Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

Again, quiet. Scattered fire teams lay prone all over the beaten earth of the orchard floor. Wide, unblinking eyes exchanged up and down the line became a kind of language. We spoke in whispers, great huffs of breath gone monosyllabic and strangled of volume. We got up, resumed our prior pace.

As we walked on line through the ragged grove, we began to hear a sound from our front. At first it sounded like humbled weeping; closer, a bleating lamb. We moved faster as we were called forward and saw the enemy dead strewn about a shallow ditch: two boys, sixteen or so, their battered rifles lying akimbo at the bottom, had been shot in the face and torso. Their skin had lost most of its natural brown, and I wondered if that was because of the light flickering through the low unkempt canopy or because their blood had congealed in pools at the bottom of the ditch.

The medics had a private from third platoon on the ground, his blouse removed, his teeth chattering, mewling like a lamb. He was gut-shot and dying. We tried to help as much we could, but the medics shoved us back, so we watched and softly said, “Come on, Doc,” as they tried to put his insides back in his body. He was a pale shape. The medics were covered in his blood and he shook in his delirium. We stepped away and formed a circle under the light falling through the leaves. His lips turned dark purple in the light and quivered. Snot ran onto his upper lip and the shaking of his body threw small flecks of spittle over his chin. I realized he had been still for a while and he was dead. No one spoke.

“I thought he was going to say something,” I finally said.

The rest of the company fanned out. A couple of guys from the other squads in second platoon moved out of the circle. Murph sat with his feet swinging in one of the shallow ditches, cleaning his rifle. A few acknowledged that they’d been waiting for him to say something, too. When he only died, their faces became downcast and surprised. They moved aimlessly away.

Sterling stubbed out a cigarette near the boy’s body with his toe and a thin rail of smoke rose toward the tattered leaves and dissipated. “They usually don’t,” he said. “I only heard it once.”

An embedded photographer snapped pictures of it all: a private snaking his barrel in a ditch, the dead boy, as yet uncovered, gazing thinly toward the blue sky that had cleared itself of clouds high above the orchard. I thought that he had no regard for the significance of what he saw. But now I think maybe he did. Maybe his regard was absolute.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Who?” Sterling said.

“The KIA. What did he say?”

“Nothing really. I was holding his hand. Freaked the fuck out, you know? Fire was still coming in. I was the only one there. Doesn’t matter.” He paused. “I didn’t even know the guy.” Sterling grabbed at the collar of his vest and closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He nodded to the photographer and they began to pick their way through the debris; the branches and torn rinds, the dead and the living.

“What did he say?” I asked again.

He turned back. “Bart, you’re just gonna make it into something bigger than it was. You ought to go check your boy and quit worrying about that shit.”

I turned and saw Murph kneeling next to the body. His hands were on his thighs. I could have gone to Murph, but I did not. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating, too. How was I supposed to keep us both intact?

It is possible that I broke my promise in that very moment, that if I’d gone to comfort him a second earlier, he might not have broken himself. I don’t know. He didn’t look distraught, he looked curious. He touched the body, straightened the collar, put the boy’s head in his lap.

I had to know. “C’mon, Sarge. Just tell me.” He looked at me. I could see that he was as tired as I was. That surprised me.

“Well, he was crying,” said Sterling. “And he was all like, ‘I’m fucking dying, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, probably.’ And he kept crying harder and then he stopped and I was just waiting for him to keep talking, or whatever. You know, like in the movies or some shit.”

“Well?”

“He goes, ‘Hey, man, check if I shat my pants.’ Then he was dead.” Sterling clapped his hands together as if to signal that he was done with it, had struck it from his mind.

I turned away, overwhelmed and dizzy, and vomited until I had nothing left in me. But still the bile came out in sickly yellow ribbons. I rose from my stomach to my knees and I wiped it from my mouth. “What the fuck, man? What the fuck?” is all I could think to say as I spit into the ditch, then turned and walked away to the sound of a shutter clicking.

A few hours later we linked up with the rest of the company. The reserve platoon secured a perimeter. We were supposed to sleep. The day was not over for us. Murph and I found a hole and tried to nod off but couldn’t.

“You know what, Bart?” Murph said.

“What?”

“I cut in front of that kid in line at the DFAC.”

I looked around. “What kid?”

“The dead kid.”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s cool, man. Don’t sweat it.”

“I feel like a dick.”

“It’s all right.”

“I feel fucking crazy right now.” He had his head in his hands. He kept rubbing his eyes with the base of his palms. “I was really happy it wasn’t me. That’s crazy, right?”

“Naw. You know what’s crazy? Not thinking that shit.”

I had thought the same thing, how glad I was not to be shot, how much it would have hurt to be there dying, watching all of us watch him die. And I too, though sad now, had said to myself, Thank God he died and I did not. Thank you, God.

I tried to cheer him up. “Got to be at least nine eighty, right?”

“Yeah. Something like that,” he said.

It didn’t work. It was a shitty little war.

We moved on. A lark or finch called as I planted my tired footsteps into the dust. I looked over my shoulder and reinforced that I had been and was still going. My footsteps marked my passage. I made more, more firmly planted in accordance with my training. I held my rifle in accordance with my training. Through this I gained strength and purpose. I have leafed through heavy manuals and have found only these things to be certain in accordance with my training.

The empty city smoldered. We wore it to the bone with our modern instruments. Walls crumbled. Blocks composed of halves of shelled buildings allowed warm breezes to sweep up trash and dust and send them swirling in little cyclones as we walked. We took breaks for water, smoked where we pleased, reclined in chairs behind unoccupied desks. Empty shops with wood-fronted booths still stocked with wares from times at once ancient and obscure filled the bazaars. We placed our feet on the desks, as the soles of our boots could not offend the dead.

We walked in alleys. Saw the remnants of the enemy where they lay in ambush, pushed them off their weapons with our boots. Rigid and pestilent, the bodies lay bloating in the sun. Some lay at odd angles with backs curved slightly off the ground and others were wrenched at absurd degrees, their decay an echo of some morbid geometry.

We walked through the city, down pockmarked valleys of concrete and brick that bore the weight of old cars burning, seeming to follow the destruction as it spread rather than spreading it ourselves. No one around but an old woman. I caught glimpses of her, briefly, a shuffling gait as she floated out of sight. As we turned corners she was turning opposite and I had no solid picture but her form receding, shawled in an old quilt that gave her shapeless comfort.

We stopped at a corner. A parade of rats crossed the street, weaving through the detritus. By force of numbers they shooed a mangy dog away from the corpse that it fed upon. I watched the dog as it loped off down an alley with a mangled arm clenched tightly in its jaws. Soon the dog was out of sight and the lieutenant raised his hand to signal to the platoon to stop near a bridge that crossed over the Tigris and the sparsely wooded banks below. A spare quiet and the river flowing softly nearby. A body sprawled in the center of the bridge. His head was cut off and it lay on his chest like some perverted Russian doll.