The Yellow Birds

Chapter 9 opens on Bart’s new life, two months after the revelation in Chapter 7 that C.I.D. has wanted to talk to him. He is now living in an apartment, rarely going out, and drinking heavily: “I knew the C.I.D. investigators would find me eventually, and I was pretty sure I knew what they wanted. Someone had to be punished for what had happened to Murph” (179). Bart continues, saying, “I was guilty of something, […] that much I could feel on a cellular level. What crimes we had committed, though, […] didn’t seem to matter” (179). He also returns to the letter he sent to Murph’s mother, speculating he would probably get five years in prison for it.

Finally, on a snowy day, a captain from C.I.D. shows up at Bart’s door. Bart lets him in, and the captain asks about the letter he wrote, holding it up in a plastic bag. Bart closes his eyes and gets lost in reverie, thinking about the end-of-tour evaluation to assess a soldier’s “ability to reenter the world” (183), and how Bart chose the answers he knew would get him home the quickest.

Returning to the moment at hand, Bart admits to writing the letter.