The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers

  “John?” he asked softly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m Captain Anderson, from C.I.D.” He laid his hat down on the small table that more or less furnished the room. “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “My mother said—”

  “She said you left.”

  “I did.”

  He smiled. “You can’t run from us, John. Anyway, we just want to talk.”

  Something about the way he spoke seemed strange. His voice was gentle, but it had a power and certainty behind it. I remembered that as he spoke, Mother Army also spoke. Tall and athletic-looking, he also carried the paunch of a tenured gym teacher who lives alone and washes down the sports news shows with a six-pack by himself. His eyes were a little worn down. He was old for captain’s bars.

  “You know LaDonna Murphy.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He pulled a clear bag with an envelope inside it out of his inside jacket pocket. I could see that it had been torn open, roughly, hurriedly. “That wasn’t a question,” he said. He walked over to the wall where my few medals hung and looked at each one carefully, pausing for a few moments at the spot where I’d tacked up the photo of Murph.

  “You wrote this letter.”

  I didn’t know what to say. If writing it was wrong, then I was wrong. If writing it was not wrong, enough of what I’d done had been wrong and I would accept whatever punishment it carried. I was ready. Everything I could recall about the war flashed kaleidoscopically, and I closed my eyes and I felt the weight of time wash over my body. I could not pattern it. None of it made sense. Nothing followed from anything else and I was required to answer for a story that did not exist.

  The call of a whip-poor-will outside the window opened my eyes. The captain had not moved. And I could not comprehend what separated one moment from the next, how each breath I took would somehow be made into a memory, assigned its own significance, and set aside as the vast material I was left to make an answer from.

  He waited, then said, “What, you’ve given up?”

  “No.”

  “Not what it looks like.”

  “It’s different out there now.”

  “No it’s not. You’re different.”

  “No one cares.”

  “So what?”

  “I don’t know how to live out there anymore.”

  “Hmmm…I was well acquainted with that idea back when it was just called cowardice. Have you seen the doctors?”

  “Yeah, I saw them.”

  I remembered the long, weatherless February in Kuwait waiting for an unknown period of sequestration to be over, to go home, home. Day after day of staring into the desert stretched out on all sides like an ocean of twice-burned ash. We would be evaluated. Our ability to reenter the world would be assessed. The company was herded into a huge canvas tent. Clipboards and pencils and sheets of paper handed down the rows of boys on benches, dress right, dress. Outside the desert still expanded, slowly chewing foliage up the way a wave breaks on a shore, toward disinterested and inescapable infinity, but we were glad to be so far south of Al Tafar: hors de combat. The benches on which we sat were planted firmly in the sand and off toward the distant end of the tent an officer began to speak.

  “Boys, you have fought properly and were well led, so you are alive. Now you are being sent home.”

  I had in me a profound disquiet.

  “I will ask you to fill out the form affixed to the clipboard in front of you. This form will measure your level of stress.” He paused and pulled on the bottom of his starched blouse, straightening out the untidy folds. “Any man who feels that he is suffering from any kind of, oh, disorder, can be assured that he will receive the best mental hygiene care that the government can afford. More conveniently…”

  I began looking at the questions as he spoke, forgetting my place and immersing myself in the ramifications of the questions and the possible mental deterioration that might be in store for me. I ignored the dust, the haughty speech of the officer and the odd warmth of the February air.

  Question one: Were you involved in combat actions?

  I checked yes.

  Question two: After a murder-death-kill, rate your emotional state and indicate it by checking one of the following boxes:

  A. Delighted

  B. Malaise

  The officer was still speaking. “We have this questionnaire down to an exact science. If it is determined that you are overly stressed, you will be given the opportunity to recuperate in the presence of the best doctors available. You won’t even have to leave. You will go home when you are cured and have recovered your requisite hard-on for your country.” He laughed a little after the last part, as if to let us know he was still our brother, that Mother Army still loved us just as much as she always had, and wasn’t it funny that we had to jump through these hoops in the first place.

  I thought of something Sergeant Sterling had said after Murph died. Fuck ’em. Yes. Fuck ’em, my new design for living. I checked A. I went home.

  “Yeah, I wrote it,” I said, finally answering the captain’s question.

  “Sir,” he said, his tone changing ever so slightly.

  “Y’all don’t have me anymore.”

  “We can have you anytime we want, Private.” He took the letter out of the envelope. The slight sound of the paper unfolding filled the room as he began to read: “Mom, everything is going well here, Sgt. Sterling is taking care of us…”

  “Stop it.”

  “What?”

  “Stop. I said I wrote it.”

  “You know it was wrong?”

  “I guess.”

  He shook the letter. “We know what happened now. We know what you did.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Not what we heard. Why don’t you give us your side of it?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  The captain laughed and began to pace around the room.

  I felt like scum then, worse, and still do, so sometimes, on days when I remember well, when there is a deer gone down to drink in the creek behind my cabin, and I get my rifle out and for the hundredth time don’t shoot the thing and just sit there starting to tremble and then the sun is out, I’ll realize I can’t smell any of it, not the burned powder, not the metal on fire, not the rank exhaust or the lamb or the stink of shit in the Tigris, where we waded up to our thighs that day. I think maybe it was my fault, fuck, I did it, no it didn’t happen, well, not like that, but it’s hard to say sometimes: half of memory is imagination anyway.

  The captain wouldn’t tell me everything, only that there had been an incident. Civilians had been killed, and so on. Sterling had gone on leave just before it had gotten the attention of some higher-ups who felt they needed to come down hard on someone to prove that all these boys with guns out roaming the plains of almost every country in the world would be accountable. And Sterling never made it back to be accountable.

  So it was a rumor that had brought the captain to see me, the underlying truth of the story long since skewed by the variety of a few boys’ memories, perhaps one or two of them answering with what they wanted the truth to be, others likely looking to satisfy the imagined needs of a mother, abused and pitied as a result of that day in Al Tafar, which sometimes seems so long ago.

  Thinking about him now, I’ve come to realize that Sergeant Sterling was not one those people for whom the existence of others was an incomprehensible abstraction. He was not a sociopath, not a man who cared only for himself, seeing the lives of others as shadows on a thinly lit window. My guess was that he’d been asked a question and he had answered it as broadly as he could, not thinking of all the room he’d left for the gaps to be filled in by the men who had asked it.

  But I still believe in Sterling now because my heart beats. A lie by anyone on his behalf is an assertion of a desire to live. What do I care about the truth now? And Sterling? The truth is he cared nothing for himself. I’m not even sure he would have re
alized he was permitted to have his own desires and preferences. That it would have been OK for him to have a favorite place, to walk with satisfaction down the long, straight boulevards of whatever post he may have gone to next, to admire the uniformity of the grass, green and neatly shorn beneath a blue, limitless sky, to bury himself in a sandy shoal in the shallow of some clear cold stream and let the water wash over the pitted skin of his scarred body. I don’t know what his favorite place would have been like, because I don’t believe he would have let himself have one. He would have waited for one to be assigned to him. That’s the way he was. His life had been entirely contingent, like a body in orbit, only seen on account of the way it wobbles around its star. Everything he’d done had been a response to a preexisting expectation. He’d been able to do only one thing for himself, truly for himself, and it had been the last act of his short, disordered life.

  As soon as the captain closed his teeth around the hard “t” ending “accident,” I closed my eyes. When I closed them I saw Sergeant Sterling on the side of a mountain. Saw the rifle barrel in his mouth. Saw the way he went limp, so limp in that impossible moment when the small bullet emerged from his head. Saw his body slide a few feet down the mountain, the worn soles of his boots coming to rest in a clot of pine needles. Then I opened them.

  “So that’s it, huh?” I asked.

  He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I could see he was fingering a pair of handcuffs underneath his overcoat. “You’re gonna be OK, John,” he said. “Trust me.”

  “There are lies all through this.”

  “It’s just the way it’s gotta be, kid. Someone has to answer for some of it.”

  “Shit rolls downhill, huh, Captain?”

  “Shit’s rolling everywhere nowadays. It’s a shitty goddamn war. You ready?”

  I put my hands out, wrists up, and he clicked the cuffs in place in front of me. “You’ll be all right,” he said again.

  “I just wish more of it was true,” I said.

  “Me, too, but it’s lies like this that make the world go ’round.”

  “You mind if I take something with me?”

  “Go ahead, but they’ll take it from you when we get there.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. I walked over and picked up Murph’s casualty feeder card and my own and tucked them into the elastic band of my PT shorts.

  He led me down through the cool dampness of the stairwell and out into the street. His car was parked on the road across the footbridge and I asked if we could stop a minute when we got to the middle of the bridge. I threw the two cards into the river awkwardly and watched them until they had floated past the old railroad trestles downstream and disappeared far out of sight. It was still early. The sun had not yet broken up the mist over the river, and the sky was still white as if heavy with snow. I turned toward the line of trees across the river and saw the whole world in fractions of seconds like the imperceptible flicker of light between frames of film, the long unrecorded moments that made up my life, one after another, like a movie I never realized had been playing all along.

  10

  OCTOBER 2004

  Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq

  Murph, gape-jawed and crying, was gone. He left after finding the medic’s body sprawled in a spot of sunlight that fell through a hole the mortar made in the broken chapel’s roof. The tall grass was speckled with her blood. He wasn’t at her ceremony, where the brigade sergeant major stood her rifle between her boots and rested her small unblemished helmet at the top. He’d already left through a hole in the wire by then, his clothes and disassembled weapon scattered in the dust.

  He was gone but we didn’t know it yet. We lazed around our platoon area half-asleep beneath the light of a moon that cast shadows over the plywood guard tower and triple-strand concertina. Nothing told us this night would be different from any other until a few hours later when Sergeant Sterling calmly walked into the middle of our imperfect circle and said, “Someone had a big old bowl of dumbass today. Get your shit together.” He’d looked annoyed by our random arrangement. Some of us were lying down, some were upright; some grouped together, some sat a little off, alone. It was hard to tell what bothered him more: his boys sprawled out like we’d been spilled carelessly from a child’s toy box, a shitty head count, or the fact that one of us was missing. The incoming alarm sounded over the FOB, warning us of an event that had already happened, as usual. “Let’s go get him,” he said.

  We assembled quickly, gathered our rifles and prepared to advance into the city of Al Tafar. At every gate soldiers poured out into the alleys and neighborhoods, the last echoes of a hundred chambering rifles ringing through the evening heat. As we made our way out into the first fringes of the city, windows showing lit rooms were blacked with a shuffle of curtains. Our barrels moved from place to place. Dogs wilted into shadow as we passed. The city, past curfew, seemed vast and catacombed, its black alleys a tightly wound maze. It was impossible to know whether we’d be back in an hour or a week; if we’d come back as one body or if we’d leave remnants of ourselves out along the dank canals or in the dry fields. Nothing was certain. Plans seemed ridiculous, as did effort. We were tired, and it seemed that we finally knew how tired we were. We trickled out into the city like water wrung from a mop until we’d gone about a thousand meters toward the bridge over Highway 1. Eventually, a man emerged with hands raised high from a doorway. A spare jangling sounded as twenty rifles paused on him at once.

  “Mister, mister, don’t shoot, mister,” he pleaded. His language came glottal and broken. His fear was obvious as he stood there shaking, his body framed by the soft light in the doorway. “I see the boy,” he said.

  We bound him and sat him on the ground against the block wall of his home and called for a translator, who arrived masked in a black hood with holes cut out for his eyes and mouth. They began to chatter back and forth. Our eyes circled the street, bounced from window to streetlight, from the bent roadside trees to the darkest patches of the night. The translator had his knees on the man’s thighs and his hands gripped his dirty shift, his body language telling us the nature of the questioning: Where is he? What do you know?

  He stopped near his home to buy some apricot halawa for his wife. He and his friend the shopkeeper were talking of the heat and family and the occupation. He had his back to the street when the shopkeeper went stiff and pale, eyes wide and glossy. He put his money on the table and turned around very slowly.

  From the train tracks that edged the outpost, a foreign boy walked naked, his shape lacking all color except for where his hands and face were tanned to a deep brown by the sun. He walked as a ghost, his feet and legs bleeding from his walk through the wire and detritus.

  The man looked at us as he recounted this. His face pleaded, as though we could unlock some riddle for him. As he spoke, his bound hands waved. He paused for breath, finally, and put his hands on his head and said in his broken English, “Mister, why the boy walk naked?” as if we knew and were keeping it from him out of cruelty.

  Someone nudged the translator. He barked at the man to continue. He said that Murph walked toward them directly. Where he crossed the street, he left bloody footprints in the pale dust. When he reached them, he raised his head absently to the sky and paused.

  We imagined the soft blue of his eyes rimmed red with tears and the city appearing bent in the warmth of the evening and the dry breeze blowing the smells of sewage and cured lamb and the cool moisture of the river nearby.

  Murph shuffled his feet at them, and swayed gently from side to side, his body flecked in sweat. He showed no awareness of their presence. It was as if the basic forms of the city, the angles and composition of its softly colored evening hues, were there for him to take in: a quiet stroll through an enormous museum gallery.

  Sergeant Sterling gave voice to our impatience. “Where the fuck is he?”

  “Ooohh,” the man responded furtively, “I don’t know.” They had attempted
to break Murph’s trance, screamed and pleaded with him to return to the outpost. But as they screamed, the boy’s eyes caught the shape of an old beggar. He turned and looked through them both for what seemed to be an endless moment, then walked off.

  The eyes of the two men followed Murph as he walked clothed in nothing but the soft wattage of the streetlights, his form seemingly blinking as he passed from darkness into wan and flickering circles of light, then back into darkness. The huddled beggar scoured the garbage heaps on the fringes of a traffic circle. Murph walked through the roundabout and cars screeched to a halt as he passed balefully in front of their headlights. Before he reached the other side, all of the cars in the circle had stopped. Men opened doors and stood on the edges of their floorboards and watched him in stunned silence, the only noise the shoddy cylinders of their engines turning.

  When they last saw him, the bleeding boy approached the beggar, who in his sackcloth still crouched down warily, gathering his pastiche of discarded melon rinds and bread crusts. A knot of flies swarmed about his head, glittering in the yellow light cast off the streetlights of their audience, and the beggar took no pause to shoo them. The man said that he and the shopkeeper were like all the others, stunned and amazed by what they’d seen. Spotlit against the wall of an old crumbling hovel, the old man grabbed Murph by the hand and led him into the dark.

  He looked to the interpreter and then to us. “They go down the alley…gone.” We cut him free of his bindings, then turned northwest toward the circle. Our boots impacted softly against the dust, which settled like lime on the legs of our pants. Birds and shadows were caught quickly by our eyes, then returned to a fluttering periphery of hollow noises: a motor in the distance, an old man breathing from a doorway, the tails of his wife’s robes softly dragging across a mud floor. We moved until over the crest of a low rise we saw lights splayed out in all directions.