Brian Turner: War Poet's Testimony
Iraq Veteran's Poems Speak With Compassion About War Experience
Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl , who helped author the US Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual, wrote a gripping review of Brian Turner's poetry collection. He says he is deeply moved by it. The poems bring back the memories of the comrades and friends lost in the war.
"Ghost One-Three Alpha will call commands and Apache Red One will take point and Bulldog Six will grin again, that wonderful grin he had, full of joy, back when he still had a face." (John Nagl)
Live Witness Account of the War
The poems in this remarkable collection bear witness to Brian Turner's experiences during a tour in Iraq as Infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. Turner's style is direct and precise. In the titlle poem Here, Bullet a soldier addresses a bullet in the same way he would talk to another human. The impact the bullet will have in one brief moment - deciding about life or death - is dramatized and becomes very real.
"If a body is what you want,/ then here is bone and gristle and flesh/ (...)/ Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,/ that inexorable flight, that insane puncture/ into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish/what you've started." (...)
American and Iraqi Stories
In Baghdad Zoo, Turner displays the chaos widely reported after the 2003 invasion through the experience of displaced animals thrust into a surreal and alien habitat. The scene is as absurd as the chaos of war. In some poems Turner writes from the Iraqi perspective. In conversations with his personal translator he learned about the man's amazing life as an ex-Iraqi Special Forces soldier who spent twelve years in an Iranian prison. De-humanizing the Iraqi people was not an option for Turner. The poem 2000 lbs. is devoted to a suicide bomber:
"he is obliterated at the epicenter,/ he is everywhere, he is of all things,/ his touch is the air taken in..."
Another poem, Eulogy, was written to memorialize a soldier in Turner's platoon who took his own life.
Soldier-Poet Under Cover
Brian Turner (1966) earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. For much of 2004 he was stationed near Mosul. He was inspired by Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, a novel set during the Vietnam War, Walt Whitman's care for the wounded and an anthology of Iraqi poetry.
He also loves the epic of Gilgamesh - one of the earliest works of literary fiction from ancient Mesopotamia - which had been recorded on tablets by a Babylonian scribe named Sin-leqi-unninni. The tablets were found in the ancient city of Nineveh, near Mosul. Most of Turner's poems were written in Iraq, but he didn't talk to his soldiers about his writing. "I didn't want them to think that I was writing about flowers and stuff like that".
With the Iraq War entering its sixth year coverage in the media often seems reduced to an exchange of political arguments. Brian Turner's eloquent poems capture emotions to which all readers can relate. Anyone interested in the war and is legacy will find captivating stories of soldiers and civilians caught in the horror and ambiguities of modern warfare.
Brian Turner: Here, Bullet. (2005) ISBN: 1-882295-55-2
For more personal accounts on the Iraq War:
Carroll, Andrew (ed.): Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. New York: 2006.
