The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers, USA, 2012

A yellow bird

With a yellow bill

Was perched upon

My windowsill.

I lured him in

With a piece of bread

And then I smashed

His fucking head…

(Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence)

This beautiful, devastating book follows two young boys – John Bartle is twenty-one and Daniel Murphy (Murph) is only eighteen – during their deployment to Iraq in 2004. Their sergeant, Sterling, is twenty-four and already destroyed by the war. Early on Sterling asks Bartle to look after Murph, and Bartle does what he feels is the right thing to do but which turns out to be anything but – not for himself and not for anyone else.

We all have choices, but as Bartle reflects, long after his return home: ‘… all choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions, their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all other men and women deciding anything in that moment…’

While the subject – the waste and insanity of war – is at times difficult to digest, it is Powers’ writing that lifts the book to a level where it should remain, shoulder to shoulder with books like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Thin Red Line, reminding readers that war is not glorious and that death is unpredictable. A poet, Powers is able to describe people, places and emotions with a profound sensitivity and perception, the beauty of the writing often contrasting starkly with his subject matter. Powers manages to pinpoint the horror of war and the utter loneliness of returning home, using words and images that will remain with the reader long after the book is closed.

At the end of the book, Bartle, looking at a map of Al Tafar, thinks how, as the years pass, it becomes ‘less a picture of fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions.’ It reminds him of talking, which is never really an accurate picture of what is thought, and what is then heard is never really exactly what was said.