The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers

  “What then?” someone asked.

  The LT glanced timidly at the colonel, bit his lip and said, “They’re in there. We’re going in there.”

  Then it was quiet. It seemed we were all measuring the distances we’d travel in the morning. The bends in the road between corners of buildings, a low wall here, there an upended dumpster we could use for cover. The heights of the trees, low enough so we’d enter the orchard hunching, passing through leaves once heavy with citrus and olive, the trees planted in rows so orderly that we thought we’d have clear views from one end of the world to the other. But the orchard was much too large for that. We didn’t know that yet because we hadn’t seen it from the inside. It filled dozens of acres between two spurs of bald, grassy earth that drooped down toward the city. The ground in the little valley lay flat in spots, heaved up in others, the whole of it covered by the old growth of fruit trees and two or three times grafted branches.

  The colonel’s voice snapped up our attention. “We’re gonna drop mortars in that rathole for two hours before dawn. They’ll still be shredding those little trees right when you get up to ’em. We’re counting on you, boys. The people of the United States are counting on you. You may never do anything this important again in your entire lives.”

  He hupped the two sergeants and the embedded reporters he’d brought with him, and they pulled off from the wall and trotted back to the front of the building. We heard his vehicle start. I heard him ask the reporter how the shots looked and then he was gone.

  “Damn,” Murph said.

  “What?”

  “You think this is really the most important thing we’ll ever do, Bartle?”

  I exhaled. “I hope not.”

  The LT sat down in his chair again. The low crackle and hum of the radio was back on. The wind seemed to pick up a little and we watched the fires again in the hills. He looked scared and tired and he rubbed the small blemish on his face with the tips of two fingers. I forget most of the time that he was only a few years older than the rest of us, twenty-three or twenty-four, I’d guess. I never took the time to ask. He appeared older, though, like Sterling, and carried himself that way, or maybe we just granted him extra years because he’d done things we hadn’t: drunk at college parties with girls wild enough to run back into a strange room on a dare from their friends, driven a brand-new car.

  “How many times have we been through that orchard, through this town, sir?” a PFC from third squad asked.

  “The army?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This makes three.”

  “All in the fall?”

  “Yeah, seems like we’re fighting over this town every year.”

  I thought of my grandfather’s war. How they had destinations and purpose. How the next day we’d march out under a sun hanging low over the plains in the east. We’d go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of season. We’d drive them out. We always had. We’d kill them. They’d shoot us and blow off our limbs and run into the hills and wadis, back into the alleys and dusty villages. Then they’d come back, and we’d start over by waving to them as they leaned against lampposts and unfurled green awnings while drinking tea in front of their shops. While we patrolled the streets, we’d throw candy to their children with whom we’d fight in the fall a few more years from now.

  “Maybe they’ll make it an annual thing,” Murph snapped.

  Sterling came over from around the hawthorn where he had cleaned and loaded his weapons and taped down loose and moving parts so that they would not rattle. “Check me out, little man,” he told Murph. He jumped up and down, his hands at his sides. Silence. The only sound he made was the soft humph of his boots tamping down the fine dust. “All right. Good. Bartle, come over here, please.”

  I moved over toward Sterling and Murph and watched as Sterling placed black electrical tape over the shiny, metallic pieces of gear that could protrude and reflect a glint of light in through a window in the predawn as we walked. Murph stood there motionless, and Sterling adjusted his equipment firmly and carefully. The look on his face was one of care. He bit at his lip, furrowed up his brow and turned the corners of his mouth down ever so slightly. When he was finished he rubbed his hands along the length of Murph’s body, almost caressing him. “Give it a shot,” he said.

  Murph looked over to me and jumped off the ground a little and nothing moved or made a noise.

  “Your turn, Bartle.”

  He repeated the process for me, the same look of concern marking his face. When I jumped, there was no sound and Sterling patted me on the side of the helmet.

  “Sarge,” I asked, “do you think we’re gonna have to fight here every year?”

  “Hell yes, Private,” he said. “I was already in the first one. This shit’s gonna be bigger than Ohio State–Michigan.” He chuckled. He could tell I was nervous again. “Don’t worry. We’re gonna do all right tomorrow, OK? Just follow me, do what I say, and we’ll be back on the FOB before you know it.”

  He smiled at both of us. He seemed to soften in the strange light from the lamppost. “OK, Sarge. Sure. We’ll follow you all the way.”

  In the morning we woke to the narrow whine of mortars as they arced over our position and crumpled into the orchard. It remained dark. The sky was the color of brittle charcoal. What always happened to me before a fight happened then: a feeling I’d never felt until I went to the high desert to fight. Every time it came I searched for something to make the knot in my chest make sense, to help me understand the tremble that took over my thighs and made my fingers slick and clumsy. Murph once came close to describing it. A reporter had asked us what combat felt like. He’d worn a khaki outfit festooned with pockets and mirror-lens aviator glasses that could blind you from a hundred yards away. We hated having him around, but we’d been ordered to tolerate him, so when he came up to a group of us lounging in the dust beneath a large shade tree on base, saying, “Tell me the essence, guys, I want to know the kind of rush you get,” most of us ignored him, a few told him to go fuck himself, but Murph tried to explain. He said, “It’s like a car accident. You know? That instant between knowing that it’s gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car. Feels pretty helpless actually, like you’ve been riding along same as always, then it’s there staring you in the face and you don’t have the power to do shit about it. And know it. Death, or whatever, it’s either coming or it’s not. It’s kind of like that,” he continued, “like that split second in the car wreck, except for here it can last for goddamn days.” He paused. “Why don’t you come out with us and you can take point? I’ll bet you’ll find out.” The reporter left after that, something in the way we laughed made him stutter and backpedal out of our platoon area. But Murph was right about the feeling, and every time it began my body told me it couldn’t sustain the tightened muscles and sweat. But it didn’t end, so I tried not to pay attention to it.

  “Noise and light discipline from here on out, boys,” the LT whispered. I was glad not to be out on the point. The guy who was swung his leg over the low wall separating our position from the open field and walked out toward the gray shapes of the city.

  Sterling took a small canister of salt out of his ruck while we waited for our squad’s turn to move out. I remember that there was a picture of a girl with an umbrella on the label. Morton’s, I think. He turned the cylinder over and began to shake it over the earth beneath the hawthorn tree. I looked at Murph, and he returned my questioning expression, and we walked toward Sterling. “Uh, Sarge, are you all right?” Murph asked. Sterling spread the salt over the ground where we’d been set up the night before.

  “It’s from Judges,” he said, without really noticing us. Then he looked up and seemed to look past us, out into the end of the night, which somewhere over the horizon line prepared to reveal itself as day. “Move out, guys,” he said. “It’s just a thing I do.” So we did. In the distance behind us Sterling wa
lked, just barely in sight, spreading salt over the fields and alleys, over the dead bodies and into the dust that seemed to cover everything in Al Tafar. He spread it wherever he went, the whole time singing or muttering in a voice neither of us had ever heard him use before. It was a pleasant voice, friendly, and although we couldn’t make out the words, it terrified us.

  “I think he’s losing his shit, Bart,” Murph said.

  “You want to tell him?” I asked.

  The mortars still fell. A few times a minute we twitched from the noise of the loud impacts like kettledrums banging in the orchard. Small fires burned. The smoke rose from among the frayed leaves. Once, when it was nearly light, Murph said, “I’m gonna see what Sterling’s up to.” He raised his rifle to use the magnification scope to look back at him.

  “Well?”

  There was a brief flash of light as the first faint rays crested the foothills to the east and fell along the roofs and walls of the buildings’ pale facades. I looked back and put my hand up on my brow line trying to focus on his figure, barely perceptible in the receding dark. “Well?” I repeated, “What is he doing?”

  The figure in the distance was motionless. Perhaps all the salt was spread along this short stretch of the outskirts of Al Tafar. We were very close to the orchard and my legs were still quivering with fear. “Murph, what’s he doing?”

  He lowered the rifle. His mouth was open. He closed it, then spoke. “I don’t know, man. He’s got a fucking body.” Murph looked at me, wide-eyed. “And he’s not smiling anymore.”

  5

  MARCH 2005

  Richmond, Virginia

  Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed. I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind’s mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it’s hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war: the old life disappearing into the dust that hung and hovered over Nineveh even before it could be recalled and longed for, young and unformed as it was, already broken by the time I reached the furthest working of my memory. I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember.

  The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It’s imagination or it’s nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission.

  Forgiveness is an altogether different thing. It can’t be patterned, as a group of boys can become a calculus for what will go ungrieved, the shoulders slumping in the seats of a chartered plane, the empty seats between them, how if God had looked on us during that flight back home we might have seemed like fabric ready to be thrown, in the surrendered blankness of our sleep, over the furniture of a thousand empty houses.

  I’d been looking out the window for a glimpse of the ocean ever since the plane’s wheels left the ground. A dull cheer rolled from the first-class cabin back to the rear of the plane where the enlisted men sat. The huff of breath that exited our bodies became a grasp at joy when the plane dipped into the air and separated from the earth. The officers and senior enlisted men turned over the backs of their broad chairs, waved their hands and yelled, and we began to yell and smile, slowly, as if our bodies were underwater.

  The plane reached cruising altitude. The flight from Germany to the States was relatively short. The Atlantic Ocean was our last obstacle to home, the land of the free, of reality television, outlet malls and deep vein thrombosis. I woke with my head against the window, unaware that I’d been sleeping. My hand went to close around the stock of the rifle that was not there. An NCO from third platoon sitting across the aisle saw it and smiled. “Happened to me twice today,” he said. I did not feel better.

  I looked at the battalion scattered throughout the plane. How many didn’t make it? Murph. Three specialists from Bravo company who’d been killed by a suicide bomber in the chow hall. A few others scattered over the year. One from HQ company killed by a mortar on the FOB. Another I didn’t know but had heard was killed by a sniper. Ten more? Twenty?

  Those that remained were dark against the blue seats and thin squares of blanket covering them. They twitched and grunted and rolled within the confines of their business-class chairs. I looked out the window and saw that it was not yet night despite the fact that my body had sensed its coming a few hours before. We traveled with the sun, uncoupled from its dictates of light and dark for a little while. I watched the broad ocean spread out beneath me after the clouds thinned. I focused for what seemed like hours on crests becoming troughs, troughs tilting to become whitecaps, all of it seeming like the breaking of some ancient treaty between all those things that stand in opposition to one another.

  A group of clerks who remained awake had taken to ringing their assistance bells incessantly so that the attendants would be forced to make their rounds and lean into them, the smell of lilac and vanilla descending heavily from their tanned chests. The older ones performed this task by rote, pushed wide their shoulders, showed skin like browned wax paper.

  The clerks must have tired of their game after a while because it grew quiet. Only the deliberate hum of the engines filled my ears. I began the same thought over and over as we breached the sand and rock and thistle of the coast, but could not complete it. I want to go…I want to…I want…I…and then the coast greened as we flew farther inland. The earth was pocked with blue pools, the brown squares of ball fields and mazes of houses arrayed like strange reproductions of themselves. And green. It was impossibly green. There seemed to be trees growing out of every inch of the land. It was spring and some bloomed and from this height even the blooms were green and it was so green that I would have jumped from the plane if I could have, to float over that green briefly, to let it be real and whole and as large as I imagined. And as I thought of my descent, how I would take in that last breath of green before I scattered over the earth, I remembered the last word—home. I want to go home.

  “Wake up. We’re here,” the LT said. I looked out the window and saw a sign left open to flap and tatter in the wind outside the terminal. It thanked us for our service and welcomed us back to the States.

  That was it. The doors opened and we lurched down the gangway toward the bright shine of the airport. It glowed on the inside, and the curl of small neon letters against white walls and white floors addled my thinking. My mind clouded over. I saw a nation unfold in the dark. It rolled out over piedmont and hillock and fell down the west face of the Blue Ridge, where plains in pink dusk rested softly under an accretion of hours. Between the coasts, an unshared year grew like goldenrod and white puffs of dandelion up through the hardpan.

  We filed in through a special gate and stood in the cold wash of the artificial lights and listened to them buzz and hum. A few last words from the officers and senior enlisted men and then we would be released. The usual had become remarkable, the remarkable boring, and toward whatever came in between I felt only a listless confusion.

  The LT gave a safety brief. Standard stuff: “Wrap it up. Don’t drink and drive. If your old lady is pissing you off, remember…”

  We answered in unison, “Instead of a slug, give her
a hug.” We’d stood tightly in formation until the first sergeant barked “Dismissed,” but we did not scatter in all directions at once. Instead, the remains of our unit dissolved slowly, scattering from its center the way a splash of oil might over water. I saw confusion in some of the other soldiers’ eyes. I even heard a few say, “Well, what now?” It crossed my own mind, too, but I put my fingernails into my palms until the skin broke, and I thought, No way, no goddamn way, something else now.

  The ghosts of the dead filled the empty seats of every gate I passed: boys destroyed by mortars and rockets and bullets and IEDs to the point that when we tried to get them to a medevac, the skin slid off, or limbs barely held in place detached, and I thought that they were young and had girls at home or some dream that they thought would make their lives important. They had been wrong of course. You don’t dream when you are dead. I dream. The living dream, though I won’t say thanks for that.

  I made my way to the only open bar in the terminal and sat down on a stool that looked as if it had been brought from the factory that night. Everything about the bar and the airport was new and sterile. The tiles on the floor were clean and I saw where minute trails of remaining dust were left in my wake as if to guide me back. I ordered a beer and put my money on the bar. It was light wood lacquered to a mirror shine and I saw my face in the strange piney reflection and scooted my stool back a bit. A janitor swung a mop down the long tile path between the gates, and I took a swallow of my beer and glanced at the fine particles of dust I’d left on the floor in my wake.