Masters of War - hypocrites - and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

About a third of the way through Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk we take a step backward in time (this isn't obvious at first) to an event a few days before the Thanksgiving football game that seems to form the heart of the story - and at this point the men in Bravo company are
"on leave" from their celebrity tour, each gone off to be with his family for a weekend - Billy goes to his family in Texas, and it's our first sense of the world he came from: his father apparently was a right-wing talk radio host and minor celeb himself who became increasingly isolated and bitter, now a stroke victim confined to a wheelchair and nasty to everybody. Billy's sister - we'd learned before that she was badly injured in a car accident, and as a result her fiance dumped her (and Billy trashed the guy's car, leading him to enlist as a an alternative to prison) very concerned about his going back to the war in Iraq and says she knows some guys who can help soldiers leave the service - illegally, no doubt - but Billy is OK with going back. Billy is kind of a blank, but we do see his yearning for attention from his father, who is bitter and selfish. The lessons of the previous chapters are driven home even harder in this long chapter: the country is full of hypocrites, right u to the top, war-mongers who never served a day in their lives (Bust, Cheney, and on down) and blow-hard patriots who are right-wing zealots until the moment they need something from the government and then they rail against the gov'mint for incompetence. These are kind of familiar points, and I wish we could see a little more clearly the evolution of Billy's thinking on these matters - but as the novel is in a very compressed period of time, his thoughts just are, they don't become. I do sense that there will be more flashback chapters so by the end we may get a more clear sense of what the heroics of this Bravo company were and especially how Billy's best friend, Shroom, died in combat: an echo here, once again, of Catch-22, in which it takes the entire novel, if I remember correctly, to understand the death of the airman, and the references to being cold and the repeated phrase, "there, there." I also realize I was wrong about two deaths in the company: Shroom is dead and the other absent member, Lake, lost two legs and is somewhere in a rehab hospital - I wonder if he will appear in the novel, later.