The Yellow Birds

Chapter 10 returns to Al Tafar in October of 2004, right after the medic's death. The chapter begins, "Murph, gape-jawed and crying, was gone," and continues, "He'd already left through a hole in the wire by then, his clothes and disassembled weapon scattered in the dust. He was gone but we didn't know it yet" (193). Sterling comes to gather the platoon to go search for Murph. They go into the city and eventually find a resident of the city willing to offer information. With the assistance of a translator, the resident relates that he saw a naked white man, feet bleeding, coming toward him in the market, and that “[Murph] showed no awareness of their presence," despite "attempt[ing] to break Murph's trance" (196). A nearby beggar took Murph down an alley, and that was the last the man had seen of Murph. 

Sterling and the rest begin following the route Murph and the beggar took, searching for signs of him. A private finds blood, and they follow it to a small hub, where they find the beggar dead. At a loss, the soldiers more or less choose a path at random, moving toward a looming minaret and the river. They come across a man with a cart, three-legged donkey, and a couple of dogs. The soldiers ask the man if he's seen anything. He points them toward the minaret by the river. Sterling says he and Bart will go check it out. The man with the cart leads them part of the way, but then sits in the shade of a tree, saying he doesn't want to go further but they should check at the base of the minaret. Bart hesitates, saying it "Feels like a setup" (203). Sterling responds that "'Ain't right' is exactly what we're looking for" (204). They go to where the man indicated and find Murph's body in a broken heap, dead before he was thrown from the minaret's window. They lay him out and find his body severely mutilated. Bart says, "Most of us had seen death in many forms […] [b]ut none of us had seen this" (206).

Bart asks what they should do, "reckoning with the fact that the decision would be ours," since he and Sterling were the only ones who had seen everything so far (206). Sterling and Bart weigh their choices: whether to follow protocol and recover the body, or to "fix this like it never happened," as Sterling says (208). Sterling then adds, "You know what that means, right?" (208). Bart says he does. They call over the man with the cart and load Murph's body into the back. Bart narrates, "We didn't have the chance to take it back. We had never had the chance, not really [...] The decision had been made" (209). Sterling takes Bart's lighter and sets fire to the brush at the foot of the tower, They then take Murph's body to the river. The minaret has caught fire by this point. With the hermit's help, they throw Murph’s corpse into the water. Sterling says, "Like it never happened, Bartle. That's the only way," and Bart responds, "Yeah, I know" (211). Sterling then "sho[ots] the cartwright once, in the face [...] No time to even be surprised by it" (211). They look back at the river, and the chapter ends: "Murph was gone" (211).

The final chapter of the novel jumps ahead several years, from where Chapter 9 left off, to April2009, Bart's "third and last [year] of [his] confinement" (215). Over the years, Bart narrates, "I developed the habit of making a mark on my cell wall when I remembered a particular event, thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense" (216). However, at some point, he "realized that the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed in place. Connecting them would be wrong" (217). The guards think he has been counting down the days until his release, guessing at a number near 1,000, which makes Bart wonder "what [Murph's] number would have been if I hadn't lied about it all" (218).

During his incarceration, Murph's mother, to whom Bart had forged the letter from Murph to cover up what he and Sterling had done, comes to visit him. She tells him about when the officers came to inform her and her husband of their son's death, on a snowy winter day. Bart imagines in detail what it would have been like for them. He tells her, "I didn't mean for it all to happen like that," and she responds, "Well, what you meant can't do anything now" (221). Bart narrates, "The army had given up on her eventually, her fight for truth and justice, [...] why the explanations never fit," until they eventually waited her out, finally offering a slight increase in her benefits and Bart's imprisonment, which she took (222). Bart reflects, "I appreciated the way she reacted to my explanation [...] She hadn't offered forgiveness and I hadn't asked for it. But after she left, I felt like my resignation was now justified, perhaps her too, which was a big step nowadays, when even an apt resignation is readily dismissed as sentimental" (223).

After he is released, Bart says, "My loss is fading too and I don't know what it is becoming," and, a little later, "I've allowed myself the gift of a quiet quarantine in a cabin in the hills below the Blue Ridge" (223). Bart reveals that during her visit, Murph's mother had given him a map of Iraq with a section "magnifying Al Tafar and its surrounding landscapes" (224). Bart tacks it to his cabin wall the day he arrives at the cabin, and then goes for a walk: "And then I saw Murph as I'd seen him last, but beautiful. Somehow his wounds were softened, his disfigurement transformed into a statement on permanence" (226). He imagines the journey Murph’s body took along the river, "toward a line of waves that break forever as he enters them," which is where the novel ends (226).