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The only physically disabled character in Ben Fountain's excellent Iraq War novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012) is not a combat veteran but the protagonist Billy Lynn's father Ray, who is confined to a wheelchair following a stroke. Though the brooding, remote Billy Lynn and his squadmates are mentally rattled by the sequence of events beginning with the death of two of their own in battle and now culminating in a garish "Victory Tour" that has brought them to Texas Stadium to be feted at a Dallas Cowboys game, at least they have their physical health to be thankful for. On the other hand, Ray Lynn, portrayed in a subplot involving Billy's dysfunctional family, does little to inspire sympathetic understanding of the impaired. Confined to a battery-powered wheelchair, a "dark purple motorized job with fat whitewalls and an American flag decal stuck to the back" (74) and unable to speak clearly, Ray inspires comments such as the following from his daughter Kathryn: "'He's an asshole.... Won't do his physical therapy, never goes out, just sits in that damn chair all day watching Fox and listening to fat-ass Rush Limbaugh, won't even talk unless he wants something, and then he just grunts. Expects us to wait on him hand and foot'" (75). Billy Lynn the war hero, whatever the source of his alienation, is nonetheless physically whole, sexually attractive to women, and envied by the fat-cat Dallas Cowboys owner and the hyper-masculine Dallas Cowboys players he meets in the course of the novel. Ray Lynn's disability, on the other hand, symbolically complements and intensifies the lameness of his arch-conservative political views, the blindness of his hypocritical morals, and the impotence of his control over his family, his life, and the world.
?Lameness,? ?blindness,? ? impotence.? Theorists of disability would say that my use of these words to describe Ray Lynn indicates how infested is our language with figures of speech that stigmatize the handicapped. But what if lame, blind, and mutilated veterans are not even stigmatized, but just ignored? So far, our most popular and acclaimed works of fiction about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have mostly done just that. The United States' post-9/11 wars have focused attention on the plight of combat veterans...