that produced what I hope is unreasonable guilt. The two incidents got me thinking, and I began to form an opinion. My perception is that nonveterans believe trauma comes from having people try to kill you. I don’t think that’s true. I think events that produce guilt are what cause most trauma and PTSD.

Getting shot at can be kinda fun. Getting hit isn’t; I was close enough to people who were hit to know I didn’t want any part of that. But just getting shot at could be funny, exhilarating, thought-provoking, good-naturedly embarrassing, any number of positive things. Having someone die, or get wounded, or almost get wounded because of your mistake, however, produces nothing but negative effects.

As I stated earlier, I think I’m partially at fault for someone else’s PTSD. This story and this soldier have been on my mind for years. I haven’t tried to get in contact with this soldier, which is something else I feel guilty about.

One afternoon my team left Camp Victory, Baghdad, with a convoy of supply trucks. We rolled out the gate, down a long dirt road, and turned onto Route Tampa, which at that time was one of the most dangerous roads in the country. As soon as we turned into Tampa, far in the distance I saw black smoke rising.

Another convoy team from my company was about a mile ahead of us. One of their vehicle commanders called the command post on the radio and asked, “Do you have a report of an accident on Tampa? We see a vehicle burning ahead.”

The command post had no reports. The convoy ahead of us moved closer to the smoke. We listened to their vehicle commanders talk back and forth, trying to figure out what was burning. I wasn’t too concerned. Iraqis were always burning something, and also had a reputation as bad drivers. If a vehicle was on fire, it was probably the result of a civilian accident.

The next radio call froze my blood. The lead vehicle commander screamed, “It’s a burning humvee! A patrol just got hit!”

What I experienced over the next few hours isn’t all that important. My convoy was ordered to stop about a mile from the downed humvee. We heard on the radio that a car bomb had rammed it and killed the gunner. The other convoy team stopped to assist, and waited until an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team arrived. Apache helicopters buzzed through the air overhead, searching vainly for a target. The only enemy involved had voluntarily killed himself.

Hours later, after dark, the highway was reopened. We drove past the still-burning humvee. It was almost totally destroyed. The doors were blown off, frame rails jutted into empty space where the engine had been. Debris lay scattered across the highway. I watched flames devour the remains as we passed, then turned forward. And I saw, just for a moment in the headlights, a shoe with bone and flesh protruding, sitting upright in the road.

I sat quietly for a few moments, wondering if I had seen what I had just seen. Then I turned to my driver and asked, “Was that –?”

He cut me off with, “Yeah, it was.”

A few minutes later, an IED exploded well ahead of us. Just after the blast, tracer fire sprayed into the air. We stopped again, and convoys stacked behind us. Looking back, it should have been obvious that the insurgents were just trying to stop us. About thirty minutes later, the convoy behind us took fire and engaged in a brief firefight. It was the first time I had heard a shot fired in anger.

Eventually we got back to our base. The next day we discovered the car bomb attack had wounded three soldiers in addition to killing the gunner. We also discovered that a staff sergeant from our company had pulled the dead gunner from the burning humvee.

The staff sergeant was about my age, and like me had been in the military for sixteen years. I think he had been in the same unit his entire time in the National Guard. I was an attachment from another unit, but he was close friends with almost everyone in the company. He and I were friendly but not friends. He wasn’t the most emotional or approachable guy in the world, but had a reputation as a good soldier. I found him the day after the incident and asked him about it.

He sat down on his steps of his trailer, shook his head and ran his hands over his face. His description of the attack’s aftermath was brutal.

“Man, that was awful. I just couldn’t do anything. We stopped and I ran to the humvee, and the gunner was inside burning, and I couldn’t get to him. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and every time I tried to get through the fire and grab him, ammo would explode in my face. I was finally able to grab him and drag him out, and he was laying there dead and on fire. It was bad, man.”

I listened, shook his hand and told him he did everything he could. We parted ways, and as far as I knew he got over the trauma and moved on. We ran across each other periodically during the rest of the deployment, and he always seemed to be fine.

Several months later, not long before we came home, the staff sergeant led a convoy toward a base in Anbar province. This was a route his team had been on before. At one point in the route, convoys had to skirt the edge of a hostile town. We knew not to enter that town, because we would likely be attacked.

The staff sergeant, for a reason I don’t know, stopped at an intersection and directed his team to turn straight into the town. The other soldiers in the team knew they shouldn’t have taken that route, but were confused by the staff sergeant’s directions and did it anyway. Friends of mine on that team told me they were on edge, expecting an ambush. They were right.

RPG and small arms fire exploded around the vehicles. Some of the civilian truck drivers were wounded, and the convoy stopped. Soldiers had to get out and run to the stopped trucks under fire, so they could scream at the drivers to move out. Eventually the convoy rolled through the kill zone and got out of the town. None of the soldiers were injured, and fortunately the civilian truck drivers didn’t suffer any serious wounds.

Word about the ambush spread quickly. Most of us thought it was funny, as dealing with mortal danger was more or less the norm by that time. We jokingly asked how a team that knew a route could have made that mistake. A few days later, I saw the staff sergeant on our base and approached him.

Keep in mind, we had a pretty twisted sense of humor. Once, when I found out a friend was going on an extremely dangerous mission, I asked him for his computer password so I could use it after he got killed. He understood the humor, and laughed about it. So when I saw this staff sergeant, I felt compelled to jack with him about his error.

I approached him with a smartass grin and said, “Hey man, I heard you made a little mistake on a convoy recently.”

This guy always had an even keel, but he blew up at my joke. “Oh yeah motherf****r, like you’ve never made a f***ing mistake!”

I was taken aback. I had never seen him express anything near that level of emotion. That probably should have been a signal for me to back off. But this was years before Afghanistan, years before I learned firsthand what guilt can do. So instead, I responded with a laugh, “Sure I’ve made mistakes, but I never made that one!”

If I recall correctly, he walked away cursing. I don’t think we had another conversation after that.

Our deployment ended, we came back to Texas and I went home. I’ve kept in touch with several of the guys I went to Iraq with. And from them I heard bad news about the staff sergeant.

With only two years until retirement, the staff sergeant got out of the military. He moved, changed his phone number and broke ties with the friends he had served with his entire adult life. Some of those friends tried to contact him, and he rebuffed those attempts. I’m no psychiatrist, but I think this is avoidance, a symptom of PTSD.

When I heard that, I had to wonder: was I partly at fault for any problems the staff sergeant might have? Did the first incident, with the gunner who had been killed, weaken his defenses? Maybe. After he made a mistake and led his team into an ambush, did I reinforce his belief that he almost got his friends killed? Probably.

Was I a total asshole who did everything wrong, and deserved a good buttkicking for not helping a fellow soldier through a tough time? Absolutely.

Today I found out the staff sergeant is back in touch with several of his old friends, although he apparently hasn’t gotten back into the Army. Hopefully the story I was told about him was exaggerated. Maybe he got out of the Army for some completely legitimate reason that had nothing to do with PTSD. Maybe what I had to say to him after the ambush meant nothing and he doesn’t remember it.

Either way, I handled it wrong. Either way, my words at least had the potential to make things worse. Either way, I justifiably feel guilty about it.

Staff Sergeant H, I hope you’re doing well. I hope you let my words roll off you that day. I hope you aren’t suffering for your simple, honest mistake that mission, because you don’t deserve to. I’ve learned a lot about life, war, trauma and leadership since then. Back then I didn’t know guilt produces stronger, more evil demons than fear. Now I know I said stupid things to you that may have made things worse.

I’m sorry, man.

In a nutshell, here’s the plot:

Billy Lynn’s squad gets into a firefight in Iraq. One soldier is killed. Others perform heroic actions and are awarded Silver and Bronze Stars for Valor. A Fox News camera crew is embedded with the squad and puts video of the firefight on the internet. America goes nuts. Billy’s squad is brought back to the US for a “Victory Tour”. Hilarity ensues. The highlight of the Victory Tour is a trip to the Super Bowl. Billy and his soldiers are treated like royalty. However, everyone involved in the tour is just using the soldiers to achieve their own selfish goals. The greed and cruelty of American culture is exposed. Poor Billy and his teenage buddies are manipulated, employed as mere props, used up, tossed aside like trash, and sent back to Iraq.

Keep in mind, I’m trying to be objective about this book. I’ve only read the Barnes and Noble free sample, and checked out several reviews. One of those reviews, which spoke about the novel in glowing terms, was from a reviewer I trust (http://indiscriminatecritic.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/book-review-billy-lynns-long-halftime-walk/). This book was a National Book Award finalist, and has just been nominated for a major award in the UK. I found out about the UK award when I went to Fountain’s scheduled appearance at a Houston bookstore, only to be told he cancelled because he was on his way to London.

I have serious problems with this book. The first is that Fountain isn’t a veteran. Yeah, I know, I’m not being fair. Any good writer can write a good war book if he does his research, right? How dare I expect The Great Iraq War Novel to have been written by an Iraq vet. I mean, it’s not like there are millions of Iraq vets around the country who are qualified to write about the war. Oh wait, yes there are. Well, I guess none of us are writing about it. Oh wait. . . yes we are.

Let’s forget all that. I’ve been assured that Fountain spoke to many veterans to make sure he got the technical aspects, jargon and attitudes correct. Fine. Personally, I think a virgin could study sex, interview thousands of people who have had sex, and still not know what sex is really like. But I’ll forget that too.

Next on the list of my hang-ups about this book is this minor, irritating little fact: the vortex of the story, the “Victory Tour” which exposes the greed, corruption and callousness of Bush, Cheney, Fox News and the American public, could not have happened. Billy Lynn and his soldiers are in the firefight one day, a few days later have already been awarded Silver or Bronze Stars, and suddenly find themselves on a plane back to America (with the body of their friend, no less). This is a ridiculous, nonsensical turn of events.

During my deployments, soldiers who received Army Commendation Awards for Valor, which are lower than a Bronze Star, waited months for the approvals to go through. One incident I know of happened in early August, and medals weren’t awarded until November. Another soldier who received a Bronze Star for the same incident didn’t get it until a year after the battle. U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer and Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta didn’t get their Medals of Honor until years after the fact.

In other words, soldiers don’t get awards for valor that quickly. There’s an approval process involved, and the higher the award, the longer the process. But, once again, I’ll forgive Fountain’s fictional transgression. Either he didn’t know this fact (and heaven forbid he ask an actual veteran) or he ignored it for plot purposes. I’m a fiction writer myself, and sometimes I’ve skirted the improbable for a plot’s sake. Not the impossible, but the improbable. Fountain went full impossible.

Next on the list is the Victory Tour itself. Iraq was an “economy of force” war, which means we used as few troops as possible to accomplish missions. Small units covered huge swaths of territory, and platoons that by doctrine were supposed to be in physical contact wound up holding isolated outposts miles from sister units. Guys like me on convoy escort teams had three humvees, with nine guys, to escort twenty or thirty civilian supply trucks through hundreds of miles of hostile territory. Every soldier on my team was in a critical role as gunner, driver or vehicle commander; we just didn’t have anyone to spare. In Fountain’s story, Billy’s squad is sent back to America for propaganda purposes, and the question of “who’s covering their sector?” is never addressed. Neither is that fact that our troops haven’t been pulled out mid-deployment for victory tours since maybe World War II.

I’ll forget that too. The fact that a situation probably couldn’t happen is no reason to exclude it from a novel. You can’t make a fictional omelet without breaking the eggs of reality.

Now I get to an obstacle that I just can’t overcome. As I’ve said, I’ve only read part of Fountain’s story. I refuse to buy the book. That’s because I’m hesitant to give money to someone who I think may be insulting our troops.

“Whoa”, you might say. “Why do you think Fountain insulted the troops? He’s actually standing up for the troops, trying to protect them from being used for political purposes. What’s wrong with that?”

Fair question. Here’s my answer. I think it’s insulting because, based on the little bit of the book I’ve read and the reviews I’ve seen, Billy Lynn and his fellow soldiers are portrayed as nothing more than child victims. They’re too young to understand the war, they don’t get the fact that they’re being used by the evil Bush administration to drum up political support, they don’t realize that people don’t actually care about them. They’re just too dumb to know what’s happening.

Lines like these, about one of the soldiers, have been highlighted by a reviewer: “He grew up in a ditch, he don’t know from being cold!” “It’s like giving a pig a Rolex, ma’am, he’s got no appreciation for the finer things in life.” According to the same review, this line is in the book: “Maybe this low-grade band of brothers isn’t ‘the greatest generation’, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.”

Until I read this, I wasn’t aware I was part of the bottom third of anything. I have to wonder, was this characterization supposed to apply to all of us? I served with many highly intelligent, well-educated soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. The vast majority of those guys either had successful careers and families back home, or were waiting to complete their military service before starting families and beginning careers. They weren’t losers in the mythical “bottom third percentile”.

Come to think of it, is there some reason Fountain chose the name “Billy Lynn” for his protagonist? Does that name evoke a down-home redneckishness that Fountain thinks epitomizes all our soldiers? I’d bet the answer is yes.

My impression might be wrong. Maybe Fountain doesn’t think our troops are too stupid to know better. However, I’ve seen this kind of thinking so often I’m not surprised by it, and have come to expect it from highly-educated people. When my cynicism is flowing freely, I suspect much of their “support” for troops is actually pity. Pity for us poor, young, uneducated, mostly minority children who were tricked into joining the military because we had no other options.

I’ve heard a woman with a PhD speak of the “poverty draft”, which was the military’s alleged targeting of poor teenagers (according to her, “There are no recruiting stations in Beverly Hills”). People like her, who like Fountain were never in the military, seem to think they understand those of us who made the conscious decision to serve in the military during wartime. Gee, thank God they’re here to save us from our own decisions.

To Fountain’s credit, he acknowledged his lack of credentials during a November 13th New York Times interview: “Since I’ve never served in the military, never been in a shooting war, I felt like I had to earn the right to write a book like this. I’m still not satisfied that I had the right to do it.” He also said, after talking about receiving praise from vets, “. . . I don’t doubt that there are plenty of current and former soldiers who’ve read a couple of pages and chucked it aside in disgust or boredom. But I don’t hear from them, or at least I haven’t yet.”

Well, he’s hearing from me now. I’ll address the remainder of this post directly to Mr. Fountain, in the probably vain hope that he’ll actually read it and care what a combat vet has to say.

Mr. Fountain, I assure you that even though you never served, you have the right to write war novels. Likewise, even though I’m not a college guy, I have the right to write a book about what being in a fraternity is really like. In this country, anyone can write any stupid book about anything. The First Amendment, rather than anything we’ve done, guarantees it.

In the NYT interview, you mentioned that Leo Tolstoy wasn’t even alive during the Napoleonic era, yet still wrote War and Peace. You used this to prove your lack of military background doesn’t mean you can’t write a good war novel. However, Tolstoy had two huge advantages over you. First, he was an actual war veteran, having served in the Crimean War. Second, and more importantly, the soldiers he wrote about were dead. When his book was published, few if any veterans of the war he wrote about were alive to point out what was real and what was absolute crap. In a hundred years, someone can write a World War II novel about a lesbian who leads the invasion of Normandy from her wheelchair, and no WW2 vets will be around to figuratively stab the author in the face for it. Unfortunately for you, there are still plenty of Iraq vets around who may take exception to your depiction of who we are.

But what really pisses me off, or potentially pisses me off, is that you think you have the authority to tell anyone what the war/soldiers/homecoming/whatever is really like. If your book was comedy or something inconsequential, I wouldn’t be bothered. But from what I gather, you wrote this book to make a statement, to tell some alleged truth about our soldiers, our war, and our country. My gut reaction is that nobody who hasn’t been there can tell the truth about any war. You don’t have to be a soldier in a war to see this truth, but you have to at least visit. I don’t like what Ashley Gilbertson had to say about the Iraq war and our military, but at least his opinions came from firsthand experience.

My last word to you will be partly an apology. I haven’t read your book, so my suspicions and criticism may be completely off. I will read the book if someone gives it to me for free, or if I find it at my library. I’m willing to forgive if you’ll just acknowledge that central tenets of your plot, the light-speed awards and Victory Tour, could not have happened. I’ll praise your writing ability, and admit that I envy your talent. If I read the book and discover that you’ve done us justice, I’ll post an apology on my blog.

However, if I do read the book, this is what I expect to find: it was written by someone who knows nothing of the war, for people who know nothing of the war. I expect it to pander to an audience that openly despises the previous presidential administration and quietly despises our military. I suspect your novel has much in common with the ridiculous movie The Hurt Locker, which received fawning praise from nonveterans and was laughed at by those who had been in Iraq. I think your book will make Billy and his friends look like morons, rather than adult men who freely decided to serve their country in combat. I think you’ve done nothing more than offer us pity disguised as support. I think you’ve committed the same offense you accuse others of; the characters in your novel use Billy’s squad for political purposes, while you, by the same token, use us soldiers as devices to further your own career.

Not that I expect my feelings to matter to you; I’m sure that whatever complaints soldiers have about your book, you’ll happily walk across our backs to the bank and awards stage.

If your book shows that most of us live by the mantra, “My country was at war; I joined the military; I knew what I was doing,” then I congratulate you for your success. But I think you’ve portrayed us as something other than volunteers who willingly chose wartime service and all the pain, anger, and frustration it entails. If that’s the case, if you’ve shown us pity disguised as support, then you can kiss my “bottom third percentile”, proud Iraq veteran ass.