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