Current Reading: The Yellow Birds

 

Today I started a book I checked out of the public library recently: The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. I am only about 25 pages into the story, but I can see, already, that it will be an intense book about one American soldier's experience in the Iraq war.

In addition to his experience in combat, Powers also has an MFA in poetry. The book is short -- 230 pages -- but it probably is one that is best read slowly because the author has a poetic style that is worth paying close attention to. Of course, two the essential books in the cannon of literature of the ancient world -- The Illad and the Odyssey -- are epics poems about one man's (Achilles) experience in the Trojan war and another man's (Odysseus) journey back from the battlefield to his home from before the war.

Here is one example of the poetry in Powers' book:

    I didn't think about Malik much after that. He was an incidental figure who only seemed to exist in his relation to my continuing life. I couldn't have articulated it then, but I'd been trained to think war was the great unifier, that it brought people closer together that any other activity on earth. Bullshit. War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today? Dying would be one way. If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not. You're nothing, that the secret: a uniform in a sea of numbers, a number in a sea of dust. And we somehow thought those numbers were a sign of our own insignificance. We thought that if we remained ordinary, we would not die. We confused correlation with cause and saw a special significance in the portraits of the dead, arranged neatly next to the number corresponding to their place on the growing list of casualties we read in the newspapers, as indications of an ordered war. We had a sense, something we only felt in the brief flash of synapse to synapse, that these names had been on the list long before the dead had come to Iraq. That the names were there as soon as those portraits had been taken, a number given, a place assigned. And that that they'd been dead from that moment forward. When we saw the name Sgt. Ezekial Vasquez, twenty-one, Laredo, Texas, #748, killed by small arms fire in Buqubah, Iraq, we were sure that he'd walked as a ghost for years through South Texas. We though he was already dead on the flight over, that if he was scared when the C-141 bringing him to Iraq had pitched and yawed through the sky above Baghdad there had been no need. He had nothing to fear. He'd been invincible, absolutely, until the day he was not. The same , too, for Spc. Miriam Jackson, nineteen, Trenton, New Jersey, #914, dead as a result of wounds sustained in a mortar attack in Samarra, at Landsthul Regional Medical Center. We were glad. Not that she was killed, only that we were not. We hoped she'd been happy, that she took advantage of her special status before she inevitably arrived under that falling mortar, having gone out to hang her freshly washed uniform on a line behind her connex.

    Of course, we were wrong. Our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we though. It seems absurd now that we saw death as an affirmation of our lives. That each one of those deaths belonged to a time and that therefore that time was not our. We didn't know the list was limitless. We didn't think beyond a thousand. We never considered that we could be among the walking dead as well. I used to think that maybe living under that contradiction had guided my actions and that one decision made or unmade in adherence to this philosophy could have put me on or kept me off the list of the dead.

    I know it isn't like that now. There were no bullets with my name on them... There were no combs made just for use. Any of them would have killed us just as well as they'd killed the owners of those names. We didn't have a time laid out for us, or a place (pp 12-14).