War novels and anti-war novels: Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk

There are war novels and anti-war novels, and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk seems to be the latter - not only because it is anti-war in the sense of opposed to war - who isn't? - but in that it's a war novel that's about the culture of war but not about the act of war  - OK, maybe that's not so, as I'm only 40 pages in: the novel focuses on the title character and the fellow members of a Bravo Company, 8 men? plus one killed in action who are at home on leave from the Iraq war and are being nationally honored as war heroes - we're not sure, at least yet, what exactly they did that was heroic. The opening scenes are at a Cowboys Thanksgiving game, the Bravo company as guests of honor, accompanied by a military brass Major who is kind of out of it, possibly deaf from explosive percussions, and a Hollywood producer - the rights to their story are in negotiations. Several themes: first, the Bravo soldiers are heroes maybe but not heroic, they are coarse guys, full of vulgarity, heavy drinkers, guys who challenge authority rather than toe the military line. In this sense they're familiar military anti-heroes, that we know from many novels and more recently from many movies and TV series: they could have stepped right out of the excellent HBO Generation Kill, for ex. This novel calls up many obvious comparisons with other anti-war classics - the jacket blurbs point this out - notably as the Catch-22 of the Iraq war? Well, it isn't exactly Catch-22, in that Heller's novel was full of wit and irony and Half-Time is full of rambunctious energy but not wit exactly, or not pointed wit: for ex., in Catch the famous conundrum of the title (as well as the opening scene in which the guy is neither in nor out of the medical infirmary) skewer military logic and give us an undying sense of the absurdity even the surrealism of life in combat. The "catch" in Half-time has to do with movie rights: Hilary Swank won't look at the script without an offer and no studio will send her the script without a commitment. Hollywood is a far easier subject for satire. Half-time is also echoing Going after Cacciata - the major disappears from the group before the game starts, and I wonder if Billy's walk will involve searching for him? - but the times are so different, and distant: in Vietnam the nation was bitterly divided about the war, and soldiers who fought - draftees, most of them - were certainly not feted on return from war. In Halftime the soldiers are fawned over by would-be military stars who probably never served and never would have - armchair generals and patriots who wear it on their sleeve.