Kevin Powers Yellow Birds is the perfect antidote to all that toxic nonsense emanating from and around the Help For Heroes slogan. Whatever the US and UK servicemen and women returning from the bloody imperialist interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan may be, they are certainly not heroes. Yellow Birds makes that perfectly clear. Seen from the Afghan and Iraqi perspective they are probably seen as heartless mercenaries in the pay of corporate America. Seen from an Anglo-Saxon perspective they might charitably be regarded as unemployed and unemployable youngsters who naively join the armed forces looking for something more engaging than their dour and demeaning lives in the post-industrial wastelands of Britain and America.

Looking for status, manhood and above all, a regular income, this generation of squaddies, like all previous generations, are little more than cannon fodder in a much bigger game. But however we care to define their motives and character, heroic should not be one of them. There is absolutely nothing heroic about deploying lethal US firepower to humiliate and murder hapless and long suffering Iraqi and Afghan families, most of whom are tragically caught in an endless war between barbaric and medieval Islamic Jihadism, brutal and corrupt local warlords and an ever more veracious and murderous US Imperialism.

Yellow Birds turns out to be far more than a stinging denouncement of the mindless brutality that is associated with the wholly illegal Nato invasion of Iraq. Through its central protagonist, we are treated to an unsettling discourse of existential dimensions of the kind that all wars inevitably produce. The quest for meaning in a chaotic and seemingly meaningless universe makes Yellow Birds more than just an indictment of one war. It has something to say about all wars and of life itself. This is a novel that can sit comfortably alongside the volumes of bleak and bitter poetry emanating from the First World War. It even has a touch of Camus The Outsider about it. Like these earlier works, Yellow Birds lingers on long after the book has been put down always a sign that something special has been produced.

Yellow Birds is also an extremely timely work given the propensity for ex-servicemen to go on killing sprees in the United States. There was yet another deadly rampage just a few weeks ago. What do these blood lettings tell us? Chanel Four recently produced a sobering piece of journalism highlighting the desperate state of so many of the ex-servicemen in the US; homeless, unemployed, mired in drug and alcohol abuse, and above all, suffering severe mental health issues. Like Bartle and Murphy, these men have been desensitised and brutalised during their military training, and then instructed to carry out the most brutal and barbaric operations against the Iraqi people, many of whom, ironically, were victims not perpetrators under the Saddam regime. Remember those sickening photographs taken inside the detention centres showing gratuitous scenes of torture and humiliation by US and British servicemen and women of Iraqi prisoners? Conquering heroes? I think not. More reminiscent of Nazi atrocities carried out on the Eastern front. Little wonder that when these young mercenaries return to civilian life they are totally ill prepared to slot into the hum-drum of daily suburban existence.

What could these young servicemen and women do to elevate themselves to heroic status? Not an easy question to answer given that once in a military situation there is a certain logic of war; kill or be killed. Could these servicemen refuse certain duties? Theoretically possible but extremely difficult given the nature of military discipline. A handful of Israeli conscripts have refused to serve in the Occupied Territories and they have been imprisoned by their own government for taking such a principled stand. Now they might be regarded as true heroes. Refusing to enlist in an imperialist conscript army is an even more heroic act but in a fully professional army that option does not arise. Finally, one could do as Kevin Powers has done, and attempt to expose the true nature of war, with all its senseless barbarity and murderous intent. That is a true act of heroism and one that we can confidently salute. Merely increasing the resources of the physically and mentally scarred, as President Obama has pledged to do, is only to be complicit in the end.