Poetic but pickled.
Those were the words that kept coming to mind as I read the bestselling novel The Yellow Birds by Iraq veteran Kevin Powers.
Awarded the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, The Yellow Birds is the story of Privates Bartle and Murphy and the complicated relationships that war forges. Mostly set on the streets of Iraq, with a few glimpses of boot camp and home, both pre and post deployment, it is a gut-wrenching tale of the struggle to remain human in an intensely inhumane arena.
Poetic
From a literary perspective, the book is an incredible work of art. Powers has a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry and was a Michener Fellow in Poetry and it shows. From the first line – “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” – to the description of a mortar falling as “a small metal fist to the chest of the earth,” Powers uses powerful and beautiful words to paint a vivid and haunting picture of the lives of grunts at the forefront of war. With foul language and the vulgar yet accurate descriptions that seem unique to soldiers, he drags his reader through the streets of Al Tafar, through firefights and foot patrols, and into the moral dilemmas that accompany suicide bombers and artillery strikes.
But Pickled
Despite his skill as a writer, I had to put the book down several times, as the story is simply saturated with bitterness. With the exception of some gallows humor, everything in the book is anger, bitterness, misery, desperation, and negativity. Even Sergeant Sterling, who Private Bartle describes as being a heroic example with tons of awards and medals, is a violent, heartless, and repugnant creature. And the other characters, officers and NCOs mostly, whom Powers seems to think don’t even warrant names, are conglomerations of every horror story that has ever been told or made up about those in charge. There isn’t a shred of hope or happiness or goodness anywhere and even the symbols of hope and goodness are destroyed.
Overall, it is a beautifully written, bitter story that portrays the military as a place where everyone is corrupt and nothing good ever happens. That’s not the military I know. But what I kept wondering as I read it was – is this the face of PTSD? Is this the lens so many Iraq vets are seeing the world through? If so, that is simply heartbreaking.
You can find out more about Kevin Powers and The Yellow Birds here.
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