Where It All Goes Down
Kuwait and Wartime Iraq
For Birdy, a teenager from Harlem, Iraq might as well be the dark side of the moon. The hustle and bustle of New York City is about as far from the desertscape and ancient buildings of Iraq as you can get.
It's all foreign, and he's totally bowled over by both how strange he finds it, and by its distinctive mixture of old and new.
In this book, we don't get one vision of Iraq—we get many: the modernity of Baghdad; the old, impoverished villages they travel to; the vastness of the desert; and the danger and wildness of the marshy area near the border of Iran.
Iraq is not a country that looks the same throughout. It's full of completely different landscapes…and completely different sorts of people.
Birdy's not the kind of guy to examine his feelings much, so often his description of whatever setting he's in betrays how he feels. After Pendleton's death, Birdy's narration reads,
The smell from the river drifted over us like the stink of doom. (12.202)
Yeah. That's not exactly the smell of roses and freshly-baked bread.
The sunrise over Fallujah, while beautiful, comes to symbolize the dawning of a new part of his life, after he has killed and watched his victims die. Birdy continues to emphasize the beauty of the country, but as the book goes on, his descriptions get more and more tinged with his feeling of depression.
Poor Birdy. He's never seeing just Iraq. He's seeing a very specific side of the country: Iraq in the middle of a war.