The most lyrical passages in The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers' novel about a United States soldier who served in Iraq, are those that describe the geography: of Virginia, from where he hails and to where he returns, and of Nineveh Province, where he fights. With brief stops at the barracks in Fort Bragg, New Jersey and a whorehouse in Kaiserslautern, Germany, the story shifts between Richmond and Al Tafar, building drama by overlaying the landscapes of America and the Middle East, forest and desert, tradition and modernity, violence and sterility. The narrator has a keen memory for the spread of earth around him (the plants, the sounds, the light, the air) and relates them to us exquisitely. Of the rising sun he says, "… a light the color of unripe oranges fell…“ Of the night sky he says, ” … a few stars like handfuls of salt thrown out.“ And he understands how deeply the landscape shapes identity and memory. Of an orchard he says, ”… the trees planted in rows so orderly we thought we’d have views from one world to another.“
While the themes of the book are timely, stirring up discussion about parts of our current national policy we don't really like thinking about, it’s its description of Iraq that haunts. The Iraq in the book is a real place, with hyacinth gardens and sewage ditches, with three-legged donkeys and beautiful old women. It’s a landscape that is being devastated, without clear reason, by gunshot, explosions and fire. The soldier’s memories of this place, which stay with him, are his memories of the war. At the end of the book, after he’s back in the States, a visitor gives him a map of Iraq and he thinks, "That map, like every other, would soon be out of date, if it was not already… the map would become less and less a picture of a fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions." There’s a way in which every story is a map, and every map is exactly that, an attempt to put a world we know on paper.
A Map of the New Continent, by J.Gibson, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1758.