"A yellow bird
With a yellow bill,
Was perched upon
My windowsill.
I lured him in
With a piece of bread
And then I smashed
His fucking head ..."
Traditional U.S. Army marching cadence
For Powers, the epigraph has come to stand for: "the lack of control soldiers have over what happens to them. The war proceeds, no matter what you think or do; it's an entity unto itself. You're powerless, and powerlessness itself becomes the enemy. That was my emotional experience of the war. The idea of the bird resonated with the core of what I was trying to get at."[6]
One of the major themes of The Yellow Birds is the separation between the American public and soldiers fighting overseas, which has dominated much of the Iraq War. It reflects the idea that Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum put forward in their book, That Used to Be Us: "We have also outsourced sacrifice. If World War II was 'the good war,' and the Korean War 'the forgotten war,' and Vietnam 'the controversial war,' the conflict that began with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and has sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan and Iraq for nearly a decade can be called 'the 1 percent war.' The troops deployed to these combat zones and their immediate families make up less than 1 percent of the population of the United States. The rest of us contribute nothing. We won't even increase our taxes, even through a surcharge on gasoline to pay for these wars. So we end up asking 1 percent of the country to make the ultimate sacrifice and the other 99 percent to make no sacrifice at all."[8]
With regard to the lack of connection between U.S. forces and the general public, Powers has said: "But I also felt powerful resentment that it seemed like nobody cared that we had gotten into this thing without thinking what the consequences would be...In some ways, the dialogue itself is missing. It seems the public conversation has disappeared. There are still soldiers in Afghanistan right now. There might be a wounded soldier as we speak who is feeling his life slipping away from him. And it doesn't warrant a mention in some venues. I think that's tragic."[9]
