The Yellow Birds

Chapter 7 picks up several months after Bart has returned to Richmond, after his tour of duty (the events of Chapter 5). Bart has fallen into a sort of routine in the intervening months, avoiding people (including his old friends), sleeping, walking to a store for beer, drinking, and, most of all, remembering and reliving his wartime experiences: “the caws [of crows] might strike in perfect harmony with the memory of the sound of falling mortars, and I, at home now, might brace for impact, come on, you motherfuckers, I’d think, you finally got me” (134). He compares the feeling to standing at the edge of a cliff: “going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. […] And you can’t go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can’t” (134-35).

Eventually, Bart realizes that he doesn’t necessarily want to be alive any more, calling it “a passive wish,” and saying, “Sure, there is a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself” (135). His best friend from childhood, Luke, calls to invite him down to the river the following day, but Bart tells his mother, who is worried about him, he doesn’t want to talk and wanders off. He finds a place where he had apparently scrawled his initials, J.B., into a tree, though he doesn’t actually remember doing it. He returns home, packs a bag, and walks off again, thinking of Murph: “The closer I got to reconstructing him in my mind, the more the picture I was trying to re-create receded” (138). Bart walks down the railroad track to the bridge where they cross the river and ponders the water; then, when a train approaches, wishes he could hop aboard. He builds a fire by the river and sleeps.

In the morning, he wakes up and finds Luke and some friends swimming and diving in the river, and watches them from the bank. “I had become a kind of cripple,” Bart narrates, “They were my friends, right? Why didn’t I just wade out to them?” (144). From his retrospective point of view, the present-day Bart reflects on the trauma he was feeling at the time, saying, “everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it” (145).

Eventually, he wades out into the river and floats on his back, falling asleep and dreaming of a battered horse that comes out to nuzzle him in the water. He wakes again being pulled from the water by police after Luke has seen him floating off and has called 911. He shows his military ID, and the officer says, “Try to keep it together, buddy. You’ll be back in the swing in no time” (147). When he gets home, his mother confronts him, saying, “I don’t understand what’s happening to you” and revealing that she has gotten calls from “The Criminal Investigation Division” (C.I.D.) asking to speak with Bart (148). The chapter ends with Bart reflecting vaguely on what happened in Al Tafar: “Everything happened. Everything fell” (148).  

Chapter 8 returns to the events of 2004, in Al Tafar, after the battle. In the ensuing days, the platoon is applauded for doing such a fine job, and a major shows up to give out commendations, though few of the soldiers seem interested. Sterling receives “a Bronze Star for valor” (153). Bart notices Murph has missed the ceremony and has been seen less and less of late, thinking, “I started to get the impression he was avoiding me” (153). Bart becomes more concerned about Murph’s behavior: “I wanted to measure the particulars of Murph’s new, strange behavior and trace it back to one moment, to one cause, to one thing I would not be guilty of” (155). Bart again reflects on his promise to Murph’s mother.

Eventually, Bart goes to Sterling, who tells him, “You’d better get used to the fact that Murph’s a dead man” (155), because, “If you get back to the States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are a fucking dead man” (156). Bart begins to lose it, getting drunk and obsessing over his own death. He finds little tags Murph has left in various places that read “Murph was here” (159), and finally finds out from Sterling that Murph has been spending his days watching a female medic at the headquarters’ medic unit. Bart goes up there and finds Murph. They watch as a chopper drops off an injured soldier and the female medic and her colleagues rush out to try to save him. They hear the soldier die. Murph says, “I want to go home, Bart” (164). They see the medic exit again and cry. Bart realizes the real reason Murph watches the female medic is that “it might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we’d ever know” (164-65).  

The medic goes into the chapel. Murph and Bart begin walking away and mortars begin exploding around them. Bart loses track of Murph and finds a sewage ditch to shelter in until the barrage ceases. The apparent target was a small area of the base set aside for Iraqi merchants to sell their wares, which is seen as traitorous by the insurgents. Bart sees a wounded vendor die. Bart then returns to the chapel to find Murph. He finds Murph and another soldier tending to the body of the female medic, who has been killed in the blasts. Murph “curl[s] up helplessly in the still-smoldering ruins of the chapel, muttering to himself over and over again, ‘What just happened,’” while Bart and the other soldier carry her body back to the medic unit (172). The chapter again ends with the call of the muezzin.