[3] Much of the novel draws upon Powers's experience serving a year as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq, from February 2004 to March 2005 after enlisting in the Army at the age of 17.

"[6] The Yellow Birds begins with "The war tried to kill us in the spring" and follows Private John Bartle, the novel's protagonist and narrator, in Al Tafar, Iraq; Fort Dix, New Jersey; Kaiserslautern, Germany; the author's and narrator's hometown of Richmond, Virginia; and Fort Knox, Kentucky, from December 2003 to April 2009.

"[6] The title of the novel alludes to a story Murph tells Bartle while on a guard tower about when Murph's "father brought a dozen caged canaries home from the mine and let them loose in the hollow where they lived, how the canaries only flitted and sang awhile before perching back atop their cages, which had been arranged in rows, his father likely thinking that the birds would not return by choice to their captivity, and that the cages should be used for something else: a pretty bed for vegetables, perhaps a place to string up candles between the trees, and in what strange silences the world worked, Murph must have wondered, as the birds settled peaceably in their formation and ceased to sing.

I lured him in With a piece of bread And then I smashed His fucking head ..." For Powers, the epigraph has come to stand for: "the lack of control soldiers have over what happens to them.

"[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.

"[9] In a review for The New York Times Benjamin Percy writes: "In this way, The Yellow Birds joins the conversation with books like Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony," Brian Turner's Phantom Noise and Tim O'Brien's classic, The Things They Carried — and wakes the readers of 'the spoiled cities of America' to a reality most would rather not face.

And though we might slap a yellow ribbon magnet to our truck's tailgate, though we might shake a soldier's hand in the airport, we ignore the fact that in America an average of 18 veterans are said to commit suicide every day.

[12] Juror Joyce Carol Oates praised its capacity to depict a minority culture in the United States, that of military service.

The National Book Award citation describes The Yellow Birds as: "Poetic, precise, and moving, The Yellow Birds is a work of fiercest principle, honoring loss while at the same time indicting the pieties of war...An urgent, vital, beautiful novel that reminds us through its scrupulous honesty how rarely its anguished truths are told.

"[13] The book was adapted on screen in 2017, The Yellow Birds was directed by Alexandre Moors and starred Jack Huston, Alden Ehrenreich, Tye Sheridan and Jennifer Aniston.