Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

What happened? What fucking happened? That’s not even the question, I thought. How is that the question? How do you answer the unanswerable? To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object’s destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell.

Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq

Fall came at the tail end of our first storm. We’d been granted a reprieve from the heat and the dust, both gently smothered by flat sheets of rain fallen from skies the color of unworked iron. We were still tense, but now we were tense and wet.

On a morning several days after the fight in the orchard a major came to our platoon area just before first light. Our platoon had done well in the orchard, minimized civilian casualties, killed a lot of hajjis and suffered only a few casualties of our own. This had earned us good duty: regular patrols with forty-eight hours on and twenty-four off. When the major arrived, we were just returning from one of our cushier patrols through the sparsely occupied buildings on the southern outskirts of Al Tafar. We casually tossed our equipment on the ground and lolled against the low concrete barriers and trees in whatever position was easiest to achieve.

“Platoon, ah-ten-shun!” barked the major’s aide as they sauntered into our area through a veil of camo netting.

The LT was snoring, stretched out on top of a concrete enclosure where we’d often wait out mortar barrages, playing spades or engaging in close-quarter wrestling matches until the last bits of shrapnel whistled by. He didn’t move. The major and his aide looked at each other, then at us, and we looked back at them only slightly more aware of their presence than we’d been the moment before. Even Sterling remained unstirred. All his gear was on, as taut and orderly as ever, but we’d spent the three hours prior to dawn waiting for a medevac that couldn’t fly through the cloud cover from the storm, carefully picking thin slivers of metal out of a boy’s face and neck while we huddled in a sewage ditch. We were tired.

The aide cleared his throat. “Ah-ten-shun!” he said, louder this time, but we enjoyed resting in the cool rain and the quiet of the early hour and hardly noticed.

Sterling roused himself, looked over at the LT sleeping soundly, and said, “At ease,” with what little earnestness he could muster.

We began to mill about as the major spoke. Only Sterling kept his military bearing and remained attentive. I think it was all that he had left at that point. On the periphery of our gentle domestic activities, citations were read. All the while, weapons were cleaned on dry squares of ground below camouflage nets and tarps, other boys ignored the rain and washed the dust and salt out of their clothes in red plastic buckets full of water gone brown and dingy with their filth, and still others traded care package items for packs of smokes, lighting up and coalescing into the major’s audience. But most paid the unasked-for ceremony the attention they thought that it was worth, and as the major spoke, the orders bestowing medals of gallantry and commendation upon us became soaked through, falling apart into wet organic tatters, whereupon they were received from him or not as each name was called, depending on the interest level of the boy in question at the time.

Only Sterling’s promotion caused any comment, and most of that because it was accompanied by a Bronze Star for valor. But we said, “Good job, Sarge” and “You earned it, Sarge,” and took turns patting him on the back. He gave the major a crisp salute, a sharp about-face, and sat back down against his tree trunk, the ribboned medal hidden in his palm.

After the major and his aide disappeared I noticed that Murph had missed the ceremony. Over the next few weeks I started to get the impression he was avoiding me. There wasn’t any particular thing that made me curious at first. He was aloof on patrol, which happened from time to time. When I saw him on the FOB, he would act as if he were in a hurry, or he’d turn his back to me when I tried to catch up to him, casting down his eyes when we’d make contact. But you give a guy a break at times like those. Shit, it wasn’t but a year or so since he’d spent the better part of his life buried in that goddamn mine he was always talking about. “Shipp Mountain,” he’d say, “now that’s a bitch. We’d go down in, three, four o’clock in the morning, laying on this cart and I’d just lay back and look up and think the whole world’s a couple feet above me, just looking for a seam to let loose and bust me into nothing. Damn, Bart,” he’d say, “I don’t recall seeing the sun for weeks at a time.”

“No shit?”

“Honest and true,” he’d say.

It was heating up in Al Tafar then, and we’d be out on patrol hour after hour, so hot that it seemed that the dust gave off its own light even after the sun went down, so fucking hot that we’d joke with Sterling to get a rise out of him. “Sarge, it’s a hundred and twenty degrees. Why don’t we surrender and go home,” one of us would say.

“Shut your fucking cock holsters,” he’d answer if he was in a bad mood. Those rare days he could be said to have been in something resembling a good mood, he’d look back at us as we struggled over a wall or tried to scramble up over the scree of a sewage ditch, and he’d smile and say, “Life is pain.” And I’d tell Murph, both of us blinded by a sun that seemed at times to be the whole sky, “It would have been nice if somebody could have eased us into this shit.”

I spent a lot of time trying to identify the exact point at which I noticed a change in Murph, somehow thinking that if I could figure out where he had begun to slide down the curve of the bell that I could do something about it. But these are subtle shifts, and trying to distinguish them is like trying to measure the degrees of gray when evening comes. It’s impossible to identify the cause of anything, and I began to see the war as a big joke, for how cruel it was, for how desperately I wanted to measure the particulars of Murph’s new, strange behavior and trace it back to one moment, to one cause, to one thing I would not be guilty of. And I realized very suddenly one afternoon while throwing rocks into a bucket in a daze that the joke was in fact on me. Because how can you measure deviation if you don’t know the mean? There was no center in the world. The curves of all our bells were cracked.

I couldn’t think of anything else. My days passed sitting in the dust, throwing rocks into a bucket, missing, didn’t matter. I thought a lot about that ridiculous promise I’d made to Murphy’s mother. I couldn’t even remember what I’d said, or even what had been asked for. Bring him home? What, in one piece? At all? I couldn’t remember. Would I have failed if he wasn’t happy, if he was no longer sane? How the hell could I protect that which I couldn’t see, even in myself? Fuck you, bitch, I’d think, and then think it all again.

I finally went to Sterling with my concerns. He laughed. “Some people just can’t fucking hack it, Private. You’d better get used to the fact that Murph’s a dead man.”

I scoffed. “No way, Sarge. Murph’s got his shit together.” And I tried to laugh off Sterling’s comment, turning back to him. “Nothing’s gonna happen to Murph, he’s solid.”

Sterling sat carving reliefs of animals into a broken ax handle beneath the slight cover of tree branches. “Private, you forget the edge you’ve got, because the edge is normal now.” He paused and lit a cigarette. It dangled out of his mouth and the ash grew long as he returned to his whittling. “If you get back to the States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are a fucking dead man. I’m telling you. You don’t know where Murph keeps going, but I do.”