[In the following essay, Morrissey analyzes the bird metaphors in the novel In Country.]

Birds and images of flight help to elucidate the psychological states of the principal characters of Bobbie Ann Mason's compelling post-Vietnam War novel, In Country. Sam Hughes, posthumous daughter of a Kentucky farm boy killed at Quang Ngai, and her Uncle Emmett, a veteran whose life is stalled, struggle to come to terms with a war that has been banished from public consciousness.

Emmett's quest for an egret, a heron-like bird similar to a species he saw (or imagined he saw) in Vietnam, opens a channel of communication between him and his niece and serves as a symbol of the survivors' questions about the war. Although Emmett, like the other vets, is reluctant to discuss the fighting, he will talk about the birds that are his only positive memory:

That beautiful bird just going about its business with all that crazy stuff going on. Whole flocks of them would fly over. … Once a grenade hit close to some trees and there were these birds taking off like quail, ever' which way. We thought it was snowing up instead of down.

(35)

The incongruous juxtaposition of a grenade and gracefully ascending birds symbolizes Emmett's difficulty in reconciling the horror of the war with the peace and beauty that elude him. He calls his former girlfriend a “flamingo” (99, 101, 109) and a “Kentucky red bird” (114), but he is unable to sustain a relationship with her. He loves flying things, even the “wonderful aircraft” (51) of Vietnam, and he mourns when they fall, as in the cases of flocks of birds killed in Florida (120) and of his hero, Colonel Henry Blake of M*A*S*H, who fell “out of the sky” (84). It is important that Emmett is searching for egrets and not eagles (90). Believing that the war was a waste and that the Veterans Administration treats veterans with contempt, he has had enough of national patriotic symbols and looks for his own personal symbol of fulfillment.

Birds are Emmett's link with a larger reality, for, as he explains to Sam, “‘If you can think about something like birds, you can get outside of yourself, and it doesn't hurt as much’” (226). That his goal is escape from the weight of memories is suggested by Sam's vision of him as he walks in front of her, having for the first time unburdened himself of a frightening combat experience: “He seemed to float away, above the poison ivy, like a pond skimmer, beautiful in his flight” (226).

Likewise, Sam knows that understanding the Vietnam experience is somehow related to Emmett's bird. She says to a vet, “‘I want to know about that bird Emmett's looking for. And I want to know all this stuff about Agent Orange. It's so frustrating’” (95). In fact, following Emmett's example, she sometimes sees the world in terms of avian images. Her new stepsister looks like “a baby bird waiting for the mother bird to vomit food into its gullet” (156), and the child's hand is “like a naked little bird” (162). These images of dependency and vulnerability are especially important because Sam is haunted by visions of Vietnamese women carrying their dead babies until they rot.

The visit by Emmett, Sam, and Mamaw Hughes, mother of Sam's dead father, to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington is the emotional and imagistic highlight of the novel. The trio sets off in Sam's VW, “‘a good little bird’” (6), in which Sam “could glide … all the way across America” (3). The monument is both the real gathering place of the psychologically wounded and the figurative culmination of the images of birds and flight. Sam faces the monument, “the black wing embedded in the soil” (239). It is as though all the war dead are united in one colossal air crash. The narrator tells us that “The memorial cuts a V in the ground like the wings of an abstract bird, huge and headless. Overhead, a jet plane angles upward, taking off” (239). The 58,000 Americans killed lost their potential futures; unlike those in the rising aircraft, flight has been denied them. Mamaw Hughes finds the name of her dead son and, buoyed by the sight of a white carnation, “loosens her bird-like grip” (245) on Sam's arm. The loss of her young has now been acknowledged by her nation. Finally, staring at the wall in the lotus position, Emmett faces his friends' deaths. With a simile suggesting the phoenix, the narrator tells us that “his face bursts into a smile like flames” (245). Mamaw Hughes's release from isolated sorrow, Emmett's figurative cathartic immolation, and Sam's touching her father's name, or coincidentally finding her own name—Sam A. Hughes—on the wall, are all liberating reconciliations. If the memorial is a fallen bird, it has nevertheless unburdened the survivors so that they can rise from the ashes of war and sorrow to meet their own destinies.