Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

The call of a whip-poor-will outside the window opened my eyes. The captain had not moved. And I could not comprehend what separated one moment from the next, how each breath I took would somehow be made into a memory, assigned its own significance, and set aside as the vast material I was left to make an answer from.

He waited, then said, “What, you’ve given up?”

“No.”

“Not what it looks like.”

“It’s different out there now.”

“No it’s not. You’re different.”

“No one cares.”

“So what?”

“I don’t know how to live out there anymore.”

“Hmmm…I was well acquainted with that idea back when it was just called cowardice. Have you seen the doctors?”

“Yeah, I saw them.”

I remembered the long, weatherless February in Kuwait waiting for an unknown period of sequestration to be over, to go home, home. Day after day of staring into the desert stretched out on all sides like an ocean of twice-burned ash. We would be evaluated. Our ability to reenter the world would be assessed. The company was herded into a huge canvas tent. Clipboards and pencils and sheets of paper handed down the rows of boys on benches, dress right, dress. Outside the desert still expanded, slowly chewing foliage up the way a wave breaks on a shore, toward disinterested and inescapable infinity, but we were glad to be so far south of Al Tafar: hors de combat. The benches on which we sat were planted firmly in the sand and off toward the distant end of the tent an officer began to speak.

“Boys, you have fought properly and were well led, so you are alive. Now you are being sent home.”

I had in me a profound disquiet.

“I will ask you to fill out the form affixed to the clipboard in front of you. This form will measure your level of stress.” He paused and pulled on the bottom of his starched blouse, straightening out the untidy folds. “Any man who feels that he is suffering from any kind of, oh, disorder, can be assured that he will receive the best mental hygiene care that the government can afford. More conveniently…”

I began looking at the questions as he spoke, forgetting my place and immersing myself in the ramifications of the questions and the possible mental deterioration that might be in store for me. I ignored the dust, the haughty speech of the officer and the odd warmth of the February air.

Question one: Were you involved in combat actions?

I checked yes.

Question two: After a murder-death-kill, rate your emotional state and indicate it by checking one of the following boxes:

A. Delighted

B. Malaise

The officer was still speaking. “We have this questionnaire down to an exact science. If it is determined that you are overly stressed, you will be given the opportunity to recuperate in the presence of the best doctors available. You won’t even have to leave. You will go home when you are cured and have recovered your requisite hard-on for your country.” He laughed a little after the last part, as if to let us know he was still our brother, that Mother Army still loved us just as much as she always had, and wasn’t it funny that we had to jump through these hoops in the first place.

I thought of something Sergeant Sterling had said after Murph died. Fuck ’em. Yes. Fuck ’em, my new design for living. I checked A. I went home.

“Yeah, I wrote it,” I said, finally answering the captain’s question.

“Sir,” he said, his tone changing ever so slightly.

“Y’all don’t have me anymore.”

“We can have you anytime we want, Private.” He took the letter out of the envelope. The slight sound of the paper unfolding filled the room as he began to read: “Mom, everything is going well here, Sgt. Sterling is taking care of us…”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

“Stop. I said I wrote it.”

“You know it was wrong?”

“I guess.”

He shook the letter. “We know what happened now. We know what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Not what we heard. Why don’t you give us your side of it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

The captain laughed and began to pace around the room.

I felt like scum then, worse, and still do, so sometimes, on days when I remember well, when there is a deer gone down to drink in the creek behind my cabin, and I get my rifle out and for the hundredth time don’t shoot the thing and just sit there starting to tremble and then the sun is out, I’ll realize I can’t smell any of it, not the burned powder, not the metal on fire, not the rank exhaust or the lamb or the stink of shit in the Tigris, where we waded up to our thighs that day. I think maybe it was my fault, fuck, I did it, no it didn’t happen, well, not like that, but it’s hard to say sometimes: half of memory is imagination anyway.

The captain wouldn’t tell me everything, only that there had been an incident. Civilians had been killed, and so on. Sterling had gone on leave just before it had gotten the attention of some higher-ups who felt they needed to come down hard on someone to prove that all these boys with guns out roaming the plains of almost every country in the world would be accountable. And Sterling never made it back to be accountable.

So it was a rumor that had brought the captain to see me, the underlying truth of the story long since skewed by the variety of a few boys’ memories, perhaps one or two of them answering with what they wanted the truth to be, others likely looking to satisfy the imagined needs of a mother, abused and pitied as a result of that day in Al Tafar, which sometimes seems so long ago.

Thinking about him now, I’ve come to realize that Sergeant Sterling was not one those people for whom the existence of others was an incomprehensible abstraction. He was not a sociopath, not a man who cared only for himself, seeing the lives of others as shadows on a thinly lit window. My guess was that he’d been asked a question and he had answered it as broadly as he could, not thinking of all the room he’d left for the gaps to be filled in by the men who had asked it.

But I still believe in Sterling now because my heart beats. A lie by anyone on his behalf is an assertion of a desire to live. What do I care about the truth now? And Sterling? The truth is he cared nothing for himself. I’m not even sure he would have realized he was permitted to have his own desires and preferences. That it would have been OK for him to have a favorite place, to walk with satisfaction down the long, straight boulevards of whatever post he may have gone to next, to admire the uniformity of the grass, green and neatly shorn beneath a blue, limitless sky, to bury himself in a sandy shoal in the shallow of some clear cold stream and let the water wash over the pitted skin of his scarred body. I don’t know what his favorite place would have been like, because I don’t believe he would have let himself have one. He would have waited for one to be assigned to him. That’s the way he was. His life had been entirely contingent, like a body in orbit, only seen on account of the way it wobbles around its star. Everything he’d done had been a response to a preexisting expectation. He’d been able to do only one thing for himself, truly for himself, and it had been the last act of his short, disordered life.

As soon as the captain closed his teeth around the hard “t” ending “accident,” I closed my eyes. When I closed them I saw Sergeant Sterling on the side of a mountain. Saw the rifle barrel in his mouth. Saw the way he went limp, so limp in that impossible moment when the small bullet emerged from his head. Saw his body slide a few feet down the mountain, the worn soles of his boots coming to rest in a clot of pine needles. Then I opened them.

“So that’s it, huh?” I asked.