Halfway through our ongoing war on terror, a scholar at the University of East London estimated that a new book on terrorism was being published in English every six hours. Fiction writers were slower to engage with Sept. 11, but by 2006, the attacks and America’s response were becoming a touchstone for major novelists, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, Ward Just, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Joseph O’Neill, Andre Debus III, Lorrie Moore, Allegra Goodman, Sue Miller and many, many others. Even more than a decade into that insatiable conflict, two of the best novels of this year — “Wish You Were Here,” by Graham Swift, and “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain — revolve around soldiers returning home from Iraq.
And now comes a novel about the Iraq war written by an Iraq war veteran. Kevin Powers enlisted at 17 and served as an Army machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar in 2004-05. After returning home, he studied creative writing and poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Yellow Birds” is his first novel, and though it isn’t the first work of fiction about the war on terror by someone who actually fought in it, such books fill a relatively short shelf.
(Little, Brown) - “The Yellow Birds” is Kevin Powers’s first novel. The author served in the Army during the Iraq war.
“The Yellow Birds” reads like a collection of 11 linked short stories. Except for one that takes place in Germany, they move back and forth between Iraq in the fall of 2004 and the United States from 2003 to 2009. The narrator is John Bartle, a pensive, guilt-ridden vet recalling his friendship with another young soldier he calls Murph. “We were boys then,” Bartle says, and in the disturbing scenes of battle that he describes, it’s impossible to forget that these soldiers carrying out the fantasies of politicians back in Washington are barely old enough to vote.
Bartle and Murph form the sort of intense friendship that battle cements quickly. Two Virginia boys, they’d “had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams.” The younger man’s naivete appeals to Bartle’s sense of responsibility. As they’re getting ready to ship out, he makes a solemn promise to Murph’s mother to bring her son back home safely. But he admits early on, “The world makes liars of us all,” and the rest of the novel is a tortured search for how he failed to protect his friend in battle, an effort to “assemble all the marks into a story that made sense.”
The first chapter demonstrates what Powers can do so well, and anthology editors should be fighting over the rights to excerpt it from the novel. “The war tried to kill us in the spring,” he begins. “We stayed awake on amphetamines and fear. I pushed my chest off the rooftop and crested the low wall, trying to scan the few acres of the world for which we were responsible.” Patrolling the streets with his buddies, Bartle describes a life in which the most lurid scenes of carnage have become routine. “Nothing seemed more natural than someone getting killed,” he says. “We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare.” Watching a civilian being shot in the street, he wants to jump up and yell, “What kind of men are we?” but then suddenly he realizes, “I was shooting at him and I wouldn’t stop until I was sure that he was dead.”
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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