Buzz Bissinger is an anthropologist who disguises himself as a sports writer. Way back in 1990, when he was more formally writing as “H.G. Bissinger” rather than “Buzz,” he published Friday Night Lights, which justifiably earned lots of attention and rave reviews, and which has subsequently been overshadowed by the eponymous television series based on it. I am not qualified to discuss the television series, but I know that it’s been popular as a teen drama as it has fictionalized Bissinger’s nonfiction. I’m more interested in the original book and its subtitle: “A Town, a Team, and a Dream.” Note that the town gets top billing. Bissinger temporarily moved his family to Odessa, Texas, so that he could observe up close the Permian High School football team and the status granted it by the citizens of Odessa. He may have begun the work as a study of small-town football mania, but what he delivered was a profile of a community. It has been more than thirty years since I read Friday Night Lights, but I still remember the overwhelming sadness of reading about young men whose lives most likely peaked during their senior year of high school.
Just a few days ago I finished Bissinger’s The Mosquito Bowl, which also comes with a subtitle: “A Game of Life and Death in World War II.” That subtitle, frankly, is the weakest element of this deftly researched history. The Mosquito Bowl was a football game played by bored Marines on Christmas Eve, 1944, in Guadalcanal. Many of those Marines had been college football players, and from Bissinger’s brief account—he spends perhaps a page on the game itself—they seem to have enjoyed playing to a tie in a rough-and-tumble contest. But nobody died. It wasn’t a game of life and death. It was merely an entertainment for the American troops posted in the South Pacific as they waited for orders into combat. Jay Jennings, reviewing the book in The New York Times, calls the title a “feint,” the perfect word.
No, the death comes later at Okinawa, and here’s where Bissinger’s skill as an empathic journalist rises to the level of artistry. Again, as in Friday Night Lights, we see young men whose lives peaked far too early. But at least in Odessa, Texas, there was life after high school, no matter how dreary that life might have been. In The Mosquito Bowl Bissinger profiles one remarkable young Marine after another so that when we reach the true subject of the book—the protracted and ill-planned invasion of Okinawa—we care intensely about their fates. Those of us who admire Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 recall the absurd competitions for power between General Dreedle and General Peckem and the cavalier indifference of officers sending their subordinates out to die. Until I read Bissinger’s history of the war in the South Pacific, I had always assumed Heller was distorting reality for the sake of satire. But Bissinger shows us that such jostling and elbowing for prestige and control were all too real. The result is a brilliant, tart, nonfiction scream of exasperation at the loss of so many good lives that might have been saved under different leadership.