The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers

  “Platoon, ah-ten-shun!” barked the major’s aide as they sauntered into our area through a veil of camo netting.

  The LT was snoring, stretched out on top of a concrete enclosure where we’d often wait out mortar barrages, playing spades or engaging in close-quarter wrestling matches until the last bits of shrapnel whistled by. He didn’t move. The major and his aide looked at each other, then at us, and we looked back at them only slightly more aware of their presence than we’d been the moment before. Even Sterling remained unstirred. All his gear was on, as taut and orderly as ever, but we’d spent the three hours prior to dawn waiting for a medevac that couldn’t fly through the cloud cover from the storm, carefully picking thin slivers of metal out of a boy’s face and neck while we huddled in a sewage ditch. We were tired.

  The aide cleared his throat. “Ah-ten-shun!” he said, louder this time, but we enjoyed resting in the cool rain and the quiet of the early hour and hardly noticed.

  Sterling roused himself, looked over at the LT sleeping soundly, and said, “At ease,” with what little earnestness he could muster.

  We began to mill about as the major spoke. Only Sterling kept his military bearing and remained attentive. I think it was all that he had left at that point. On the periphery of our gentle domestic activities, citations were read. All the while, weapons were cleaned on dry squares of ground below camouflage nets and tarps, other boys ignored the rain and washed the dust and salt out of their clothes in red plastic buckets full of water gone brown and dingy with their filth, and still others traded care package items for packs of smokes, lighting up and coalescing into the major’s audience. But most paid the unasked-for ceremony the attention they thought that it was worth, and as the major spoke, the orders bestowing medals of gallantry and commendation upon us became soaked through, falling apart into wet organic tatters, whereupon they were received from him or not as each name was called, depending on the interest level of the boy in question at the time.

  Only Sterling’s promotion caused any comment, and most of that because it was accompanied by a Bronze Star for valor. But we said, “Good job, Sarge” and “You earned it, Sarge,” and took turns patting him on the back. He gave the major a crisp salute, a sharp about-face, and sat back down against his tree trunk, the ribboned medal hidden in his palm.

  After the major and his aide disappeared I noticed that Murph had missed the ceremony. Over the next few weeks I started to get the impression he was avoiding me. There wasn’t any particular thing that made me curious at first. He was aloof on patrol, which happened from time to time. When I saw him on the FOB, he would act as if he were in a hurry, or he’d turn his back to me when I tried to catch up to him, casting down his eyes when we’d make contact. But you give a guy a break at times like those. Shit, it wasn’t but a year or so since he’d spent the better part of his life buried in that goddamn mine he was always talking about. “Shipp Mountain,” he’d say, “now that’s a bitch. We’d go down in, three, four o’clock in the morning, laying on this cart and I’d just lay back and look up and think the whole world’s a couple feet above me, just looking for a seam to let loose and bust me into nothing. Damn, Bart,” he’d say, “I don’t recall seeing the sun for weeks at a time.”

  “No shit?”

  “Honest and true,” he’d say.

  It was heating up in Al Tafar then, and we’d be out on patrol hour after hour, so hot that it seemed that the dust gave off its own light even after the sun went down, so fucking hot that we’d joke with Sterling to get a rise out of him. “Sarge, it’s a hundred and twenty degrees. Why don’t we surrender and go home,” one of us would say.

  “Shut your fucking cock holsters,” he’d answer if he was in a bad mood. Those rare days he could be said to have been in something resembling a good mood, he’d look back at us as we struggled over a wall or tried to scramble up over the scree of a sewage ditch, and he’d smile and say, “Life is pain.” And I’d tell Murph, both of us blinded by a sun that seemed at times to be the whole sky, “It would have been nice if somebody could have eased us into this shit.”

  I spent a lot of time trying to identify the exact point at which I noticed a change in Murph, somehow thinking that if I could figure out where he had begun to slide down the curve of the bell that I could do something about it. But these are subtle shifts, and trying to distinguish them is like trying to measure the degrees of gray when evening comes. It’s impossible to identify the cause of anything, and I began to see the war as a big joke, for how cruel it was, for how desperately I wanted to measure the particulars of Murph’s new, strange behavior and trace it back to one moment, to one cause, to one thing I would not be guilty of. And I realized very suddenly one afternoon while throwing rocks into a bucket in a daze that the joke was in fact on me. Because how can you measure deviation if you don’t know the mean? There was no center in the world. The curves of all our bells were cracked.

  I couldn’t think of anything else. My days passed sitting in the dust, throwing rocks into a bucket, missing, didn’t matter. I thought a lot about that ridiculous promise I’d made to Murphy’s mother. I couldn’t even remember what I’d said, or even what had been asked for. Bring him home? What, in one piece? At all? I couldn’t remember. Would I have failed if he wasn’t happy, if he was no longer sane? How the hell could I protect that which I couldn’t see, even in myself? Fuck you, bitch, I’d think, and then think it all again.

  I finally went to Sterling with my concerns. He laughed. “Some people just can’t fucking hack it, Private. You’d better get used to the fact that Murph’s a dead man.”

  I scoffed. “No way, Sarge. Murph’s got his shit together.” And I tried to laugh off Sterling’s comment, turning back to him. “Nothing’s gonna happen to Murph, he’s solid.”

  Sterling sat carving reliefs of animals into a broken ax handle beneath the slight cover of tree branches. “Private, you forget the edge you’ve got, because the edge is normal now.” He paused and lit a cigarette. It dangled out of his mouth and the ash grew long as he returned to his whittling. “If you get back to the States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are a fucking dead man. I’m telling you. You don’t know where Murph keeps going, but I do.”

  “Where is that, Sarge?” I asked.

  “Murph is home, Bartle. And he’s gonna be there with a flag shoved up his ass before you know it.”

  I walked off, intending to look for Murph, when Sterling called after me. “There’s only one way home for real, Private. You’ve got to stay deviant in this motherfucker.”

  In a way, I knew it was true. Over the next few days Murph came to embody an opacity I couldn’t penetrate further. I had my own speculations. On our days off I gave myself free rein to explore them. I talked to myself in bunkers at the few rarely traveled edges of our FOB, fueled by cheap Jordanian whiskey. My mutterings in the dark were punctuated by short percussive sobs. I was becoming spectral, too. An afterthought. I began to visualize my own death in those raw, purposeless tubes of concrete between which I wandered in the evenings. If someone could have seen me, if I could have been seen, then I might have looked like I’d been hurtled into my future, huddling under roofs of an urban landscape just below street level. My mutterings would not seem uncharacteristic, but rather inevitable, and the passing men and women would not pay me much attention. They might in their passing talk say, “What a shame he couldn’t get it back together.” And one might answer, “I know, so tragic.” But I would not embrace their pity. I might be numb with cold, but I would not ask for understanding. No, I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives. But it would not matter. Couldn’t, because the rain would still fall on the alleys and culverts where I’d rest. It would fall at the edges of parking decks where one might remain for a night or two before discovery. It would fall in the city parks where the leaves or bare branches would conspire with a cardboard sign to keep
me dry, all legibility bled away from the pathetic messages I’d written on it. It would fall the way it fell in Al Tafar, soft and intermittently over the war, the rain’s stops and starts becoming nothing more than weathered sighs of resignation.

  When I imagined my death that night, sitting in a bunker at the eastern edge of the FOB, I imagined all of its possible permutations. I sipped from a bottle of Royal Horse and gazed out through the round entrance of the bunker, an aperture through which I could see the buildings and minarets tinged in purple and black by each variety of night passing through the hours. I imagined it all, the first wound coming soon, in fall or what would pass for winter, likely to be cold, apt to be. I’d bleed, to be sure, if I were not also concussed, boxed on the ears, and de- and re-pressurized in an instant. I would bleed. I’ll bleed. I spoke out loud, slurring the words slightly, my voice echoing with a dull reverberation in the concrete tube. Murph would find my body, but first I had to become a body, so that there would be something to be shot, but more likely there would be an explosion, more likely there would be metal made into sheets with jagged edges folded over into my skin and my skin would be torn. And as confusion always seems to follow blasts, I would be left to bleed until my face became gray and my skin all over became gray and thus would I become a body. I said “gray” and “body” and my quiet vowels echoed out the ends of the short tube and I’d be dead and A and O sounds trickled into the night, into the slight rain, and I saw Murph. I was drunk. I saw Murph cradling my head, its new concavity, saw him drag me by my arms. My legs, limp and dead, dragged sputteringly along the ground, where they bounced at slight shifts in elevation, but I didn’t notice them as they were dragged behind my body. I laughed and the soft expulsive H made no echo and I saw water and my body floating, my blood in it, and I thought I smelled my blood, my body, a ripe metallic. I was so drunk. I saw inside dark boxes, cheap tin caskets and Virginia and all the little graves lined up like teeth in the field and the dogwoods blooming and then the falling petals and my mother crying, she was crying. I made her cry. I saw the solidity of the earth, the worms, the flag and the tin box fading away and I saw brown earth forever and I thought of Murph and water and I mouthed the word “water” in a questioning tone and that is all I remembered before I woke up, all except the syllabic echo of my voice against the concrete going “qua, qua, qua.”

  The rain stopped. The weather mellowed. Our next forty-eight-hour rotation on patrol was uneventful. We were unaware of even our own savagery now: the beatings and the kicked dogs, the searches and the sheer brutality of our presence. Each action was a page in an exercise book performed by rote. I didn’t care.

  I hadn’t talked to Murph in days. No one had. I found the remnants of his casualty feeder card and the letter and picture from his ex-girlfriend in a laundry bucket, soap and all. I put them in my pocket. I started tailing him, trying to figure out what he was up to. I didn’t want to believe that I was watching the actions of someone who was already dead, so I searched for evidence that would contradict this; I searched for some grasp, at least, at life.

  I began to find his mark all over the FOB: Murph was here. A little tag: two eyes and a nose peering over one thin line. Sometimes the fingers over the wall as well, sometimes not, but always the eyes and nose, ridiculous and searching, and the tag, Murph was here. I considered the possibility that he had been doing this all tour. There were never any dates, at least not on the half dozen or so I found, but I didn’t believe that any of them were older than a week or so. I attempted to triangulate his whereabouts from those half-dozen tags, narrowing down the places he could be one by one. Over the next few weeks I tried a stakeout on the DFAC, a transportation company, distant guard towers, even the hajji market that the brigade colonel had allowed to be set up on post so that we could further assist the native population by participating in their local black market economies. I couldn’t find him anywhere.

  Out of ideas, I asked around. “Anybody know where Murph’s been off to?”

  “Naw, man,” they’d say.

  “How the fuck would I know?” said others.

  I ran into Sterling, his feet resting on a short stack of sandbags, a porno mag shading his eyes from the dulled sun. “Hey, Sarge, you seen Murph around lately?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “He’s been going up to the medics’ station and eyeballing some bitch up there.”

  “At headquarters?” I asked.

  “No, dummy,” he replied. “He’s eyeballing our medic, fat-ass Smitty.”

  “Oh, right. I’m going to head up there and see what he’s up to.”

  “Your war today, Private,” Sergeant Sterling said, and I headed out of our area, ducking under the netting stretched from bunker to bunker and from connex to connex. I used my hands to keep the sagging fabric from falling over me like a shroud. Thin light rippled down through the voids and fell onto my hands and my body and fell onto the dusty track toward the little hill where the HQ medics’ unit was quartered.

  I chain-smoked my way up the base of the hill. A small clapboard chapel stood in the packed dust that stretched out over the majority of the base. The white painted boards were chipped and peeling from the abrasive wind, and a few trees rose out of their potting holes around its perimeter, not yet taken by the earth where they were planted for shade, then left to fend for themselves in the heat of summer. A helipad was roughly scoured out of the dirt at the top of the hill. Behind it a series of tents and exhumed concrete culverts sat in a sectioned maze. A low stone wall surrounded the entirety of the small compound, snaking along the crest of the hill like an unwound ribbon of decalcified bone, seeming on the verge of collapsing back into the earth from which the stones were taken.

  The grade of the hill was gentle. I reached the top and looked back over the base and the fence line punctuated by towers and emplacements in the slight distance. Over the fence a road and a railway line ran together for a few hundred yards, edged by broad evergreens gone limp from the cool air and recent rain. Through those drooping branches the city sprawled out haphazardly like a drunk on a sidewalk, fallen where he may.

  “Hey, Bart,” Murph said.

  He sat in the shade cast off by the wall, seemingly palsied against the unfinished outcroppings of stone.

  “Where you been, buddy?” I asked.

  “I’ve been here. Here.”

  “You OK?”

  Murph’s hands were in his pockets. His stretched-out legs crossed at the ankles. He seemed to be looking at the medics’ station, waiting for some particular thing that I did not know about. The thwump, thwump of a chopper rolled out of the sky. The bird dipped and swayed in the air, coming in low over the horizon, out of the glare. I sat down next to him in the shadow of the wall, and we put our hands over our covers so they didn’t blow off in the fine particles of dust swirling in little spirals over the compound beneath the rotor wash.

  The compound began to bustle as soon as the chopper fixed its hover above the helipad. A medic guided the chopper in and two more medics had a stretcher at the ready. Even from our position at the wall we could see that it was stained rust brown with blood. Another medic, a girl, squatted in the dust next to the stretcher. She was blond and wore a brown T-shirt and latex gloves that reached up to her pale elbows. The short sleeves of her shirt were rolled up toward the gentle white arc of her shoulders, and her gloves were a shade of sky blue that stood out against the desert’s dull wintry monochrome so vibrantly that we were transfixed by every minute motion that they made.

  “You looking at this girl?” I asked.

  “It’s what I’ve been doing.”

  The chopper landed and the crew chief and the medics dragged a boy off the metal floor of the cabin, and he wailed in pantomime beneath the staccato beat of the spinning blades. His own blood followed his passage from the floor to their arms and onto the stretcher, and his left leg was no longer a leg but instead dangled like a coarse cornmeal mush the color of wet clay beneath his scissored pants. The
girl’s hands applied a tourniquet to the leg, and she took a position next to the stretcher and they ran beside it toward the makeshift hospital, and one gloved hand was in his hand and one gloved hand ran over his face, into his hair, over his lips and eyes, and they disappeared behind the tent cloth and the chopper took off, again listing in flight and receding off toward the horizon. As the whip of the rotors faded over the city, the boy’s voice became louder as he screamed in the small enclosure of the hospital tent. The few people wandering near the hill stopped. Murph and I did not move or speak. All those gathered listened as the unavoidable sound of the boy’s screams weakened and then died. We could only hope that his voice had broken, that it had become tired or had been anesthetized, that he now took deep breaths of cool air, his vocal cords unshaken by the music of his agony, but we knew it wasn’t true.

  “I want to go home, Bart,” Murph said. He pulled out a dip, tucked it behind his lower lip and spit into the dust.

  “Soon, man, soon,” I said.

  The passersby moved on, over and down the hill, reverted to their prior state.

  “I’m never going to tell anyone I was here when we get home,” he said.

  “Can’t help some people knowing, Murph.”

  The girl came out of the tent. All urgency subtracted from her movement. She peeled the gloves off, now splotched darkly with blood, and tossed them into a barrel. Her arms were pale, but her hands were dark, and I could see that they were small. I looked at Murph and I thought I knew why he had been coming here. It was not because she was beautiful, though she was. It was something else. We watched as she took a chunk of soap out of a dish and washed her hands in a makeshift sink bolted to a post. In the afternoon light, the soft down on her neck was visible and she was washed in the light. Sparse clouds floated by and she sat on the ground and lit a cigarette and she crossed her legs and began to cry quietly.