About ten years ago, unknown to the literature battalion but (young) veteran of the American forces in Iraq, Kevin Powers, immediately imposed his signature with Yellow Birds. A stunning first novel of humanity and finesse on the American war between Tigris and Euphrates, written with the miraculous grace of a master of poetic prose. As an epigraph to his new opus, Breaking pointhe chose a quote from War is a racketpamphlet dating from… 1935 and due to a certain Smedley Butler, general of the Marine Corps, also known for having denounced an alleged plot led by large capitalist families to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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Yellow Birds put into words the flood of emotions that Kevin Powers had brought with him in his troop luggage back home. With this Breaking pointit narrows the focus on what is akin, according to Smedley Butler, to “ a racket where profits are calculated in dollars and losses in human lives. » Said profits here are those of private military companies (PMC) whose role has increased tenfold in international conflicts over the past twenty years, particularly when the United States is involved.
To tell the extent to which their business takes precedence over regular armies and in fact frees itself from all the rules, Kevin Powers chose the thriller route. He adopts the intensity, the nervousness of the narrative division, the effects of surprise and suspense, without losing any of his incredible talent in making the sound of falling men heard. In war, after war, the one that ends and the one that never stops.
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The character present at the opening of the novel, Arman Bajalan, belongs precisely to the category of those for whom the return to total peace seems almost impossible. Kurdish and Iraqi, he worked as an interpreter for a US Army unit before being the victim of an assassination attempt. He survived, not his wife and daughter. Did he see what he shouldn't have seen? Thanks to an officer a priori sensitive to his fate, Arman has been exfiltrated and we discover him swimming like almost every day near the motel where he was hired, near Norfolk, Virginia.
Massacre of Iraqi Kurds
It could be the RAS day, one more, of an exile whose scars show “that we wanted to cut this man into pieces, and roughly, without succeeding “. Except that coming out of the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, at the bend of a dune, Arman discovers the lifeless body of a man. And this dead man, we learn throughout the plot, is perhaps not unrelated to himself and two walkers, seen earlier on the beach, whose approach fleetingly reminded him of that ” Saddam's soldiers (Who) had captured his father in the Topzawa camp during Anfal. »
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For the record, in 1988, Anfal, ethnic cleansing sometimes compared to genocide, cost the lives of tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians.It's a lead. Possibly false or misleading, as is the law of the genre. A series of characters, including a duo of police officers, equal and particularly well drawn, will gather around Arman Bajalan to gradually clarify the issue that the latter carries, at the risk of being the ultimate victim of a series of executions, quite savage and disguised.
At one time or another, everyone has a piece of the puzzle in their hands – notably a young journalist who was too early addicted to the bottle but endowed with the right intuition having investigated the SMP Decision Tree and its CEO, Trevor Graves. According to the usual formula with (good) thrillers, we don't put Powers' book down. For the good execution of the plot. And even more for some magnificent pages of literature where the endless misfortune of an old man who lost his son is hidden behind a discreet friendly greeting to the visitor. “Go ahead son. It'll be OK. (…) Lamar had spent a lot of time trying not to think about it, but he was pretty sure he didn't know what “it's going to be okay” meant. »
Breaking point, by Kevin Powers. The cosmopolitan, Stock €23.
