The Yellow Birds

Starred review from July 30, 2012
This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire. Pvt. John Bartle, 21, and Pvt. Daniel Murphy, 18, meet at Fort Dix, N.J., where Bartle is assigned to watch over Murphy. The duo is deployed to Iraq, and the novel alternates between the men’s war zone experiences and Bartle’s life after returning home. Early on, it emerges that Murphy has been killed; Bartle is haunted by guilt, and the details of Murphy’s death surface slowly. Powers writes gripping battle scenes, and his portrait of male friendship, while cheerless, is deeply felt. As a poet, the author’s prose is ambitious, which sets his treatment of the theme apart—as in this musing from Bartle: “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 end of my war.” The sparse scene where Bartle finally recounts Murphy’s fate is masterful and Powers’s style and story are haunting.

July 15, 2012
A novel about the poetry and the pity of war. The title comes from an Army marching chant that expresses a violence that is as surprising as it is casual. Pvt. John Bartle's life becomes linked to that of Pvt. Daniel Murphy when they're both assigned to Fort Dix before a deployment to Iraq. Murph has just turned 18, but at 21, Bartle is infinitely more aged. In a rash statement, one that foreshadows ominous things to come, Bartle promises Murph's mother that he'll look out for him and "bring him home to you." The irascible Sgt. Sterling overhears this promise and cautions Bartle he shouldn't have said anything so impulsive and ill-advised. In Iraq nine months later, the two friends go on missions that seem pointless in theory but that are dangerous in fact. They quickly develop an apparent indifference and callousness to the death and destruction around them, but this indifference exemplifies an emotional distance necessary for their psychological survival. As the war intensifies in Nineveh province, they witness and participate in the usual horrors that many soldiers in war are exposed to. As a result of his experiences, Murph starts to act strangely, becoming more isolated and withdrawn until he finally snaps. Eventually he, too, becomes a victim of the war, and Bartle goes home to face the consequences of a coverup in which he'd participated. Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2012

Starkly, relentlessly absorbing (at first glance), this debut comes from an Iraq war veteran who joined the army at 17. Now he's a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, getting his MFA. His protagonists, 21-year-old Private Bartle and 18-year-old Private Murphy, are sustained by their friendship, but the war they were never really prepared to fight changes them both.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2012
Coming on the heels of two other Iraq War novels, the powerful Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and the blackly comic Fobbit (both 2012) is this first novel by a former soldier. It follows 21-year-old Private John Bartle and his friend Murph from basic training through their horrific experience in Iraq and Bartle's subsequent attempts, once he arrives back home, to reconcile himself to what he saw and did in the war. Flowing entirely from Bartle's perspective are long, languorous sentences that simultaneously describe the stark desert landscape of Iraq and the mutilated corpses that litter the battleground. Under intense pressure, Murph begins to dissociate from his surroundings, eventually leaving his unit's base camp, where he becomes the prey of insurgents. Powers' intense and insular prose effectively communicates the fear of young soldiers so inadequately prepared for the atrocities they will both witness and commit as well as the absurdity of continually capturing and losing the same city over the war's long course. Some readers, however, may find the novel to be somewhat static in its relentlessly artful depiction of the horrors of war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)