{"id":686,"date":"2012-12-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T20:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=686"},"modified":"2024-12-31T17:16:14","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T04:16:14","slug":"the-yellow-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/12\/15\/the-yellow-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"The Yellow Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kevin Powers<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Hachette<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, December 15th 2012<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Although we have all experienced war vicariously through news stories, novels and movies, there is only so much that embedded journalists, writers, and directors can capture.\u00a0 While they can observe and document, they are never directly immersed in the full reality of war in the way that the soldiers themselves are.\u00a0 This experience can really only be conveyed from the perspective of the soldiers themselves (the documentary Armadillo<\/em> is perhaps the most confronting piece of cinema I have ever seen), but very few are willing or able to do so.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Kevin Powers is both a talented author and Iraqi war veteran makes The Yellow Birds<\/em> an important book for anybody who really wants to understand the reality of the current American\/Arab conflict.\u00a0The narrator, John Bartle, is back in the States after his tour of duty and struggling to come to terms with his experiences.\u00a0 He is especially troubled by the fact his best friend, Murph, died in the field, his guilt deepened by the promise he made to Murph\u2019s mother to keep him safe, and by his own complicity in her son\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chapters alternate between the States where he now living as a hermit, attempting to find meaning in his experiences there (his eventual conclusion being that there is none), and his time training and fighting with Murph in Iraq.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The former passages are reflective and philosophical, often in long, rambling discursions that capture the associations and random drift of thought, while the latter are more descriptive and narrative in nature, relating his experiences in the field and the slow revelation of the circumstances leading up to and following Murph\u2019s death.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yellow Birds<\/em> captures the reality of life for those caught in the fight, a world of heat, thirst, and fatigue in which long periods of boredom and endless waiting are punctuated by moments of terror. It is the small details that stand out \u2013 a lark calling as they march past to retake a city that has been taken and lost again many times, the soft tinkle of Murph\u2019s grenades as they laugh together on the night watch \u2013 fragments of normality that jar against the world they now inhabit, one in which the moments before a fight are \u201clike a car accident\u2026the instant between knowing that it\u2019s going to happen and actually slamming into the other car.\u00a0 Feels pretty helpless\u2026it\u2019s there staring you in the face and you don\u2019t have the power to do shit about it. And know it. Death or whatever, it\u2019s either coming or it\u2019s not\u2026except here it can last for goddamn days.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading this novel, I felt as close to the reality of war as I hope I ever get, and there is a truth to it that comes from the fact that the author is writing from experience and shows us the true cost of the current conflict on all sides.  I leave the final judgement to Bartle: \u201cThere isn\u2019t any making up for killing women or even watching women getting killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them it [is] just like trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like acid was seeping down into your soul\u2026there is no making up for what you are doing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/reality-war-only-veteran-could-tell-it<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Powers
\n
\nOtago Daily Times review December 15th 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[153,370,177,18],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-153","tag-fiction","tag-kevin-powers","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1559,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/1559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}