Book: The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers Instructions: Character analysis of Murphy.

How does the Iraq War change the character as he comes of age or searches for his own identity? ( Essay in 500 words) . The first page of the essay may already contain a brief topic outline, no longer than one page and without complete sentences.

Introduction: The Yellow Birds is a story of two young soldiers, Bartle and Murphy, who went on the Iraq war. Both the soldiers are together at the training when the Sergeant as well the mother of Murphy commands and requests respectively to take care of Murphy. The book, on its debut has been shortlisted for the Guardian award. The book 'Yellow Birds' is a brilliant book by Kevin Powers' which gives an essential description of the Iraq War and its impact on those who were engaged in the war. In the first phase of the book, the story revolves around Bartles promise to Murphys mother which he could adhere to. Bartles life is changed with the uttering of the two words, I promise. And in the other part of the book the author talks about the feelings and emotions of a war returning soldier. The main story in this book revolves around the battle relationship between Bartle and Murphy. And the readers are beautifully engaged till the death of Murphy. The books replicates the psychological impacts of war on the soldiers. The book is written in an excellent loquacious style which represents the aesthetic sense of the writer. The real essence of the book comes in the form of explanation and manifestations of emotions on the war which makes the book to become a classic. The book has given a true picturesque of the way war breaks down the soldiers and the difficulties soldier face while coming back to society. The book travels in the past and future at the same time

Murphy's greatest flaw is that he cannot shake his longing for human compassion. "He wanted to choose. He wanted to want," and this makes him vulnerable to deeper suffering. He begins to drift away mentally, until he is gone. His body slips "through a hole in the wire ... his clothes and disassembled weapon scattered in the dust."

). This is a novel about death, where it is clear that even those who come home had to kill something inside of themselves in order to survive. The other tragedy that this novel exposes is what the Iraq war did to thousands of men who were barely out of boyhood. First, it turns readers into active participants, enlisting them in a sense as co-authors who fit together the many memories and guess at what terrible secret lies in wait, the truth behind Murphys death. Because they lean forward instead of back, because they participate in piecing together the puzzle, they are made more culpable. Powers earned a masters degree in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. This is evident in the music of his sentences, the shining details he delivers like tiny gems in so many of his descriptions. The soldiers wake to the narrow whine of mortars as they arced over our position and crumpled into the orchard, and Bartles body pulses with an all encompassing type of pain like my whole skin was made out of a fat lip. His language is as dazzling as the flashes of a muzzle.

The title of Kevin Powers' debut novel comes from a marching song he learned on manoeuvres with the US army.

One of the gifts The Yellow Birds gives readers is a clear view into the way war breaks down soldiers and why it can be so difficult to reenter society. On the plane back to the U.S., Bartle says, "I woke with my head against the window, unaware that I'd been sleeping. My hand went to close around the stock of the rifle that was not there. An NCO from the third platoon sitting across the aisle saw it and smiled. 'Happened to me twice today,' he said. I did not feel better" (101). This situation is anchored by previous descriptions of combat and long, sleepless missions. The book moves back and forth in time, telling the war story and reentry story in alternating chapters. Later in the book, Bartle recalls a time during the war when he was wandering the streets and speaking softly to himself, and he muses on the prophetic nature of the scene: "If someone could have seen me, if I could have been seen, then I might have looked like I'd been plunged into my future, grouping under roofs of an urban landscape just below street level. My mutterings would not seem uncharacteristic, but rather inevitable, and the passing men and women would not pay me much attention. They might in their passing talk say, 'What a shame that he couldn't get it back together.' And one might answer, 'I know, so tragic.' But I would not embrace their pity. I might be numb with cold, but I would not ask for understanding. No, I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives" (157). The other tragedy that this novel exposes is what the Iraq war did to thousands of men who were barely out of boyhood. During basic training, Bartle says,"We'd had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams. So we'd come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be" (37). Then, on the plane ride home from the war, he says,"I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind's mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it's hard to get close to saying what a heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those

afterthoughts which were the beginning and the end of my war: the old life disappearing into the dust that hung and hovered over Nineveh even before it could be recalled and longed for, young and unformed as it was, already broken by the time I reached the furthest working of my memory" (99). This is a novel about death, where it is clear that even those who come home had to kill something inside of themselves in order to survive. The Yellow Birds is a good book, but not a pleasant book. It is an important book, but not one to be relished. I recommend it, but I think it would be particularly useful to read it with a friend, book club or class. This story is too real for entertainment and demands to be considered deeply. I recommend doing that with a friend

At the age of 17, Kevin Powers enlisted in the Army and eventually served as a machine-gunner in Iraq, where the sky is vast and catacombed with clouds, where soldiers stay awake on fear and amphetamines and Tabasco sauce daubed into their eyes, where rifles bristle from rooftops and bullets sound like small rips in the air. Now he has channeled his experience into The Yellow Birds, a first novel as compact and powerful as a footlocker full of ammo.

In the northern city of Al Tafar, 21-year-old Pvt. John Bartle and his platoon engage in a bloody campaign to control the city. Before his deployment Bartle promised the mother of 18-year-old Pvt. Daniel Murphy he would take care of her son, bring him back alive. It is a promise that, as Powers reveals from the earliest pages, he will not keep. But in the meantime they suffer through basic training together, followed by Iraqi street fights that leave rooftops covered in brass casings and doorsteps splashed with blood all under the command of the growly, battle-scarred Sergeant Sterling, who punches them in the face one moment and claps them on the back the next, ordering them to combat both the insurgents and the mental stress that threaten to send them home in a box with a flag draped over the top.

Though a colonel in a crisp uniform smelling of starch does his best half-assed Patton imitation and tells the young soldiers to give em hell, Bartle feels little sense of drive or destination or purpose. He knows this is not his grandfathers war. He will kill some. He will drive away others. And then, while he patrols the streets, he will throw candy to their children with whom wed fight in the fall a few more years from now. There is a helpless resolve when he dodges bullets and ducks mortar blasts and studies corpses and considers going AWOL, doing his best to survive while wondering how he can honor his promise to keep Murphy intact, when he feels as if he himself is disintegrating. The novel moves, fitfully, through Virginia and Iraq and Germany and New Jersey and Kentucky, from 2003 to 2009. Recalling the war, Bartle says, is like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion. This serves the story in two ways. First, it turns readers into active participants, enlisting them in a sense as co-authors who fit together the many memories and guess at what terrible secret lies in wait, the truth behind Murphys death. Because they lean forward instead of back, because they participate in piecing together the puzzle, they are made more culpable. Then too, the fractured structure replicates the books themes. Like a chase scene made up of sentences that run on and on and ultimately leave readers breathless, or like a concert description that stops and starts, that swings and

sways, that makes us stamp our feet and clap our hands the nonlinear design of Powerss novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. War destroys. It doesnt just rip through bone and muscle, stone and steel; it fragments the mind as a fist to a mirror might create thousands of bloodied, glittering shards. When Bartle ends up confined to a military prison, he has only his memories to keep him company, memories he tries to chase down even as their logic and sequence evade him: My first few months inside, I spent a lot of time trying to piece the war into a pattern. I developed the habit of making a mark on my cell wall when I remembered a particular event, thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense. But the marks begin to run together, and disorder predominates. Eventually, he knows, the walls will appear scraped over entirely, scoured down to a blind white patina. Bartles uncertain memory a willful forgetfulness partnered with the inability to control images of so many bullets tearing through bodies and making them dance makes it impossible for him to return stateside. Throughout the war, he has wanted nothing more than to come home, but once home, everything reminds him of something else. His hand closes around the stock of a rifle that isnt there. From the moment he steps off the transport plane and walks through the airport, the ghosts of the dead filled the empty seats of every gate I passed: boys destroyed by mortars and rockets and bullets and I.E.D.s to the point that when we tried to get them to a

medevac, the skin slid off, or limbs barely held in place detached, and I thought that they were young and had girls at home or some dream that they thought would make their lives important. When his mother embraces him and tells him hes home at last, he doesnt believe her. A fan whirs, a train rattles in the distance and Bartles pulse flutters up into his eyes, every little thing a trapdoor sending him into that dark place where the alligators wait with widening jaws. In this way, The Yellow Birds joins the conversation with books like Leslie Marmon Silkos Ceremony, Brian Turners Phantom Noise and Tim OBriens classic, The Things They Carried and wakes the readers of the spoiled cities of America to a reality most would rather not face. Here we are, fretting over our Netflix queues while halfway around the world people are being blown to bits. And though we might slap a yellow ribbon magnet to our trucks tailgate, though we might shake a soldiers hand in the airport, we ignore the fact that in America an average of 18 veterans are said to commit suicide every day. What a shame, we say, and then move on quickly to whatever other agonies and entertainments occupy the headlines. Powers earned a masters degree in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. This is evident in the music of his sentences, the shining details he delivers like tiny gems in so many of his descriptions. The soldiers wake to the narrow whine of mortars as they arced over our position and crumpled into the orchard, and Bartles body pulses with an all-encompassing type of pain like my

whole skin was made out of a fat lip. His language is as dazzling as the flashes of a muzzle. Of course, fancy phrasing can be a distraction as well, and Powers occasionally stumbles especially when Bartle is thoughtfully processing the war or staring moodily out at the landscape. Consider this half-page passage about clouds bunching over the ocean: I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my minds mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though its hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war. . . . On it goes, with lengthy brow-furrowing meditation and descriptions of the Iraqi deserts enclosure and how lost Bartle felt among the innumerable grains of sand. Passages like this seem better suited to sonnets about strummed lutes and foggy moors. The emotional recoil of the war is strongest when Powers remains in scene, when he keeps his soldiers on the march. Midway through the novel, a group of soldiers group around a gut-shot private. His skin pales even as his lips go dark purple. His body shakes and spittle runs down his chin. Everyone leans in to hear what he will say. But when he dies without speaking, his comrades cast down their faces in frustrated surprise before wandering aimlessly away. Bartle wishes aloud that the dying soldier would have said something, and his sergeant responds: They usually dont.

But Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the ill-health of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen.
Benjamin Percy is the author of a novel, The Wilding, and two story collections. His new novel, Red Moon, will be published next spring.

The title of Kevin Powers' debut novel comes from a marching song he learned on manoeuvres with the US army. "A yellow bird/With a yellow bill," it goes, "was perched upon/ my windowsill./I lured him in/With a piece of bread/And then I smashed/His fucking head " The lines, which looped round and through his 2004 tour of Iraq, snagged unshakeably in his mind; as he was writing the novel, the bird suckered in then set upon came to stand for "the lack of control soldiers have over what happens to them. The war proceeds, no matter what you think or do; it's an entity unto itself. You're powerless, and powerlessness itself becomes the enemy. That was my emotional experience of the war. The idea of the bird resonated with the core of what I was trying to get at." The Yellow Birds shortlisted last week for the Guardian first book award landed in bookshops in September off the back of a wave of hype that began to build with the reports of Powers' lucrative deal with US publisher Little, Brown and crested with reviews comparing its author to among others Tim O'Brien, Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. It tells the story of Private John Bartle, who grows up in smalltown Virginia, signs up to get out, and is shipped off to Iraq's Nineveh province to play his part in the US's 21st-century war theatre. Attempting to impose meaning on the conflict's senseless sprawl, Bartle fastens on a promise inadvertently given to the mother of his friend Murph younger, softer, less robust that he would "bring him home". It's a promise he can't keep. The novel unfolds along two intercutting timelines: a superstitiously hopeful before, when Bartle and Murph hold their own against horror by deploying a kind of magical thinking in which "if we remained ordinary, we would not die", and a bleak and blasted after, in which Bartle, back in Virginia, must come to terms both with the guilt of losing Murph and the way his death reduced all their carefully cultivated shibboleths to so much dust. As war novels go, The Yellow Birds is a triumph, mining the conflict in Iraq to investigate universal questions of the extent to which we are in control of our lives; the degree to which we are capable of exercising free will. As debuts go it's better yet, with an opening as arresting and beautiful as any I have recently encountered. And there's no question that Powers 31, army veteran, fresh off the University of Texas MFA programme is himself a compelling proposition: if it's a truism that most first novels are autobiographical, it is also

true that some resums are more equal than others, and reviewers have been quick to ferret out the points at which Powers and his narrator overlap. When we meet on the UK leg of his publicity tour, Powers in person thoughtful, diffident, intriguingly tattooed is happy to acknowledge their shared "biographical and geographical details", although he "didn't lose a friend the way Bartle did". But he's keener by far to talk about the places where their inner lives intersect. "The core of what Bartle goes through," he says, "I empathised with it. I felt those things, and asked the same questions: is there anything about this that's redeeming; does asking in itself have value? The story is invented, but there's a definite alignment between his emotional and mental life and mine." Powers was just 17 when he enlisted. "I wasn't a good student in high school," he explains. "I wanted to go to college but they weren't exactly beating down my door to offer me admission, and it's so expensive in the US. If you join up for a period, the army will pay your school and provide a stipend." There were other reasons too a family tradition of military service (Powers' father and grandfathers both served, and his uncle was a marine), as well as the purely geographical imperative of growing up in the American south, from which the bulk of the US army is drawn. "And then there was just being 17: the attraction of adventure: doing something different. I hadn't spent much time outside of a very small area of Virginia before." He served from February 2004 to March 2005. On his return, honourably discharged, he drifted: working for a spell at a credit card company ("less than satisfying"), spending a summer framing houses with his carpenter brother, taking some college courses at night. "I did a bunch of things. But at a certain point I made a decision: what I needed to do was really try to write. The process took three or more years; I had help from some professors who encouraged me to look into graduate school, and I managed to get a place at the University of Texas." Most of the book was written there, several years on from the events that fired it. "I think I had to come to terms with my own experience before I was able to contend with it in writing," Powers says. The Yellow Birds is his answer to the wider question, put to him repeatedly on return to civilian life, of "what it was like over there". He set out, he says, with the aim of "seeing if it would be possible to paint a portrait of the war looking out from inside of this one soldier"; the focus of the book, as a result, is tight and personal, veering back and forth between soaring, saturated descriptions of light and dust, minarets and hyacinths, and the all-out screaming horror of the war. He switches, sometimes, mid-sentence, until the country's two faces become compounded for the reader as they are for Bartle, blending and overlaying each other in a woozy mix that leaves you sick and giddy, gasping for air. What's more, unusually for a novel about the war, almost half of it is set away from the battlefield, in a prosaic Richmond of school buses and muddy river banks that Bartle, battledazed, sees as if through a pane of glass. "There have been stories recently that the number of veteran suicides has now surpassed the battlefield casualties," Powers says. "I wanted to show the whole picture. It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home,

everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way. I thought it was important to acknowledge that." Was there any sense of exorcism in the writing? "Certainly there were moments of satisfaction where I felt like: 'Ah, that's what that is; that's what I've been feeling: the words I've put in Bartle's mouth, that I hadn't been able to articulate before.'" Did the war, then, make him a writer, or simply give him something to write about? "I'd always written, though I didn't think of it as anything other than a secret hobby. But I suppose what the war did was free me from the fear of failure. It gave me licence to give it a go."