War and its opposite, by a soldier poet: My Life As a Foreign Country

My Life as a Foreign Country

Author: Brian Turner

ISBN-13: 978-0-22409-743-7

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Guideline Price: £16.99

My Life As a Foreign Country is Brian Turner's memoir of his experience as an infantry team leader with the US army in Iraq. A meditation on the nature of war and on what it is to be a soldier, it has the lyricism and imaginative reach of Turner's two collections of poetry, Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010).

Time and space dissolve on these pages. The story of one American soldier is interwoven with glimpses of other wars until it becomes the story of war itself. The soldier’s boyhood is peopled with veterans, men he loves and reveres: his father, grandfather, great-grandfather. The family has a long tradition of military service and war stories; his father teaches him martial arts and how to make napalm. It’s hardly surprising that soldiering is embedded in the boy’s understanding of what it means to be a man. This book is about what leads that man to war, what he witnesses and experiences there and, crucially, how he begins to recover from it.

Turner weaves his narrative together with threads of poetry and dream, images of owls and ghosts calling for water. Soldiers run “along narrow paths, leading most of them to damp holes in the earth”. There are sudden explosions, doors kicked in, roadside bombs, cruel tricks played on children one minute and chocolates handed out the next. There are men captured and hooded with sandbags. There are fuck magazines and Michael Moore documentaries and a volume of Iraqi poetry. There are stretches of boredom and flashes of bloodlust, masturbation in the showers and heartbreaking sex, as when, home on leave and at a rave party in Seattle, the soldier encounters a woman whose husband has been killed. She tells him, “I’m going to draw my husband from you now. Touch by touch, I will bring him back to this world.”

The soldier poet’s imagination roams 20th-century wars in search of men he loves, in action in their turn. Remembering stories they have told him, he becomes his father, his grandfather, a favourite uncle. Experiencing their fear and hurt and loss as his own, he inflicts pain and terror and death in his turn, even as he keeps his imagination open to the lives of Iraqi civilians and those he fights. In these pages war becomes a character in its own right, wild and insatiable.

One evening in camp, Turner comes across a poster advertising an “Open-Mic/ Poetry Nite”, bringing soldier self and poet self face to face. The poet refuses the invitation and turns away: “In many ways, the language of journal entries and poetry forged an internal space within me, a space that didn’t belong to the army or to the community of soldiers I served with.” He admits to another reason for retreating from that microphone: “Cowardice. I was afraid to admit that I loved this world. I was afraid to admit that I was alive.”

These lines reveal the heart of Turner’s work. The writer is in the grip of painful knowledge, something dark and twisted and difficult that demands witness and expression. His writing, too private and necessary to be exposed in that setting, generates a forcefield where his imagination is free and large enough to encompass the enemy’s experience as well as his own, other wars as well as this one. It is a place where “the word beauty intertwines with the words love and loss”. In his memoir he invites us into that deeply private space where language is at work, forging understanding.

War’s shadow

After the war Turner travels widely, looking for a way to re-enter the world. War casts a shadow everywhere he goes. He revisits Bosnia, where he had been stationed before Iraq. His old base has been replaced by young trees. The poet reflects that soon the violence that happened here will be forgotten, but “war is far more relentless, far more patient than this. Just as the body is known to ‘weep’ glass shards and embedded debris long after an injury has scarred and healed over, war shares its deep reserves of trauma” whether we look for it or not.

This idea finds concrete expression in stories, as when a Dutch trawler nets an unexploded shell from the second World War and three fishermen are killed, “a bomb from the 1940s arriving from the cold dark to discover [them] in the year 2005”, and in poems: “Such patience the mine has, waiting / under a canopy of years, the boy who placed it // now a taxi driver in Battambang, / a man who might offer you a cigarette . . .”

Turner asks, “How does anyone leave a war behind them, no matter what war it is, and somehow walk into the rest of his life?” Back at home, confusions of time and place persist for the soldiers in Turner’s story. They stray in their minds. Ghosts walk among them. This is what the people who love them face and cope with, sometimes in fear for their own lives and safety. When Turner’s destabilised spirit revisits scenes of violence he imagines his wife’s spirit in search of his. She finds him, unwinds his fingers from his weapons and leads him home to the safety of their bed.

The brigade returns to a ceremonial welcome. The soldiers stand in formation while a colonel delivers a speech. Family, friends and journalists watch from the bleachers while he reads out the names of those who didn’t make it back. He doesn’t mention Pte Miller, “A young man from New Jersey who wrote poetry and wanted to become a lawyer one day”, because Pte Miller took his own life.

How does such a death get written into the record? Through books like this one, bearing witness, naming names, calling things what they are. The task Brian Turner is engaged in, the work of literature, is to keep language alive, not to surrender to slogans and acronyms; to resist euphemism and cliche so that the sinister work of terms such as “collateral damage”, “neutralise” and “rendition” doesn’t cloud our understanding of what war is.

Turner's enterprise is, in Barbara Kingsolver's phrase, the opposite of war. He uses language as tool and medium, not weapon. Neither veil nor smokescreen, it makes and invites connection. This memoir is an exploration, an investigation, not a statement. It wraps us in lyricism one minute, tells unvarnished truth the next. It does for Iraq what Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried did for the war in Vietnam. Urgent, beautiful, disturbing, this is a humane and necessary book.