Telling war stories: thinking about Kevin Power's "The Yellow Birds" and Tim O'Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone"

After finishing Kevin Power's novel set in the Iraq war,The Yellow Birds, I recalled having bought and never read Tim O'Brien's memoir of combat in Vietnam, If I Die In a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. Maybe it was that both use Army drill songs for titles that drew me to recall and pick up O'Brien's book. I don't know. But, I decided to read O'Brien's memoir in the hopes of better understanding Power's novel.

The two books converse with each other. While nominally a novel, Power's book has a whiff of memoir about it. The author bio on the jacket informs that Powers "served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar." Power's story of the fictional infantry man John Bartle takes place at that time and place. Despite the fact that Powers has clearly not intended this as a memoir, he really does seem to want to offer some kind of witness to his experience. Or, to offer Bartle as an unwilling witness forced to tell a story he'd rather not tell. 

Both soldiers are careful to hedge their stories with caveats and warnings. O'Brien confesses, "I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows,  from one who's been there and come back," but he realize that to draw this or any other such large lesson from the war is not "right." He writes, "Now, war ended, all I'm left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth" and ends asking: "Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?"(31).

Power's Bartle too is unable to draw pattern or meaning from his experience.  Imprisoned after the war for crimes committed during it, he marks his cell walls everytime he remembers an incident from the war,  "thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense." Later, he realizes "the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed in place. Connecting them would be wrong. They fell where they had fallen"(216-217).

Bartle is not a young man prone to reflection or philosophy. He seems to be telling his story only to himself. On the other hand, O'Brien is clearly writing a book as a witness to what he saw as a combat soldier during his year long stint in Vietnam in 1969. In distinction to Bartle, both before and during his year of war, the young O'Brien is obsessed with the justice of his war, why he is there and should he be there. He spends a great deal of time trying to define courage and whether he displays it.

But, like Bartle, O'Brien seems reluctant to see pattern and meaning in his war experience. His experience leads him to suspect that only people who have never experienced war look for meaning there. Bartle is truly adverse to drawing meaning from his time in Iraq; O'Brien claims to feel the same but he is much more apt to occasionally try to draw some redeeming value from his time in Vietnam.

He modestly and maybe disingenously offers his book as something far less. He asks, "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories." As both books make clear, war stories tell truths that call into question the very idea of truth.