The Yellow Birds Read online

  A radio crackled in the rooms beneath us. The lieutenant quietly gave our situation report to our command. “Yes, sir,” he said, “roger, sir,” and it passed, at each level more removed from us, until I am sure somewhere someone was told, in a room that was warm and dry and safe, that eighteen soldiers had watched the alleys and streets of Al Tafar through the night and that X number of enemies were lying dead in a dusty field.

  The day had almost broken over the city and the ridges in the desert when the low, electric noise of the radio was replaced by the sound of the lieutenant’s boots padding up the staircase to the roof. Mere outlines took shape, and the city, vague and notional at night, became a contoured and substantial thing before us. I looked west. Tans and greens emerged in the light. The gray of mud walls, of buildings and courtyards arranged in squat honeycombs, receded with the rising sun. A few fires burned in the grove of thin and ordered fruit trees a little to the south. The smoke rose through a gently tattered canopy of leaves only slightly taller than a man and leaned obediently to the wind coming across the valley.

  The lieutenant came up to the roof and lowered himself into a slouch, his upper body parallel to the earth, his legs chugging, until he reached the wall. He sat with his back against the wall and gestured for us to gather around him.

  “All right, guys. This is the deal.”

  Murph and I leaned against each other until the weight of our bodies found their balance. Sterling inched closer to the lieutenant and fixed his eyes in a hard glare that traversed the rest of us on the roof. I looked at the lieutenant as he spoke. His eyes were dim. Before he continued he let out a short, bright sigh and rubbed a rash the color of washed-out raspberries with two fingers. It covered a small oval from his sharp brow line down onto his left cheek and seemed to follow the rounded path of his eye socket.

  The LT was a distant person by nature. I don’t even remember where he was from. There was something restrained about him, something more than simple adherence to nonfraternization. It was not elitism. He seemed to be unknowable, or slightly adrift. He sighed often. “We’re here until midday or so,” he said. “Third platoon is going to push through the alleys to our northwest and try to flush them to our front. Hopefully they’ll be too scared to do much shooting at us before we…” He paused and brought his hand down from his face, reached into the pockets on his chest beneath his body armor and fished for a cigarette. I handed him one. “Thanks, Bartle,” he said. He turned to look at the orchard burning to the south. “How long have those fires been going?”

  “Probably started last night,” said Murph.

  “OK, you and Bartle keep an eye on that.”

  The column of smoke that bent beneath the wind had straightened. It cut a black runny line across the sky.

  “What was I saying before that?” The lieutenant looked absently over his shoulder and inched his eyes up over the wall. “Fuck me,” he muttered.

  A specialist from second squad said, “Hey, no sweat, LT, we got it.”

  Sterling cut him off. “Shut the fuck up. LT’s done when he says he’s fucking done.”

  I didn’t realize it then, but Sterling seemed to know exactly how hard to push the LT so that discipline remained. He didn’t care if we hated him. He knew what was necessary. He smiled at me and his straight, white teeth reflected the early morning sun. “You were saying, sir, that hopefully they’ll be too scared to shoot before…” The LT opened his mouth to finish his thought, but Sterling continued, “Before we fucking kill the hajji fucks.”

  The lieutenant nodded his head and slouched over and trotted downstairs. We crawled back to our positions to wait. A fire had begun to burn in the town, its source obscured by walls and alleys. Thick black smoke seemed to join from a hundred fires all over Al Tafar, becoming one long curl up toward heaven.

  The sun gathered itself behind us, rising in the east, warming the collar of my blouse, baking in the salt that clotted in hard lines and snaked around our necks and arms. I turned my head and looked right into it. I had to close my eyes, but I could still see its shape, a white hole in the darkness, before I turned west again and opened them.

  Two minarets rose, like arms, up from the dusty buildings, slightly obscured now and then by smoke. They were dormant. No sound had come from them that morning. No adhan had been called. The long line of refugees that snaked its way out of the city for the past four days had slowed. Only a few old men bent over worn canes of cedar shuffled between the field of dead and the grove of trees. Two gaunt dogs bounced around them, nipped their heels, retreated when struck, and then started in on them again.

  And it began once more. The orchestral whine of falling mortars arrived from all around us. Even after so many months beneath them, there was a blank confusion on the faces of the platoon. We stared at one another with mouths agape, fingers strangling the grips of our rifles. It was a clear dawn in September in Al Tafar, and the war seemed narrowly focused, as if it occurred only in this place, and I remember feeling like I had jumped into a cold river on the first warm day of spring, wet and scared and breathing hard, with nothing to do but swim.

  “Incoming!”

  We moved by rote, our bodies made prostrate, our fingers interlaced behind our heads, our mouths open to keep the pressure balanced.

  And then the sound of the impacts echoed off into the morning. I didn’t raise my head until the last reverberation faded.

  I looked over the wall slowly, and a din of voices shouted, “All clear!” and “I’m up!”

  “Bartle?” Murph huffed.

  “I’m up, I’m up,” I said quietly, and I was breathing very hard and I looked out over the field and there were wounds in the earth and in the already dead and battered bodies and a few small juniper trees were turned up and on their sides where the mortars fell. Sterling ran to the opening in the floor and yelled down to the LT, “Up, sir.” He moved to each one of us on the roof, smacking the back of our helmets. “Get ready, motherfuckers,” he said.

  I hated him. I hated the way he excelled in death and brutality and domination. But more than that, I hated the way he was necessary, how I needed him to jar me into action even when they were trying to kill me, how I felt like a coward until he screamed into my ear, “Shoot these hajji fucks!” I hated the way I loved him when I inched up out of the terror and returned fire, seeing him shooting too, smiling the whole time, screaming, the whole rage and hate of these few acres, alive and spreading, in and through him.

  And they did come, shadowed in windows. They came out from behind woven prayer rugs and fired off bursts and the bullets whipped past and we’d duck and listen as they smacked against the concrete and mud-brick and little pieces flew in every direction. They ran through trash-strewn alleys, past burning drums and plastic blowing like clumps of thistle over the ancient cobblestones.

  Sterling yelled a long time that day before I squeezed the trigger. My ears had already rung out from the noise and the first bullet I released into the field seemed to leave my rifle with a dull pop. It kicked up a little cloud of dust when it hit and it was surrounded by many other little clouds of dust just like it.

  Rounds by the hundreds shook dust off the ground, the trees and buildings. An old car crumpled and collapsed beneath the dust. Once in a while, someone ran between the buildings, behind the orange and white cars, over the rooftops, and they’d surround themselves with little clouds of dust.

  A man ran behind a low wall in a courtyard and looked around, astonished to be alive, his weapon cradled in his arms. My first instinct was to yell out to him, “You made it, buddy, keep going,” but I remembered how odd it would be to say a thing like that. It was not long before the others saw him too.

  He looked left, then right, and the dust popped around him, and I wanted to tell everyone to stop shooting at him, to ask, “What kind of men are we?” An odd sensation came over me, as if I had been saved, for I was not a man, but a boy, and that he may have been frightened, but I didn’t mind that so mu
ch, because I was frightened too, and I realized with a great shock that I was shooting at him and that I wouldn’t stop until I was sure that he was dead, and I felt better knowing we were killing him together and that it was just as well not to be sure you are the one who did it.

  But I knew. I shot him and he slumped over behind the wall. He was shot again by someone else and the bullet went through his chest and ricocheted, breaking a potted plant hanging from a window above the courtyard. Then he was shot again and he fell at a strange angle—backward over his bent legs—and most of the side of his face was gone and there was a lot of blood and it pooled around him in the dust.

  A car drove toward us along the road between the orchard and the field of dead. Two large white sheets billowed from its rear windows. Sterling ran to the other side of the building, where the machine gun was set up. I looked through my scope and saw an old man behind the wheel and an elderly woman in the back passenger seat.

  Sterling laughed. “Come on, motherfuckers.”

  He couldn’t see them. I’ll yell, I thought. I’ll tell him they are old, let them pass.

  But bullets bit at the crumbling road around the car. They punched into the sheet metal.

  I said nothing. I followed the car with my scope. The old woman ran her fingers along a string of pale beads. Her eyes were closed.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  The car stopped in the middle of the road, but Sterling did not stop the shooting. The bullets ripped through the car and out the other side. The holes in the car funneled light, and the smoke and dust hung in the light. The door opened and she fell from the old car. She tried to drag herself to the side of the road. She crawled. Her old blood mixed with the ash and dust. She stopped moving.

  “Holy shit, that bitch got murdered,” Murph said. There was no grief, or anguish, or joy, or pity in that statement. There was no judgment made. He was just surprised, like he was waking from a long afternoon nap, disoriented, realizing that the world has continued uninterrupted in spite of the strange things that may have happened while you slept. He could have said that it was Sunday, as we did not know what day it was. And it would have been a sudden thing to notice that it was Sunday at a time like that. But he spoke the truth either way, and it wouldn’t have mattered much if it had been Sunday, and since none of us had slept in a long time, none of it really seemed to matter much at all.

  Sterling sat down behind the wall next to the machine gun. He waved us to him and took a piece of pound cake from the cargo pocket on his trousers as we listened to the final bursts of nervous firing peter out. He broke the dry cake into three pieces. “Take this,” he said. “Eat.”

  The smoke rose and began to disappear. I watched the old woman bleed on the side of the road. The dust blew in languid waves and began to swirl slightly. We heard shots again. Beyond a building a small girl with auburn curls and a tattered sundress stepped out toward the old woman. Errant bullets from other positions kicked up the dust around her in dry blooms.

  We looked to Sterling. He waved us off. “Someone get on the net and tell those fuckers it’s a just a kid,” he said.

  The girl ducked behind the building, then emerged again, this time shuffling toward the old woman very slowly. She tried dragging the body, and her face contorted with effort as she pulled the old woman by her one complete arm. The girl described circles into the fine dust as she paced around the body. The path they made was marked in blood: from the car smoking and ablaze, through a courtyard ringed by hyacinths, to the place where the woman lay dead, attended by the small child, who rocked and moved her lips, perhaps singing some desert elegy that I couldn’t hear.

  The ash from the burning of clay bricks and the fat of lean men and women covered everything. The pale minarets dominated the smoke, and the sky was still pale like snow. The city seemed to reach upward out of the settling dust. Our part was over, for a while at least. It was September and though there were few trees from which leaves could fall, some did. They shook off the scarred and slender branches, buffeted by the wind and light descending from the hills to the north. I tried to count the leaves as they fell, removed from their moorings by the impact of mortars and bombs. They shook. A thin sheaf of dust floated off each one.

  I looked at Murph and Sterling and the rest of the platoon on the roof. The LT walked to each of us and put his hand on our arms, speaking softly, trying to soothe us with the sound of his voice, the way one would with frightened horses. Perhaps our eyes were wet and black, perhaps we bared our teeth. “Good job,” and “You’re OK,” and “We’re gonna be OK,” he said. It was hard to believe that we’d be OK and that we’d fought well. But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.

  The radio came on again. Before long the LT would give us another mission. We would be tired when the mission came, but we would go, for we had no alternative. Perhaps we’d had them once: alternatives, other paths to take. But our course was certain then, if unknown. It was going to be dark before we knew it. We had lived, Murph and me.

  I try so hard now to remember if I saw any hint of what was coming, if there was some shadow over him, some way I could have known he was so close to being killed. In my memory of those days on the rooftop, he is half a ghost. But I didn’t see it then, and couldn’t. No one can see that. I guess I’m glad I didn’t know, because we were happy that morning in Al Tafar, in September. Our relief was coming. The day was full of light and warm. We slept.

  2

  DECEMBER 2003

  Fort Dix, New Jersey

  Mrs. LaDonna Murphy, rural mail carrier, would have only needed to read the first word of the letter to know that it had not been written by her son. The truth is, she had not received all that many letters from him, so when I wrote it, I took a guess that she might not have that much to compare it to. He’d rarely been more than a few miles away from her during the first seventeen years of his life. About five miles, depending on where Daniel was, when she reached the farthest stop on her mail route if measured as the crow flies. Seven, if we allow for depth, at midnight, during those three months he worked in the Shipp Mountain Mine after he graduated from the Bluefield Vocational and Technical School. Then on to Benning in the fall, the farthest he’d ever been from home, where Daniel would write her a few short notes before lights-out, scrawling out his thoughts about the redness of the clay, the pleasure he took in sleeping under those endless Georgia stars and, when time allowed, making space for the assurances that boys like me and Daniel always end up sending to our families, assurances that were as much for us as for them. The rest of his life he’d spent with me. Ten months, give or take, from the time he appeared next to me in formation that day in New Jersey with the snow so high over our boots that our left and right faces made only a whisper in the snow. Ten months, give or take, from that day to the day he died. It might seem like a short time, but my whole life since has merely been a digression from those days, which now hang over me like a quarrel that will never be resolved.

  I’d had this idea once that you had to grow old before you died. I still feel like there is some truth to it, because Daniel Murphy had grown old in the ten months I’d known him. And perhaps it was a need for something to make sense that caused me to pick up a pencil and write a letter to a dead boy’s mother, to write it in his name, having known him plenty long enough to know it was not his way to call his mother “Mom.” I’d known a lot, really. I’d known that snow comes early in the year in the mountains where Daniel was from, November, sure, and sometimes as early as October. But I only found out later that she’d read that letter with snow falling all around her. That she’d set it on the seat next to her while she mushed her old right-hand-drive Jeep up and down the switchbacks on her route, carving clean tracks through the white erasure that had fallen all throughout the night before. And that as she pulled down the long gravel path leading to their little house, on the winter-dormant apple orchard Daniel had talked about so often, she kept sneaking glances
at the return address. She must have taken those glances with an unusual level of skepticism for a rural mail carrier as experienced as she was, because she thought each time that something different would be written there. When the wheels of her old Jeep finally stopped, and the whole mass of ’84 metal slid a few last feet in the snow, she’d taken the letter in both hands and become briefly, terrifyingly happy.

  At one time you could have asked me if I thought the snow meant something and I would have said yes. I might have thought there was some significance to the fact that there had been snow on the day Murph had come into my life and snow on the day I willed myself into the one that had been taken from him. I may not have believed it, but I’m sure I would have wanted to. It’s lovely to think that snow can be special. We’re always told it is. Of all those million million flakes that fall, no two are alike, forever and ever, amen. I’ve spent some time looking out the window of my cabin watching snowflakes fall like a shot dove’s feathers fluttering slowly down to the ground. They all look the same to me.

  I know it was a terrible thing to write that letter. What I don’t know is where it fits in with all of the other terrible things I think about. At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance. Order became an accident of observation. I’ve come to accept that parts of life are constant, that just because something happens on two different days doesn’t make it a goddamn miracle. All I really know for sure is that no matter how long I live, and no matter how I spend that time, those scales aren’t ever coming level. Murph’s always going to be eighteen, and he’s always going to be dead. And I’ll be living with a promise that I couldn’t keep.