Taking a thematic page from the psychological elements of the Hurt Locker and the symbolism of the natural world continuing and regenerating during war from All Quiet on the Western Front, Kevin Powers the Yellow Birds travels between Al Tafar, Ninevah Province, Iraq and the east coast as two young men go to war. Throughout the novel, it’s that simple, and that complex. Nothing, and everything.
That place, those little tents at the top of the hill, the small area where she was; it might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we’d ever know. So it made sense to watch her softly sobbing in the open space of a dusty piece of ground. And I understood why he came and why I couldn’t go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever. So sure, Murph wanted to see something kind, he wanted to look at a beautiful girl, he wanted to find a place where compassion still happened, but that wasn’t really it. He wanted to choose. He wanted to want. He wanted to replace the dullness growing inside him with anything else. He wanted to decide what he would gather around his body, to refuse that which fell toward him by accident or chance and stayed in orbit like an accretion disk. He wanted to have one memory he’d made of his own volition to balance out the shattered remnants of everything he hadn’t asked for.
- The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers
