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THE THING BEGINS

THE MEN OF BRAVO are not cold. It’s a chilly and windwhipped Thanksgiving Day with sleet and freezing rain forecast for late afternoon, but Bravo is nicely blazed on Jack and Cokes thanks to the epic crawl of game-day traffic and the limo’s minibar. Five drinks in forty minutes is probably pushing it, but Billy needs some refreshment after the hotel lobby, where overcaffeinated tag teams of grateful citizens trampolined right down the middle of his hangover. There was one man in particular who attached himself to Billy, a pale, spongy Twinkie of a human being crammed into starched blue jeans and fancy cowboy boots. “Was never in the military myself,” the man confided, swaying, gesturing with his giant Starbucks, “but my granddaddy was at Pearl, he told me all the stories,” and the man embarked on a rambling speech about war and God and country as Billy let go, let the words whirl and tumble around his brain

Thanks to asswipe luck Billy will have the aisle seat at Texas Stadium, which means he will bear the brunt of these encounters for most of the afternoon. His neck hurts. He slept but poorly last night. Each of those five Jack and Cokes puts him deeper in the hole, but the sight of the stretch limo pulling up to the hotel aroused a bundle of nervous cravings in him, this boat of a snow-white Hummer with six doors to a side and black-tinted windows for maximum privacy. “What I’m talking a-bout!” cried Sergeant Dime as he pounced on the bar, everyone whooping over all the pimp finery, but after destroying all hopes for a quick recovery Billy subsides into a gnarled, secret funk.

“Billy,” says Dime, “you’re flaking on me.”

“No, Sergeant,” Billy says at once. “I’m just thinking about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.”

“Good man.” Dime raises his glass, then conversationally remarks to no one in particular, “Major Mac is gay.”

Holliday yelps. “Damn, Dime, the man sitting right here!”

And indeed, Major McLaurin is seated on the rear banquette, watching Dime with all the emotion of a flounder on ice.

“He can’t hear a damn word I say,” Dime laughs. He turns to Major Mac and slows down his rate of speech to moron speed. “MAY-JURH, MACK-LAAAUUURIN, SIR! SAR-JINT, HOLLI-DAY, HERE, SAYS, YOU’RE, GAY.”

“Aw fuck,” Holliday moans, but the major’s eyes merely take on a needling glint, then he holds out his fist to show his wedding band. Everyone howls.

There are ten of them in the limo’s plush passenger bay, the eight remaining soldiers of Bravo squad, their PA escort Major Mac, and the movie producer Albert Ratner, who at the moment is hunkered down in BlackBerry position. Counting poor dead Shroom and the grievously wounded Lake there are two Silver Stars and eight Bronze among them, all ten of which defy coherent explanation. “What were you thinking during the battle?” the pretty TV reporter in Tulsa asked, and Billy tried. God knows he tried, he never stops trying, but it keeps slipping and sliding, corkscrewing away, the thing of it, the it, the ineffable whatever.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Mainly it was just this sort of road rage feeling. Everything was blowing up and they were shooting our guys and I just went for it, I really wasn’t thinking at all.”

His chief fear up to the moment the shooting started being that of fucking up. Life in the Army is miserable that way. You fuck up, they scream at you, you fuck up some more and they scream some more, but overlying all the small, petty, stupid, basically foreordained fuckups looms the ever-present prospect of the life-fucking fuckup, a fuckup so profound and all-encompassing as to crush all hope of redemption. A couple of days after the battle he was walking down the gravel path to chow and there it was, this sense of reprieve or release, of a terrible burden eased, and all with no more effort on Billy’s part than the exhalation of a normal breath. This feeling of ahh-hhh, like there was hope for him? Like maybe he wasn’t completely expendable. By then the Fox News footage was viraling through the culture and there were rumors that Bravo was going home, the kind of suicidally hopeful talk no soldier in his right mind would dare credit, and then, lo, they were QT’ed to Baghdad on two hours’ notice and thence across the ocean for their Victory Tour.

One nation, two weeks, eight American heroes, though technically there is no such thing as Bravo squad. They are Bravo Company, second platoon, first squad, said squad being comprised of teams alpha and bravo, but the Fox embed christened them Bravo squad and thus they were presented to the world. Now, here at the tour’s end, feeling soft, sated, bleary, under-rested and overproduced, Billy grows sad and nostalgic for the beginning. They were hustled onto a C-130 in the middle of night and took off from Baghdad in a hard spiraling scrooge. Shroom was with them, in a flag-draped coffin at the back. For the entire flight to Ramstein a couple of the Bravos were always sitting with him, but it’s the others who Billy thinks of now, the twenty or so civilians of various shades and accents who joined them for the ride. Not spooks—they were too plump for that, their smiles too heedless of the woes of the world, and as soon as the plane was airborne those guys were partying hard. Good whiskey, music blasting from a dozen boom boxes, a forest of Cuban cigars set ablaze—the fuselage quickly filled with a witches’ brew of smoke. It turned out that they were gourmet chefs. For who? The men just smiled. “The coalition.” They were French, Romanian, Swedish, German, Iranian, Greek, Spanish, Billy could discern no pattern or meaning in their nationalities, but to a man they were friendly and more than generous, eager to share their booze and smokes with soldiers. Evidently they’d made a lot of money in Iraq. One of the Swedes opened his calfskin attaché case and showed Billy the gold stash he’d acquired in Baghdad, several pounds’ worth of chains and ropes and coins, of such purity that they glowed more orange than gold. 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.

“Yes,” Albert is saying into his cell, which he bought special in Japan, which is two years ahead of everyone else in the race for cell phone superiority. “Tell her that, you can tell her this picture will maul. But it will also reward.” He’s silent for a moment. “Carl, what can I say? It’s a war picture—not everybody gets out alive.” Meanwhile Crack is reading aloud from the sports pages of the Dallas Morning News, reciting the odds from America’s Line so Holliday and A-bort can get their bets down. There are more than two hundred ways to bet on the game, including whether the coin toss will be heads or tails, which song Destiny’s Child will open with at halftime, and which quarter will the network broadcast make its first reference to President Bush.

Crack speaks as if reading from a recipe. “Drew Henson’s first pass of the game will be, complete, minus two hundred; incomplete, plus a hundred and fifty; an interception, plus a thousand.”

“Incomplete,” says Holliday, making a note in his little book.

“Incomplete,” A-bort agrees, marking his little book.

“How about quarter where Beyoncé sits on my face,” Sykes says.

“Fucking never,” Holliday says, not missing a beat.

“In a million years,” A-bort adds, similarly deadpan. Sykes is saying hell yes he’ll take those odds as Albert snaps his cell phone shut.

“All right, guys, it looks like Hilary Swank is officially interested.”

Whanh, whoa, who? “Hilary Swank a bitch,” Lodis sputters. “Why she talking to us?”

“Bee-cause,” Albert answers, punching it, knowing the rise this will get from Bravo, “she wants to play him,” and he points at Billy. Bravo erupts in hoots and cheers.

“Wait. Wait a second.” Billy is laughing along with everyone else, but he’s troubled too, already he senses the potential here for humiliation on a global scale. “If she’s a girl then I don’t see how—”

“Actually,” Albert says, “she’s floating the idea of playing Billy and Dime. We’d fold both parts into one role and she’d play that as the lead.”

More hoots, this time directed at Dime, who merely nods as if well satisfied. “I still don’t see . . .” Billy murmurs.

“Just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean she can’t do it,” Albert tells them. “Meg Ryan was the lead in that chopper flick, the one she did with Denzel a couple years ago. Or she could play it as a guy, hell, Hilary won a goddamn Oscar playing a guy. Well, playing a girl playing a guy, but whatever. The point is she’s not just another pretty face.”

Others who Albert is in talks with: Oliver Stone, Brian Grazer, Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney. It is a heroic tale, not without tragedy. A tale of heroism ennobled by tragedy. Movies about Iraq have “underperformed” at the box office, and that’s a problem, according to Albert, but not Bravo’s problem. The war might be up to its ass in moral ambiguity, but Bravo’s triumph busts through all that. The Bravo story is a rescue story, with all the potent psychology of the rescue plot. People respond deeply to such stories, Albert has told them. Everyone worries, everyone feels at least a little bit doomed basically all the time, even the richest, most successful, most secure among us live in perpetually anxious states of barely hanging on. Desperation’s just part of being human, so when relief comes in whatever form, as knights in shining armor, say, or digitized eagles swooping down on the flaming slopes of Mordor, or the U.S. cavalry charging out of yonder blue, that’s a powerful trigger in the human psyche. Validation, redemption, life snatched from the jaws of death, all very powerful stuff. Powerful. “What you guys did out there,” Albert has assured them, “that’s the happiest possible result of the human condition. It gives us hope, we’re allowed to feel hopeful about our lives. There’s not a person on the planet who wouldn’t pay to see that movie.”

Albert is in his late fifties, a big-boned, fleshy man with an unruly cloud of mostly gray hair and thick, wiry hedgerows of midlength sideburns. He wears black-frame glasses with round lenses. He chews gum. His hands are large and knuckly, and dark clumps of jungle growth sprout from his ears. Today he’s wearing a white dress shirt with the collar open, a navy blazer with a lining of brilliant scarlet, a black cashmere overcoat and cashmere scarf, and sleek, dainty loafers that appear to be made of pliable chocolate bars. This crossfire of dishevelment and suavity provides no end of fascination for Billy, and from it he infers a worldliness that could eat Bravo for breakfast and swallow the bones. This is a man who direct-dials the likes of Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones and whose movies have featured such money stars as Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, two of the four Baldwin brothers and so on, all of whom unfortunately have prior commitments or aren’t interested in a profile-leveling ensemble piece.

“We’re gonna Platoon it,” Albert says on his next phone call. “Ensemble plus star, hell yes it works. Hilary’s extremely interested.”

The Bravos listen for a minute. Ho’Wood talk. It is its own tribal dialect, rich in tonal permutations of put-down, bitch-slap, call-out, and gaff.

“No way. I’d rather sleep with Mother Teresa than make a movie with that guy.”

Bravo smirks.

“Oh sure. Like having an enema when you’ve got a catheter shoved up your cock.”

The Bravos’ eyes bug out, they chortle snot through their noses.

“Only one battle? Larry, come on, Black Hawk Down was only one battle. Look, I know it’s a war movie, but I need a director who can bring some human empathy to the story.”

Pause.

“Enemas I can handle, it’s the catheter I can’t take.”

More nasal chortles. Lodis would fall off his seat if he wasn’t strapped in.

“Listen, Larry, we’re talking two days. My boys ship out in two days and access becomes extremely problematic after that. Unless your lawyers feel like parachuting into a war zone.”

“Hooo-kay,” Crack resumes, rattling the paper. “Will Drew Henson throw an interception—yes, minus a hundred and twenty, versus no, plus a hundred and five.”

“Yes,” Holliday says.

“No,” says A-bort.

“Will Beyoncé show me her tits while sitting on my face,” Sykes offers, then starts singing in a screechy black-girl falsetto, I need a soldjah, soldjah, need me a soldjah soldjah boy . . .

“Quiet,” Dime woofs, “Albert’s on the phone,” which the rest of the Bravos take as their cue to scream at Sykes. Shut up, fuckhead, Albert’s on the phone! Quiet, shitbag, Albert’s trying to talk! Meanwhile an SUV has drawn even in the next lane, and women, actual females, are hanging out the windows and yelling at the Hummer, college girls, maybe a couple of years older, and they are fine prime examples of that buxom talent pool of all-American booty that runs amok every night on reality TV.

“Hey,” they cry as traffic crawls along, “roll down your windows! Hey you, whoever you are, got any Grey Poupon? Woooo-hoooo, go Cowboys! Roll down your window!”

Oh Lord, beauties they are and amped as all fuck, bellowing, whipping their hair around like proud war banners, they are the girls gone wild of Bravo’s fondest dreams. Sykes and A-bort futz with the windows on that side and are roundly cursed for their incompetence, then they realize the damn things have been childproofed and everybody screams toward the front, finally the driver flips a switch and the windows go down and you can just see those girls deflate. Oh, soldiers. Jarheads, they’re probably thinking, because it’s all the same to them. Not rock stars, not highly paid professional athletes, nobody from the movies or the tabloid-worthy world, just grunts riding on some millionaire’s dime, some lame support-the-troops charity case. Bravo tries, but the girls are just being polite now. We’re famous! A-bort cries. They’re gonna make a movie about us! The girls smile, nod, look up and down the freeway as if scouting better prospects. Sykes flops his entire torso out the window and yells, “Hell yes I’m drunk baby and I’m married too! But I’ll still love you ugly in the morning!” This gets the girls laughing and for a moment there’s hope, but Billy can see the light already dimming in their eyes.

He sits back and pulls out his cell; they were probably never serious anyway. Ten hut! reads the text from his sister Kathryn,

keep it in yr holster kid

Then from Pete, his other sister’s roughneck husband,

Bang a cheerldr

Then this from Pastor Rick, who won’t leave him alone,

He who honors me, I will honor

And that’s it, no more texts, no calls, nothing. Fuck, doesn’t he know anybody? He is sort of famous after all, at least that’s what people keep telling him, so you would think. Traffic is moving and they’ve lost the wild girls, but now the stadium appears on the horizon, rising from the sweep of suburban prairie like an engorged and wart-spattered three-quarter moon. They are supposed to appear today on national TV, details pending, no one knows the actual drill. They might have lines to speak. They might be interviewed. There’s talk that they’ll take part in the halftime show, which raises hopes of personally meeting Destiny’s Child, but equally if not more plausible is the possibility that they’ll be coaxed, cajoled, steamrolled, or otherwise harassed into doing something incredibly embarrassing and lame. Local TV has already been bad enough—in Omaha there was footage of a very stiff Bravo “interacting” with the zoo’s new monkey habitat, and in Phoenix they were taken to a skateboard park, where Mango did an ass-plant for the evening news. Humiliation always stalks the common man when he ventures onto the tube, and Billy is determined it won’t happen to him, not today, not on nationwide TV, no sir, thank you sir, I respectfully refuse to act like a moron, sir!

The possibilities set off a whinge in his gut like air escaping through a pinhole wound. He wants to be on TV, and he doesn’t. He wants to be on TV as long as he doesn’t screw up and it might help get him laid, but watching the stadium swell outside his window to Death Star proportions he wonders if he’s truly up to the day. Self-confidence has been a struggle these past two weeks, this sense of treading water way over his head. He’s too young. He doesn’t know enough. Not counting the small-time drag races his father used to emcee, he’s never been to a professional sporting event. In fact he’s managed to grow up in Stovall, a mere eighty miles west, without ever setting eyes on fabled Texas Stadium save through the expurgating medium of TV, and this first sighting feels historic, or at least strives to be. Billy studies it at length, with real care and attention, taking the measure of its size and lack of humor, its stark and irremediable ugliness. Years and years of carefully posed TV shots have imbued the place with intimations of mystery and romance, dollops of state and national pride, hints of pharaonic afterlife such as always inhere in large-scale public architecture, all of which render the stadium of Billy’s mind as the conduit or portal, a direct tap-in, to a ready-made species of mass transcendence, and so the real-life shabbiness is a nasty comedown. Give bigness all its due, sure, but the place looks like a half-assed backyard job. The roof is a homely quilting of mismatched tiles. There’s a slumpiness, a middle-aged sag to the thing that suggests soft paunches and mushy prostates, gravity-slugged masses of beached whaleness. Billy tries to imagine how it looked brand-new, its fresh gleam and promise back in the day—thirty years ago? Forty? The past is always a shaky proposition for him, but there’s a backdoor link between the way he feels now, looking at the stadium, and the feelings he gets when he thinks about his family. That same heaviness, the same torpor and melancholy, a kind of sickly-sweet emo funk that’s almost pleasurable, in the sense that it hints at something real. As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he’s come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory. Something new appears in the world—a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent—with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it’s going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can’t fathom why it’s not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell. The war is fucked? Well, duh. Nine-eleven? Slow train coming. They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.

“Shit,” someone murmurs, a speed bump in the silence—their first burst of enthusiasm on sighting the stadium has flatlined into verbal arrest. Maybe it’s the weather that brings them down, all this early-winter gloom, or maybe performance anxiety or just plain weariness, the burden of knowing much will be required of them today. Bravo doesn’t do so well with silence anyway. Guff and bullshit are more their working style, but the spell of introspective dread concludes with the appearance of a large, carefully rendered homemade sign affixed to a roadside utility pole. STOP ANAL RAPE IN IRAQ! the sign reads, below which someone has scrawled, heavens to betsey. Bravo howls.