Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

How does it all come to be, that’s what he wants to know, not just the how but the why of all this stuff. Only in America, apparently. Only America could take such a product-intensive sport and grow it into the civic necessity it is today.

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

a way it’s so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they’re happy, they love him, everybody gets along.

He wonders if all soldiers who do these radical things get a brief sightline into a very specific future, this telescopic piercing of time and space that instills the motivation to do what they do. The ones who live, maybe. Maybe they all think they see, but the ones who don’t make it, they were wrong.

There amid the cigar smoke and rollicking laughs Billy had lifted one of the chains, testing it for heft. He was nineteen years old and had no idea that his war contained such things, and what a damn shame for him and the rest of Bravo that it has not been won in the two weeks since.

There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

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now the stadium appears on the horizon, rising from the sweep of suburban prairie like an engorged and wart-spattered three-quarter moon.

the risks are never fully revealed until you commit.