The Yellow Birds

Birds appear throughout the novel, and the Epigraph the title comes from is taken from a “Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence,” which includes the lines “And then I smashed / [the bird’s] fucking head.” In Chapter 6, during thebattle to retake Al Tafar, Bart notes, “When the mortars fell, the leaves and fruit and birds were frayed like ends of rope. They lay on the ground in scattered piles, torn feathers and leaves and the rinds of broken fruit intermingling” (116). Here, the birds are collateral damage in a human war, a symbol of the consequences, especially to the innocent, that war can bring.

The birds also seem to Bart to be omens: “The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid” (115). A semaphore passes along meaning as a kind of visual language, but here, the meaning is “artless” and obscure to Bart, who cannot know what it means, as if he were too close to have the proper perspective.

When Bart is back home, after his tour of duty, he writes, “If I heard the caw of ugly crows swing down from the power line that they adorned in black simplicity, the caws might strike in perfect harmony with the memory of the sound of falling mortars” (134). The birds, although innocent, here turn “ugly,” bringing the war back to the forefront of his mind and becoming sinister. In this section, the birds stand for the way PTSD can infiltrate one’s mind and turn something that should be beautiful (life after war) ugly again. Later, Bart sees an egret flying close to the water and thinks, “there was no way a body could be so close to the edge of a thing and stay there and be in control” (143). But, Bart continues, “The egret didn’t seem to mind what [Bart] believed,” and flies off, “full of grace” (143). Here, the birds become a symbol not only of Bart’s PTSD, but also of hope. He didn’t believe the bird could maintain control on the edge of the water, but it did.

The novel begins with the seasons. The very first line is “The war tried to kill us in the spring” (3). This notion of the war trying to kill the soldiers is then said to also occur in summer. At first, in this opening chapter, the seasons seem to represent the passage of time, the way Murph and Bart, obsessed over the number of soldiers killed in the war, remain alive, and not yet counted among the fallen’s number.

Later, after Bart and Murph learn from Sterling that this will be the third time they are retaking Al Tafar, Bart projects into the future: “We’d go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of season” (91). A bit later, Murph says, “Maybe they’ll make it an annual thing” (91). While the inevitability of the change of seasons can have some comforting aspects, here, the war being compared to the cyclical nature of the seasons also brings a sense of meaninglessness to their actions. What they are going to be fighting and killing and dying over will just happen again to different people, and nothing will truly change. This meaninglessness becomes one of the things that affects Bart well after he leaves the army.

In the next chapter, however, the change in seasons takes on a more hopeful note. As Bart is flying over U.S. soil once again, he rejoices at the greenery below: “It was spring and some [trees] bloomed and from this height even the blooms were green and it was so green that I would have jumped from the plane if I could have, to float over that green briefly, to let it be real and whole and as large as I imagined” (102). Even here, despite the giddiness Bart conveys, it is intermingled with something darker: a plummet to his death, to be “scattered over the earth” (103). This is when he remembers the end to the phrase he had started previously, “home. I want to go home” (103). In this section, though it ends on a high note, the seasons bring back that darker idea of the cyclical nature of life, foreshadowing that the consequences of the war are not through revealing themselves. The final chapter of the novel, Chapter 11, brings us back to spring, when Bart is being released from prison. This gives the novel a sense of completeness, but also ends on the most hopeful of the seasons, the season of rebirth, as Bart gets settled in his cabin in the mountains. 

Snow is an arresting image often in the novel. Bart says in Chapter 2, "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" (31). Add to this that it is snowing when Bart is arrested for events surrounding Murph's death, and that it is snowing when Murph's death is reported to his parents, and snow would seem to be a symbol not just for death itself, but for the way that death can haunt the living.