War and football - two American sports?

After the long chapter in Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in which Billy spends a few days at home with his difficult family, we go back to the Cowboys stadium and watch as the Bravo company is additionally lauded and feted, this time - still before the game kickoff - in the owners suite, where the Cowboys' owner, no doubt based on some real football figure whom I don't know, gives an unctuous speech in praise of the Bravo company and their heroics. The message of the book is driven home to us repeatedly - others exploit the heroic exploits of Bravo, and they're not sure how to discuss what they did in wartime: it's as if they're in a kind of shellshock of disbelief - and oddly so are we because we don't exactly know what they did - we're starting to see that it involved a fight against a much larger contingent to free a captive company member - but nothing about the war seems real as they're paraded around the country so that all the armchair patriots can get a contact high from their glory. It's a highly exaggerated premise - hard to understand how or why a small company like this would be on the cover of Time and would be prospects for a movie - but I get that they are, for Fountain, a stand-in for the entire absurdity of the war - though not absurdity as in Heller, in which the military is idiotic though the cause be just - but here the military seems pretty much OK and unscathed, it's just that there is no meaning to what these guys do or have done except to provide the country with a valve through which to vent jingoistic vitriol. Billy begins a relationship with one of the Dallas cheerleaders, which seems a little far-fetched, but we'll see where it goes.