"Something Happened": The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Writing this piece about Kevin Powers novel The Yellow Birds, I realized that I didn't know the first name of the narrator and center of the book, Private Bartle. I don't think that's because Power necessarily intended Bartle as an everyman. In fact, Private Bartle would be offended by such meaning-making gestures, or attempts at propaganda. Private Bartle's narration is an act of witness, told after the fact, after his time in Iraq. Something has happened, but Bartle needs to...get to that in the right way. Bartle's story isn't intended or presented as a lesson, or to make a point. And, that might be the beginning of a peace.

John Bartle (first mention of that name comes on page 44) almost seems to wander into the war; or, maybe he's wandering when it stalks him. He begins his story by telling of how "the war tried to kill us in the spring. ....While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dar. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

Bartle is a twenty-one year old at the start of his memory. Dominated by the war, all of his memories seems to begin in 2003.  At this point, he's been in the army two years and is Fort Dix waiting to be deployed to Iraq. At Dix, he meets Daniel Murphy, an eighteen year old raw recruit whom he adopts. When he meets Murphy, Bartle thinks about what he'll say about himself and finds a disquieting blank. He thinks," I'd been in the army a couple of years. It had been good to me, more or less, a place to disappear. I kept my head down and did as i was told. Nobody expected much of me, and I hadn't asked for much in return." Bartle likes the army because it has conferred a type of freedom upon him. Soon after enlisting, he realizes, "never have to make a decision again."

Of course, this doesn't prove true entirely or how to explain his friendship with Murphy. In his telling, in his memory, Bartle downplays his part in that. He downplays his part in much of what happens. As Bartle recalls, one day at Dix, Murphy simply appeared next to him in formation, says hello and Bartle gets chewed out for talking out of turn. Capping off his account of their first meeting, Bartle summarizes, There is nothing else to be said. Something happened. I meet Murph."

Murphy as infantryman is a bit over-his-head. His and Bartle's seargent, Sterling, basically asks Bartle to keep an eye on him. Without really making a real conscious decision, Bartle agrees. He further cements his bond to the slightly spacey eighteen year old from rural Virginia when he promises his mother, LaDonna Murphy, that he'll look after her son. He tells her, "'Of course,'" while thinking "Sure, sure...Now you reassure me and I'll go back and go to bed." This promiseso casually entered proves to change him dramatically.

Bartle proves incapable of helping Murphy, incapable of figuring out how he was supposed to, and incapable of forgetting Murphy or forgiving himself. Murphy's death forces him to recall the war in an obsessive way and yet he is never able to gain any answers or perspective. By the end, this almost seems an act of memory pursued to destroy the notion of answers and patterns, to mock the idea of certainty as the refuge of people who have never experienced a war, nor seen the worst of man.