Murray Ellison has been haunted by The Yellow Birds and has re-read it several times since it was published in 2012. That is why he offered to moderate The RVA (Richmond, Virginia) discussion of Kevin Powers’ first novel at our April 2021 Zoom meeting. He was delighted when Virginia Commonwealth University Literature Professor Bryant Mangum, one of Kevin’s former teachers, agreed to join our discussion.
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Private Bartle returns home from a year of intense combat in Iraq and immediately struggles with the realities of adjusting to civilian life. While waiting in an airport-bound to Richmond, Virginia, the bartender notices Bartle’s uniform and suggests that we (the U.S.) should bomb Iraq to oblivion and “turn the whole place into glass.” Bartle is unresponsive but spills his drink, then offers to mop it up. The server insists on taking care of it, then offers to pick up Powers’s check.“It’s the least I can do.” Bartle quips back, “Forget it, I want to pay.” He didn’t want anyone to say thanks or pretend he “had done anything but survive.” Instead, he carries the weight of guilt for acts he believes he has committed. Readers would need to struggle to decide exactly which acts he feels guilty for, then sort out if they would have done anything differently if they were in his combat boots.
Powers also served three years in the U.S. Army as an artilleryman, including a year of intense combat in the Iraqi war from 2004-2005. His account of the war Bartle faces on the battlefield and upon returning home is at the same time, horrific and lyrical. He joins authors like Hemingway and Tim O’Brien, who penned some of the most exemplary fiction-based accounts of soldiers in war.
Why Powers Wrote this Book?
In 2004, the U.S. Army assigned Powers, only was only two years out of James River High School, to ship out of Richmond, Virginia, and join the war against Iraq. After a year of combat, he returned home fully affected and matured by his experiences. Like many other soldiers who had engaged intensely in wars, his adjustment to “normal” life was difficult. He found it hard to talk about the war with his parents and friends. It took him about four years to even get started writing about his experiences. He stated that he began to write The Yellow Birds “in an attempt to reckon with what it was like over there.” Writing about his war through the lens of creative fiction made it easier for him than talking about it would have been. In an interview included in the 2012 paperback edition of the book, he noted that several great war writers and correspondents had informed his book.
Powers Education
As he was contemplating and working on his book, he enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), graduating with an English Degree. He later went on to earn an MFA Degree in Poetry from the University of Texas. His book was finished in 2011, published in 2012, and received much acclaim and several awards, including the Hemingway/Pen Book award in 2013. In its Acknowledgements, Powers thanks several of the teachers who guided him in his writing, including VCU English Professor Bryant Mangum. I also had the distinct privilege of being taught by this brilliant and insightful professor. He won the VCU Distinguished Teachers Award and has published many articles and a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I attended the same class Dr. Mangum taught on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and Ernest Hemingway’s writing as Powers did, but a few years later. I also enjoyed hearing Powers speak in 2015 at VCU about The Yellow Birds and a new novel he was working on.
Kevin Powers interview on PBS about The Yellow Birds
In his class, Professor Mangum focused on Hemingway’s sparse but powerful writing style, including how he wrote about the war. He emphasized that Hemingway was aware of the possibility that anyone, particularly a soldier, might die at any moment. Death is often in the underside of his stories, like the flip side of the coin showing life. He also wrote about the problems soldiers experienced after trying to return to civilian life. Powers’ writing is sparse and leads readers to his observations and understated ways. Some critics noted that his writing style is patterned much like Hemingway’s.
Impending Death
Powers introduces his book with a typical army marching cadence which involves someone luring a yellow bird to bread crumbs, only to smash its “fucking head,” This march and the striking tone of the cadence give readers clues about the tone of the novel and reading pace. The yellow bird could be a symbol of the army recruiters luring young men and women into fighting a suicide cause. In the middle of intense fighting, a general gives a pep- talk to the enlisted soldiers saying that serving your country today may be the greatest thing you will ever do in your life. Bartle hopes it’s not. A yellow canary is also a known device that miners place in a coal mine to signal there is an impending danger of death. Regardless of how we interpret this symbol, it is certain that Bartle thinks he has been lured into a deadly situation he does not support.
Our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we thought. It seems absurd now that we saw each death as an affirmation of our lives. That each one of those deaths belonged to a time and therefore that that time was not ours. We didn’t know the list {of those killed and severely injored} was limitless…We didn’t consider that we could be among the walking dead as well.
First-Person Account
One strength of Powers’ novel is that through his first-person account he can bring readers into his war and post-war experiences by contrasting the stark violence of war with incredibly poetical writing. We see everything through the eyes of Private Bartle who has been severely desensitized by the war and has become emotionally and spiritually removed from his day-to-day duties and relationships. Bartle is shutting down, aging with each new horrific experience. He has these moments where he describes a scene so vividly, so wonderfully that we might have felt our heart rates increase. Though he cares about his war buddy, Murph, there is this distance between him and everyone else. He is solely operating on survival instinct as someone who has reached a limit of emotional response.
“A Soldier’s Home,” by Ernest Hemingway Compared to The Yellow Birds
Hemingway observed and participated at different levels in several twentieth-century wars. In “A Soldier’s Home,” Hemingway’s character (Krebs) is initially unwilling to discuss his war experiences with anyone. He moves into a soldier’s home with his parents, has difficulties adjusting to their expectations and to the friends he had known before the war. After repeated failures to re-engage with his former associates, he decides to go public and share his experiences. But to keep peoples’ attention, he has to continually exaggerate or make up war stories he never did experience personally:
At first, Krebs did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk, but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all, he had to lie. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. His lies were quite small…. consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done, or heard of.
Like Krebs, Private Bartle has difficulty adjusting to home life after his discharge. But unlike Krebs, he feels the need to keep his thoughts and experiences private. He appeared to suffer from what we currently call post-traumatic war experiences (PTSD). Picking up on Bartle’s thoughts:
I had deteriorated more than one might expect upon returning home…I can’t really explain what the feeling was like. Shame, I guess…I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone, they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Now I know: All pain is the same. Only the details are different.
Bartle describes the pain his mother felt after he had been home several days without talking with her or attempting to contact his former friends:
My mother walked into my room at eleven o’clock one morning. I was still in bed. The phone rang, and Ma picked it up. She put the mouthpiece to her ear. “You’ve gotta talk with people,” John. “It’s not good to be by yourself so much.”
As a parent, it is hard for me to imagine how I would understand or try to adjust to a son or daughter coming back from a war who is facing such difficult adjustment issues. The Yellow Birds also addresses the issue of a parent trying to understand and adjust to the unknown facts about a son who was killed in action. Why was Bartle implicated in this tragedy? The mystery of this novel revolves around this question. Private Bartle withdrew into himself and was only reunited with his friends when they pulled him from the James River after a possible attempted suicide.
The RVA Classic Book Club Discussion of The Yellow Birds
We discussed Hemingway, Powers, and The Yellow Birds at our April 2021 Zoom meeting of the RVA Classic Book Club, where I had invited Professor Mangum to attend. He agreed to join because he thought Powers was such a gifted writer when he helped guide him with The Yellow Birds. He also said that he thought it was such an exceptional book. He noted that Powers was quiet and reserved in his Hemingway class and did not want to talk much about his war experiences. Notably, Powers would have probably been at least 7 or 8 years older than most of the undergraduate students when he attended VCU. It is easy to conclude from his writing that he gained much from Professor Mangum’s class about Hemingway and his war writing style. Powers stated in his book that he read many war-related books as he was outlining The Yellow Birds. As in Hemingway’s works, the inevitability of death plays a central role in his book. Powers in poetic style about the subject of the war as a living entity trying to threaten death at every minute:
THE WAR TRIED to kill us in the spring. As green greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire… We were not destined to survive. The fact is that we were not destined at all…The war would take what it could get. It was patient. It didn’t care about our objectives, or boundaries, whether you were loved or not. While I slept that summer, the war came to me in my dreams and showed me …and I knew the war would have its way.
There are no allusions in his mind about the war being a purposeful pursuit, like there may have been for soldiers fighting in World War I or II. To keep his focus, he has to kill dozens of Iraqi soldiers. He also passively helps to murder an elderly civilian couple and engage in immoral and illegal activities involving his war buddy. I won’t discuss these here so as not to spoil the novel for those who haven’t read the novel.
Time-Shifting
One of the most interesting literary techniques that Powers uses is his constant time shifting between pre-war in Richmond, preparing to train for Iraq, scenes in battle, and post-war experiences. These scenes come at readers in no particular order because Powers relates that:
There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told, and what is true. 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.
Writing about his war experiences in such a unique non-linear style makes the reader feel disoriented, which is exactly how Bartle experiences the war. In our book club, several respondents noted that the constant time shifts jarred them. I suggested that this book may require several readings to better understand the actual sequence of Bartle’s experiences.
Powers said that he thought Americans were living comfortable and convenient lives at the same time that young men and women are being wounded, killed, and emotionally scarred in service to their country. Due to these stark reference gaps, he didn’t think that he could verbally explain the harsh realities of this violent and senseless war to anyone after returned from the fighting. How could he explain to his young former friends, who enjoyed a privileged life of partying, dating, and enjoying life, about the different reality that he had experienced than theirs?
Bartle didn’t want to be decorated, thanked, pitied, or spend time recounting or having to lie about his war experiences as Krebs did.
Bartle Accepts his Fate
Bartle ultimately accepts his fate of having to serve time in a military prison in the U.S., even if he wasn’t responsible for all the acts that he was accused of and found guilty for. Perhaps, he felt that his time served would help to relieve him of the guilt for those experiences. As in Hemingway’s works, much of Bartle’s story is unexplained and left to the reader to interpret. For example, we do not know what is written in Bartle’s forged letter to his war buddy’s mother? Bartle never mentions what he was accused of and found guilty of during the military trial?
Most importantly, can Bartle eventually come back to life and adjust to “normalcy?”Can any soldier who has engaged in violent combat and killing ever return home and be normal? Perhaps it is comforting to know that Powers worked out some of his issues with his writing of The Yellow Birds.
Well, we really don’t know if he did, but “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”*
Invitation to Offer Your Comments
What are your comments? Please send them to me directly in the dialogue box below, and I will address them directly in a short time. To participate in the RVA Classics Book Club wherever you are via Zoom, contact Murray Ellison at ellisonms2@alumni.vcu.edu
* Last words of Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
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Author of Litchatte, Murray Ellison
Murray Ellison received a Master’s in English Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech. He is married and has three adult daughters and a granddaughter! He ‘retired’ as the Director of Community Corrections for the Virginia Department of Correctional Education in 2009. His MA thesis, on Edgar Allan Poe and 19th-Century Science, was published in 2015. He founded Litchatte.com in 2016 and is Chief Editor. He is the Outreach Coordinator for the First Mennonite Church of Richmond and also contributes to music there. He is an editor for the International Correctional Education Journal and a Co-Editor of Mystic Verses(2016) by Shambhushivananda. He’s a volunteer tour guide for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia. For a decade, he has been teaching literature and music classes for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Richmond, LLI Chesterfield, and The Shepherd’s Center Open University. When tapped, he teaches adjunct English and writing classes at Richard Bland College of William & Mary College.
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