Birdmen is a story about our wars. More specifically, it is the story of two young men caught in the middle of the conflict in Iraq, and their attempts to carve out meaning and purpose in the midst of a war they do not fully understand. As an old veteran in the book says, "Something inside all of us dies in a war. Hope... innocence... maybe just naivete?" In a sense, we are all struggling in some form or other for a victory that seems to constantly elude us. Suddenly we find ourselves fighting a battle that may provide no real sense of absolution in the end. War is truly ugly. Truth becomes abstracted. Redemption reveals itself as an often unpleasant and complicated process.
Soldiers come home from a war expecting to be free and clear of the thing, only too often to find they are still carrying it around inside them. For those who live through it, the war is never really over, and there may be no such thing as a happy ending."