Another Book

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, 2012

Like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, Kevin Powers’ tale of two soldiers, Privates Bartle and Murphy, in Iraq reveals itself slowly.  Narrated by Bartle, the story puts the reader on edge from the start, offering hints and adding facts in a series of what seem at first to be disconnected scenes occurring in mostly in Tal Afar, Iraq and Bartle’s hometown, Richmond, Virginia.  The reader early on learns that Murphy is dead and that his death is not the end of the matter.  The story unfolds, filling the missing pieces on either end:  the events in Tal Afar and their impact on Bartle in Richmond, to which he has returned only in body.  His conscience is still in Iraq, wrestling with his part in Murphy’s death.  His turmoil is more than guilt over a broken promise-that-he-never-should-have-made to Murphy’s mother to keep her son safe.  What begins as a combat tale evolves into a tale of devolution into the fatal logic of war and its consequences.  Powers, an Iraq War veteran, writes credibly of combat:  how it feels, how one thinks, how one moves and reacts, how everything happens at once.  He evokes both the action of combat, the landscape in which it occurs and the long tail of responsibility and retribution that follows.