In Kevin Powers's visceral debut novel, The Yellow Birds, the war in Iraq seems driven as much by the relentless intensity of the hot, bright sun as by the suicidal fervor of the insurgents and their lethal toolkit of weapons. Twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and his younger buddy "Murph" soldier up every day, donning body armor and Goopacks to walk the streets and outskirts of Al Tafar. Whether they live or die seems not a matter of training, strategy or superior technology but of random luck. "People are going to die," their roughhewn Sergeant Sterling tells them. "It's statistics." Every day, they check yesterday's fatality numbers and look around at their comrades thinking, "If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not."
The Yellow Birds is a meditative war story, more Red Badge of Courage than Catch-22. In chapters that alternately take place during training at Fort Dix, deployment in Al Tafar, discharge through Kaiserslautern and home again, Powers captures their transition from naïve enlistees taking in a gung-ho colonel's send-off to war-weary, guilt-ridden veterans. Operation Iraqi Freedom is not Bartle's grandfather's war, a conflict with a "destination and purpose;" instead, it's one of fruitless cyclicality: "We'd drive them out," Powers writes. "We'd kill them. They'd shoot us and blow off our limbs and run into the hills and wadis.... Then they'd come back, and we'd start over."
Every war seems to spawn its own literature, but all share the common DNA of combat and horror. Powers's sensitive novel also reflects the soldier's difficult reentry back home as Bartle holes up in an empty Richmond, Va., apartment while "the dull world that ignored our little pest of a war rolled on." When asked "Hey, how are you?" he wishes he could just tell the truth: "I feel like I'm being eaten from the inside out and I can't tell anyone what's going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I'll feel like I'm ungrateful... or like I'll give away that I don't deserve anyone's gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I've done." Fortunately, we have the talented Iraq War veteran Powers to tell his story for him. --Bruce Jacobs
Shelf Talker: Powers' evocative first novel explores the frighteningly unpredictable dangers of modern combat through the perspective of a young army private in Iraq.