Wounds running deep
IN 2012, more American soldiers have died by suicide than on the battlefield. This statistic is testimony not only to the fact that the United States is now fighting only one front in Afghanistan, but to the inability of many honourably discharged soldiers to reintegrate into the world they left behind. Kevin Power’s astonishing, haunting and riveting first novel The Yellow Birds draws upon his experience as a machine gunner stationed in Iraq, as well as his skills as an accomplished poet to illuminate the souldestroying experience of war.
With unsentimental lyricism and evocative poignancy, he has written a memorable epic about those naive, patriotic young Americans who enlist to fight for freedom, experience the world and better their life prospects only to return home in body bags or broken by guilt and shame.
The transformative horror of war has long been the subject of our greatest works of literature from Homer’s The Odyssey to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. These works share brilliant characterisations as well as the uncanny ability to capture the surreality of battle through metaphorical abstraction.
The lives of their protagonists do not conclude with the burial of the fallen and the termination of conflict, but trace their discomforting re-entries into ‘‘normal’’ lives. While history can precisely record the stratagems of generals and the motions of regiments, fiction personalises experience, allowing us to feel as much as understand. Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds might well become the novel which will eternalise the collateral damage of the Iraq war.
The narrative is focused on the bond between two young soldiers, 21-year old John Bartle and 18-year-old David Murphy. They meet in Fort Dix, New Jersey, during basic training as their regiment prepares to be deployed to Al-Tafar, Nineveh Province near the Syrian border. ‘‘Bartle’’ has been in the army for three years and has not yet seen battle. One day during formation ‘‘Murph’’ stands next to him and smiles. He only reaches Murph’s shoulder. Their commanding officer, Sergeant Sterling, calls the pair over and says to Murph, ‘‘All right, little man, I want you to get in Bartle’s back pocket and I want you to stay there’’. Sterling, though only a few years older than Bartle, is esteemed because he has already been to Iraq and ‘‘even the higher-ups looked at him with admiration. And it wasn’t just the fact of his having been there that caused us to respect him. He was harsh, but fair, and there was a kind of evolutionary beauty in his competence’’.
Bartle is thus anointed with the first unwanted responsibility of his young life which is reified when he meets Murph’s single mother LaDonna, a rural letter carrier, during a family weekend. LaDonna asks him to keep her only child safe and Bartle promises that he will though he knows his promise is impossible to keep. But he has bonded with Murph for they are both from small towns in Virginia where ‘‘a few facts are enough to define you, where a few habits can fill a life . . . We’d had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams’’.
That promise is as prophetic and ominous as Abraham’s vow to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his faith in his monotheistic God. But unlike the Old Testament, no greater power rescues Bartle, Murph and Sterling from their hellish destiny. This biblical association transfers to the battlefield as the action in The Yellow Birds is set on the Tigris and Euphrates, the land of the Old Testament patriarchs. This simile is carried further to the point where war becomes the higher power. ‘‘The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the lowslung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer . . . while we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.’’
This novel will tear at your brain and break your heart. The Yellow Birds has just been nominated for America’s National Book Award. For me, it deserves this accolade, whether it wins it or not.