Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

“Oh fuck,” the lieutenant whispered.

Someone asked him what was going on. I could see on his face, as he peered through his binoculars, the unmistakable look of recognition.

“Body bomb,” he said. All stopped. It was impossible to know who the man was or what brought him to that place, and it was hard to fathom because a moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it. Grief is a practical mechanism, and we only grieved those we knew. All others who died in Al Tafar were part of the landscape, as if something had sown seeds in that city that made bodies rise from the earth, in the dirt or up through the pavement like flowers after a frost, dried and withering under a cold, bright sun.

An interminable silence passed. As a group we were on a knee, looking out at the body, wondering what should be done. The lieutenant stood and turned to us, but before he could utter a word we were overtaken by blindness, as if the sun had fallen out of the sky. We were covered in dust and deafened before any sound could reach us. I lay groggy on the ground and my ears rang and buzzed loudly and as I looked up I saw the rest of the platoon moving on the ground, trying to get their bearings. Sterling was covered in black dust. His mouth moved and he gestured to his rifle, pointed out what he saw and began to fire at it. In alleys beneath us, closer to the riverbank, and in windows above us, we saw the tips of rifles and hands. The buzz in my head was oppressive, and I couldn’t hear the bullets as they passed, but I felt a few as they cut the air. The fight was hazy and without sound, as if it was happening underwater.

I moved to the edge of the bridge and began firing at anything moving. I saw one man fall in a heap near the bank of the river among the bulrushes and green fields on its edges. In that moment, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my home, in my misremembered history, until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance, a cruel trick of light that had always made me think of stars. No more. I gave up longing, because I was sure that anything seen at such a scale would reveal the universe as cast aside and drowned, and if I ever floated there again, out where the level of the water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.

Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium, as the tracers began to show themselves in sifted twilight, two words learned on a school field trip to the tidewaters of Virginia that appeared as I was shooting at the man, paying no attention then to the strange connections made inside of any mind, the small storms of electricity that cause them to rise and then submerge, then rise again. A fleeting thought of a young girl sitting beside me on a dock, back there the twilight coming on, the crack of tracers as I shot and shot again, the man crawling from his weapon until he stopped and his blood trickled down into the river in its final ebbing tide, brief as bioluminescence. Sterling and Murph came over and sat next to me and we took out more magazines and fired those into his body and his clothes were awash in blood and it ran down the low bank and flowed into the river until it all had been exhausted.

“Now you’ve got it, Privates. Thorough, thorough is the way home.”

I stopped firing and put my head in my hands. My rifle slung in my lap. I had taken it as far as I could. I looked over at Sterling. His face was serene. I wondered what he could do beyond this. No, what could I do beyond this? Where would he take us?

We regrouped. A head count revealed no casualties except for a few broken eardrums from the blast. We returned to the spot where we had been previously and waited for the QRF. There was a wet spot where the body had been and its remnants were scattered in pieces, some small and some large, others appearing infinite like the pieces we found near our feet: a piece of skin and muscle, entrails. Others were larger, an arm and bits of legs closer to where he’d been. No one said a word but in the silence we re-created the last few moments of his life in our minds. We saw him struggling and begging and asking Allah to free him, then realizing he would not be saved as they cut his throat and his neck bled and he choked and died.

The man had been made an unwilling weapon. They’d captured and killed him and eviscerated him and stuffed his abdominal cavity with explosives, detonated him when they were sure we had recognized him, then attacked. As the QRF arrived, we were told that the bridge had to be cleared.

Sterling called out, “Murph, Bartle!”

We took grappling hooks and tried to snag the larger pieces of the body. We yanked on them until we were sure they were free of explosives and posed no further threat. Murph threw the metal implement from behind a low wall and pulled until the chunks of the body resisted, then jerked hard on the rope. He looked at me when he had tugged hard on his piece, and then it was my turn. After we repeated the process several times, an officer got out of his vehicle and declared the bridge cleared.

As we continued through the city, people began returning in twos and threes and set about the task of burying the dead. I heard the muezzin call and the sun went down purple and red, painting the city softly.

Richmond, Virginia

That spring whole days and weeks were slept through and swept into the afternoons, never seeing a soul. I woke at random intervals to hear the school bus down the street loading and unloading different grades and ages of children, telling me the time based on the pitch of their chattering voices.

I had deteriorated more than one might expect in the short time I’d been home. My only exercise was the two-mile round trip I made every afternoon to G.W.’s country store for a case of beer. I avoided roads, opting instead for the train tracks that passed by our house on the other side of a long, low berm. The hardwoods canopied above me provided shade, and the light fell through the green branches unceremoniously. The heat had gathered throughout the spring and now became a dense murk in the trellised pathway of the train tracks. Atlantic heat: muggy, thick with mosquitoes. It was quite unlike the heat in Al Tafar, which had the surprising effect of reducing one to tears in an instant, even after having spent hours broiling in it already. This heat was somehow more American; it confronted you immediately on your stepping out in it. Your breath warmed intolerably and it seemed you needed to push through it like a swimmer.

Sometimes, when I reached G.W.’s, I’d wait just inside the wood line until whatever old pickup turned its last rusted quarter panel down the road, and I’d walk into the chime of the double doors through the dust it had left in its wake. I can’t really explain what that feeling was like. Shame, I guess. But that wasn’t all of it. It was more particular than that. Anyone can feel shame. I remember myself, sitting in the dirt under neglected and overgrown brush, afraid of nothing in the world more than having to show myself for what I had become. I wasn’t really known around there anyway, but I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that’s what I thought. Now I know: All pain is the same. Only the details are different.