The Yellow Birds Read online

  We’d gotten lax. The LT rarely asked us to dig in, and we hadn’t dug in there, just laid our packs and rifles against the lurching clay-mud walls that separated that cluster of buildings from the field we’d been fighting over for the last few nights. The LT had a small antenna radio, and a green mosquito net hung between an open window and a half-charred hawthorn tree. We waited for him to tell us something, but he had his feet up on a field table and seemed to be sleeping so we let him rest.

  A runner from battalion headquarters brought us our mail after chow. He had on thick glasses and smiled at us and took great care to duck below walls and trees, which looked, to him, like cover. His uniform was very clean. When he whispered out Murph’s name, Murph thanked him and smiled up at him and opened the letter and began to read. The runner handed me a small package, and Sergeant Sterling stood up from behind his cover, a stack of sawed-off trunks of pear trees that some long-vanished family must have placed there, stacked up to be ready to burn through the cold nights of winter where the plains met the foothills of the Zagros and it sometimes snowed.

  Sterling called the runner over to him. “Private,” he barked, “where’s my mail?”

  “It doesn’t look like you got any.”

  “Sergeant,” Sterling muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Relax, Sterling, give the kid a break,” the LT said, awake now and pausing from his conversation on the radio. It was the only sound. The runner pushed his body toward the lowering dark in silence, seeming to float above the packed dust as he moved back the way he came.

  Murph took a photograph from his helmet and placed it over the letter, using it to cover the words that would come next, giving each line its due attention, the way that old men do when reading obituaries of friends, learning late the small measures of their lives and wondering how it was they came to not know these things. It was too dark to see the picture from where I sat. I didn’t remember Murph ever showing it to me. I wondered how we’d gone that long through the war without my having seen it. He rested his back against the wall, and the low-hanging branches of the hawthorn tree reached down to him in the quiet wind. The reds of the setting sun had washed out and the last soft hint of pink disappeared behind the city.

  “Good news?” I asked.

  “News, anyway,” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  “My girlfriend’s going to school. Says she figures the best thing is…well, you know.”

  The radio continued to buzz softly. The LT’s voice draped down over our whispers, saying, “They’re good boys. They’ll be ready, Colonel.”

  “Jody’s got your girl?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Don’t matter, I guess.”

  “Sure?”

  There was no sound between my question and his answer. I thought of home, remembering the cicadas fluttering their wings in the scrub pines and oaks that ringed the pond behind my mother’s house outside Richmond. It would be morning there. The space between home, whatever that might mean for any of us, and the scratched-out fighting positions we occupied, collapsed. Soon, I looked out over the water. I smiled. I remembered late Novembers. Needles browned by the warm Virginia air collecting like discarded blankets on the shore. Taking the warped steps down from the back of the house on the cusp of morning, the sun slouching behind the tallest trees on the hills above the draw where our house sat. The light strong and yellow and thin, appearing to raise itself out of the earth, invisible, up from some higher plane where as a child I imagined there must be fields of cut grass and thistle that glowed until the day had again assured them of its presence, and my mother reading on the porch so early in the morning, seeming not to notice me as I walked past, my feet making a pleasant noise as they slid through the orange and yellow leaves. It would be too dark for my mother to see me. Out all night after I enlisted. I recalled telling her just like that. Trying to sneak into the backyard through the gate in the post fence my brother built, how she called out softly, not waiting for her breath to catch up to her voice, and it took me a minute to hear her, as the bullfrogs bellowed through their last darkening songs. A little wind came up and scattered those birds that always seemed to gather in the far cove beneath the willows and dogwoods that claimed that corner of the bank’s good brown earth. When they flew, they broke the water with the tips of their spanned wings, and the light from the house and a few stars like handfuls of salt thrown out appeared to break as well, and the ripples on the pond wavered as though the lines across the water were plucked strings. But I wasn’t there. All that had happened a long time before. I’d walked up in the dark under the awning of a few trees and she’d said, knowing somehow the way mothers always seem to, “My God, John, what did you do?” And I’d said I joined up. She knew what that meant. It wasn’t much longer before I’d left. I couldn’t remember having a life at all between that day and where I sat beneath a wall that ringed a field in Al Tafar, unable to reassure my friend, who would soon be dead. He was right. It hadn’t mattered.

  Murph paused. “Everything’s just so goddamn funny.” He had the letter folded in his lap, and he bent his head backward, and the outline of his face was oriented toward the sky. He made a childish connection, but a beautiful one, and his face, looking through the thin fingers of the hawthorn that rose out of the dust, seemed to connect the long black veil of sky above us, a few stars in its stitching, to whatever sky his girl sat beneath. And yes, it was full of naïveté and boyishness, but that is all right, because we were boys then. It makes me love him a little, even now, to remember him sitting beneath the hawthorn tree, sad that his girl had left him, but without anger or resentment, despite being only a few hours removed from all the killing of the night before. He sat there in the dark. We spoke like children. We looked at each other as if into a dim mirror. I remember that part of him fondly, before he was lost, before he surrendered fully to the war, twisting through the air, perhaps one beat of his heart remaining as they threw his tortured body from the window of the minaret.

  I put out my hand and gestured for him to hand me the picture. It was a Polaroid of Murph and his girl. They stood on a dirt track. The earth rose behind them, up out of the picture toward its promontory. The mountain was covered by beech and magnolia, white ash and maple, tulip trees, and all the colors of the flowers were bright and definite in the rays of light that settled down through the upper branches. She wore a dress of blue-dyed muslin that had been worn thin, and the light in the picture passed through the thin fabric slightly, revealing the shape of her body. Her hair was brown and a little stringy and in the picture a few strands came to rest on her high, pink cheeks. Her mouth was closed. She did not smile and her eyes were gray and warm above a hand that looked as if it was captured on its way to brush stray hairs from her face.

  Then Murph next to her. His hands in the pockets of his blue jeans. Her other hand on the small of his back. Alive. There was an expression on his face that I have never seen before or since. I have convinced myself that this was the expression of one who knew, but he could not have. There was something fleeting in the picture, though I didn’t know it then. He had an easy half smile, and his eyes squinted in the light. What was there of permanence in the picture? I wondered if the girl would ever stand on that spot again. If she did, would she reach for the small of his back?

  “Who took it?”

  He squatted on the back of his calves, pulling a rub out and putting it in his bottom lip. The smell was sweet and pungent and filled the calm air. “My mom did, summer before last. I guess we were sixteen, almost seventeen in it. Marie’s a good girl. I can’t say I blame her. Too smart to stick with me.”

  Sterling had been listening to us talk. He loped over out of the dark on the other side of the tree. “I’d kill a bitch,” he interjected. “You’re not really gonna take that shit, are you, Private?”

  “I guess I figure it’s not my cal
l to make no more, Sarge.”

  Sterling put his hands on his hips and seemed to be waiting for Murph to say something else. It was as if that line of words had been hung up in a place Sterling couldn’t reach, so he just stood there, disregarding, waiting to be readdressed. But Murph did not respond. Neither did I. We just looked at him, half leaning against the wall. Behind us a streetlamp came on. It was the only one to survive the battle, and it illuminated the field where the dead lay scattered and it shined its light briefly into the scarred earth where the mortars had fallen. It flickered. In the intermittent light Sterling seemed to flicker also, appearing and disappearing. The light went out for a short stretch, and Sterling walked away.

  I want him to resist now, as I remember it. Not like Sterling suggested, but to resist nonetheless. It wasn’t that I thought he should have hoped that his being abandoned could be changed, but I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I’d missed your giving up.

  Murph looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I handed him back the picture of Marie, and he took his helmet off, resting it between his legs in the dust. He took out his casualty feeder card from a ziplock bag under his helmet liner and put the picture behind it. He held the card and the picture and looked at them in the unsteady light, and I read the sections of the card that Murph had already filled in.

  At the top of the card, in the appropriate boxes, Murph had written the requested information. His name: Murphy, Daniel; his social security number; his rank; his unit. Below that were other boxes, left blank in case the need arose to record an assortment of information with a quick X in ink. There was a box for Killed in Action, for Missing in Action, and for Wounded in Action (either lightly or seriously). There was a box for Captured, and for Detained, and for Died as a Result of Wounds. There were two sets of Yes or No boxes, one each for Body Recovered and Body Identified. There was a space for witness remarks and for the signature of the commanding officer or medical personnel. Murph had placed an X in the box for Body Recovered. “Just in case,” he said when he caught me looking. Both of our cards were signed already.

  Murph folded the picture up with the card and put them both back under his helmet liner. I cut open my package and pulled out a bottle of Gold Label sent by one of my high school buddies. I shook the bottle gently back and forth, saying, “Look what we got here.” He smiled and put his helmet to the side and he slid along the wall to get a little closer to me. I put my hand out with the bottle and he waved me off.

  “I believe you have the honor, sir.”

  We both laughed. I took a long pull of the whiskey. It burned inside my nose and down my throat and down into my stomach. I had to wipe the back of my hand across my mouth because we were laughing. Murph took the bottle and took a long swallow. For a moment we forgot our predicament and were just two friends drinking under a tree, leaned up against a wall, trying to muffle our laughter so we would not get caught. Murph stifled his laughter until his body was racked with deep spasms that caused his armor to rattle, grenades to softly tinkle against one another, until all the accoutrements of battle jingled slightly and he had to stop himself, repeating, “All right, I’m good,” with a mock stone face until he had regained his bearing. When he handed me back the bottle he sighed deeply. “Look out over there.”

  Murph pointed to the low hills around the city. Small fires had sprung up in the distance. A few city lights and the fires on the hillsides burned like a tattered quilt of fallen stars. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered. I was not sure if anyone heard me, but I saw others point their fingers off into the darkness.

  We stayed like that for a while. The night grew cool and the smell of the fires burning was bright and clean and cut through the air like a spring wind out of season. I started to feel a little drunk as we traded the bottle back and forth. We rested our chins on our arms and our arms on the top of the low mud-brick wall and we watched the little fires the citizens made speckle the hillsides in every direction.

  “It must be the whole city out there,” Murph said, and I thought of the line of people who rode or walked or ran out of Al Tafar four days ago, how they waited patiently for us to leave, for the enemy to leave, how when the battle was over they would come back and begin to sweep the shells off the roofs of their houses, how they would fill buckets of water and splash them over the dried, coppery blood on their doorsteps. We could hear a soft keening while we watched the low hills and desert glimmer in the darkness.

  It was barely perceptible, that noise. I still hear it sometimes. Sound is a funny thing, and smell. I’ll light a fire in the back lot of my cabin after the sun goes down. Then after a while, the smoke settles down into little ruts between clumps of pine. Wind whips up through the draws nearby and courses over the creek bed. And I can hear it then. I was not sure if it really came from the women around the campfires, if they pulled their hair crying out in mourning or not, but I heard it and even now it seems wrong not to listen. I took off my helmet and placed my rifle on top of it and allowed my ears to adjust to the ambient sounds in the night. There was something out there. I glanced at Murph and he returned a sad and knowing look. The LT put the radio down and sat in his chair with his head in his hands rubbing the strange mark on his cheekbone. We all listened to it awhile, watching the fires burn against the night. My chest tightened. There was something both ordinary and miraculous about the strange wailing that we heard, and the way it carried to us on the wind that began inside the orchard. Later in the night two of the lights in the distance began to brighten, then another two, and then another. The LT walked to each of us and said, “The colonel wants to see you guys. Get ready.”

  We put our rifles out over the wall and gripped the forestocks tightly. We put out our cigarettes and asserted ourselves against the silence beyond our small encampment. I felt like a self-caricature, that we were falsely strong. When we spoke, we spoke brusquely and quietly and deepened our voices.

  The lights formed a more regular line and we began to hear the whine of motors and then the lights disappeared and a cloud of dust rolled toward us above the ground from the front of the building near the road. The LT moved around our defensive perimeter and softly called out to us, “Stay alert. Stay alive.”

  Two young sergeants quickly moved from around the building and spread out to either end of the wall. Then the colonel came, short, red-haired and walking upright as tall as he could. He had a reporter and a cameraman with him. The LT exchanged a few words with him and they both turned to us. “How’s the war tonight, boys?” he asked. A broad smile spread over his face in the darkness.

  “Good,” Sterling replied with a dull certainty.

  As if in need of confirmation, the colonel slowly met each of us eye to eye until we’d all said, “Yes, sir, it’s good tonight.”

  Even in the intermittent light the crispness of his uniform was clearly visible. He smelled of starch when he came close to us. He folded his arms across his chest and began to speak, and the smile on his face disappeared. I briefly wondered which face was the real one before he pulled out a piece of paper and began to read from it, pausing ever so slightly to make sure the reporter was paying attention, “Are you rolling?”

  “Go ahead. Pretend we’re not here.”

  The colonel cleared his throat and pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket and rested them on the bridge of his nose. One of the sergeants came over and shined a small flashlight on the colonel’s piece of paper. “Boys,” he began, “you will soon be asked to do great violence in the cause of good.” He paced back and forth and his boot prints in the fine dust were never trampled. Each step was precise and his pacing only served to firm and define the tracks that he originally left. The sergeant with the flashlight paced beside him. “I know I don’t have to tell you what kind of enemy you’ll be up against.” His voice became
a blunt staccato as he gained confidence in his capacity to motivate us, a bludgeon that smoothed the weary creases in my brain. “This is the land where Jonah is buried, where he begged for God’s justice to come.” He continued, “We are that justice. Now, I wish I could tell you that all of us are coming back, but I can’t. Some of you will not come back with us.” I was moved then, but what I now recall most vividly about that speech was the colonel’s pride, his satisfaction with his own directness, his disregard for us as individuals. “If you die, know this: we’ll put you on the first bird to Dover. Your families will have a distinction beyond all others. If these bastards want a fight, we’re going to give them one.” He paused. A look of great sentimentality came over him. “I can’t go with you boys,” he explained with regret, “but I’ll be in contact from the operation center the whole time. Give ’em hell.”

  The LT started a round of applause. We’d been told to maintain noise and light discipline, but that had all gone out the window with the camera crew and the colonel’s half-assed Patton imitation. I could tell the colonel was disappointed. I looked at the rest of the platoon to see if I could read anything on their faces. Murph gazed down at the toes of his boots. Sterling listened attentively on a knee from underneath the hawthorn tree. The fires in the dark became lights that fluttered on the backs of my closed eyelids.

  The colonel gestured toward the LT, extending his arm out to him, palm up. “Lieutenant, they are all yours.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He cleared his throat three times. “All right, boys, we’ll be on fifty-percent security tonight. We move from this position just before light, crossing the open ground out there while we still have the cover of darkness.” There were a few glances over shoulders into the barren space between our position and the city proper. It was far too dark to see into it, but the images were there like an etching through the night. The stench of the dead had cut itself free from the other odors coming from Al Tafar. The trash fires and sewage, the heavy scent of cured lamb, the river; above all this was the stink of decay from the bodies themselves. A shudder ran through my shoulders, a quick shake, as I hoped not to step into the slick mess of one of them as we marched to the fight. “We’ll clear the open ground and pass along the road that swings around the city, using the buildings on the outskirts for cover. When we get to the orchard, we’ll spread out along this ditch here.” He pointed to a map illuminated by a pale green glow stick. It showed a narrow scratch in the earth, buildings crowded behind it, not forty yards from the first trees in the orchard. “Any questions?”