Shortly after starting this book, I would have been predicting a 3 star review; but as I got into it more, I really enjoyed the feelings and descriptions about a soldier's experiences with death, war, and having to come back to the "real" world afterwards.

Have you ever thought you could not imagine the hell that soldiers have to go through? The author does a great job in describing just that. ( )

A powerful novel about war and choices one makes in war. Beautifully written. The flashbacks and forward kept the story interesting. Reminiscent of The Things They Carried in writing style and motifs. ( )

"There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true."

The narrator of is a twenty-one year old US private, John Bartle, who befriends an even younger soldier, Murphy, and makes an impulsive promise to Murphy’s mother before heading out to war in Iraq.

The plot spans six years and is told retrospectively mixing two story lines in alternating chapters. The first is Bartle’s and Murphy’s experiences in Al Tafar in 2004 whilst the other is Bartle’s return home to Richmond, Virginia, as he tries to adjust to life after Iraq, and what happened to Murphy and his own role in the aftermath.

Powers mixes poetry with prose to give a truly stylish rendition of the horror of war where it's young participants are constantly fearful and on alert, where nerves are continually on edge. The power in the writing is that the author manages to juxtapose the awful with the mundane.

“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.”

The conjunction with a bullet ending a man’s life and a potted plant is typical of Powers's writing style. However, I also had a few minor issues with it. I felt that a little judicious editing would have helped, at times I felt that it went a little overboard not just about the brutality that these young men and women faced daily but also the mis-information that was being fed both to them and to the American public as a whole, nor was I totally convinced that the momentous decision that Bartle and his Sergeant make was a strictly necessary one even though I understand the reasoning behind it by two brutalised minds. Personally I felt that Powers was trying to batter the reader into submission rather than let them come to their own conclusions.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Perhaps the real problem that history tells us this was a war with no real definitive winner one way or the other but it could also be that it was simply too recent, too close to home (my brother served out there with the British Army). Or it could be a simple case of poor timing given what is happening in the Ukraine at present and its the 40th anniversary of my own experiences in the Falklands.

All the same for a first novel its a remarkable piece of writing that deserves to be widely read but oddly I feel that if it had been written in memoir form rather than a novel it would have been even better. ( )

Manu militari envolez-vous avec le Yellow Bird de Kevin Powers. Je retombe difficilement.

https://www.noid.ch/yellow-bird/ ( )

Read this powerful book by an Iraq war veteran! ( )