Brian Turner, Iraqi War Poet

Brian Turner by Kim Buchheit, Blue Flower Arts

My Friend Alice, the master teacher and poet, will have me reading 'til the end of my days. After she put me onto Yosef Komanyakaa, she said I'd liked the war poet Brain Turner, too. There are lots of great war poets, and I have to admit I am behind on all of them, women warriors' poetry included. I don't have enough time left on earth to make it through the war poetry, let alone all the contemporary authors and poets on my too-long list of Books to Read before I die.  

Alice is right again.  Brian Turner is a powerful poet and a good compliment to Komanyakaa.  Komanyakaa spent a year in the hell of Vietnam, a young man still in the bud. It's a miracle he survived the slaughter, that anyone survived. The war shaped his emotional life, turned him inward to escape the pain, until he saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and found himself where he did not want to be, remembering what he did not want to remember, absorbed into the Wall's glossy black granite, "Facing It."  

Brian Turner is a poet and US Army combat soldier telling us about war as he is fighting it, armed and on alert, in the trenches, on the front lines, hovering over a comrade, wondering if a bullet is meant for him and if it will hit its target.  Surely it will hit some target, and it will be deadly.  Turner fought for two years in Bosnia-Herzogovina, a cruel genocidal war, and then in Iraq beginning in November 2003, an infantry team leader, where fear and death, literally blood, sweat and tears, were his constant companions and living nightmares.  

In his acclaimed and award-winning book, Here, Bullet, Turner shares his experiences of war, shot through with harsh realism and agony as only a soldier poet can tell it. For most of us, war is an abstraction, horrible, sad, but far away. For Turner, war was in his sights, a participant and a witness, and it shatters all landscapes and all humans in its path.   
Here, Bullet 

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
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. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

In a review of Here, Bullet, Olivia Gerard, a writer and an officer in the US Marine Corps, highlights the significance of Turner's poems. War requires "a translator," she writes, and Brian Turner is one of them. 

"Without poetry, the experience of war defies articulation and explanation of what it meant to be there, in those conditions, with that mindset....Not because war is indescribable, but because it requires a translator—a native speaker who can write to the combat-deaf, -dumb, and -blind. As a U.S. Army soldier of the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq, Brian Turner has been that translator both in prose and poetry. His lyrical memoir, My Life As A Foreign Country, describes war as the “extension of an idea expressed in the physical language of shrapnel.” But it is through poetry, specifically Here, Bullet, that Turner distills this experience of war into his own elemental trinity, 'projectiles filled with poems and death and love.'”

Turner's poems cut through our imagined wars, our media and movie wars, straight through to the guts of them. The poems I've read literally tremble with the sounds and sights and horrors of battle, of stalking the enemy and being stalked, of being buffeted about like puppets in a sand storm, not knowing when an AR-15 might go off on soldiers and civilians alike, the bullets "hissing through the air...each twist of the round spun deeper, because here, Bullet, here is where the world ends, every time."  

The Hurt Locker
Nothing but hurt left here.
Nothing but bullets and pain
and the bled-out slumping
and all the fucks and goddamns
and Jesus Christs of the wounded.
Nothing left here but the hurt.

Believe it when you see it.
Believe it when a twelve-year-old
rolls a grenade into the room.
Or when a sniper punches a hole
deep into someone’s skull.
Believe it when four men
step from a taxicab in Mosul
to shower the street in brass
and fire. Open the hurt locker
and see what there is of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls.


What Every Soldier Should Know
To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will;
it is at best an act of prudence.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon,
it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you.

Always enter a home with your right foot;
the left is for cemeteries and unclean places.

O-guf! Tera armeek is rarely useful.
It means Stop! Or I'll shoot.

Sabah el khair is effective.
It means Good morning.

Inshallah means Allah be willing.
Listen well when it is spoken.

You will hear the RPG coming for you.
Not so the roadside bomb.

There are bombs under the overpasses,
in trashpiles, in bricks, in cars.

There are shopping carts with clothes soaked
in foogas, a sticky gel of homemade napalm.

Parachute bombs and artillery shells
sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals.

Graffiti sprayed onto the overpasses:
I will kell you, American.

Men wearing vests rigged with explosives
walk up, raise their arms and say Inshallah.

There are men who earn eighty dollars
to attack you, five thousand to kill.

Small children who will play with you,
old men with their talk, women who offer chai—

and any one of them
may dance over your body tomorrow.

Sources and information:
* Brian Turner, “The Hurt Locker” from Here, Bullet. Copyright © 2005 by Brian Turner. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books.

* https://mypoeticside.com/poets/brian-turner-poems#block-bio

* Brief biography: 
Turner was born in  Visilia, CA and raised in Fresno and Madera County. He got his BA and MA at Fresno State, and an MFA at the University of Oregon. He taught English in South Korea for a year, and traveled to Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan.  Turner is a US Army vet.  In 1999 and 2000 he was with the 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  A butchery of ethnic cleansing and gruesome rapes, deathly battles, genocide. How could anyone survive that, let alone write about it.  Turner did it.  Beginning in November 2003, Turner was an an infantry team leader in Iraq, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.  Those of us who watched these horrible conflicts on television, not sure what the hell we were doing there in the first place, cannot know what war is really like. 
  
Turner's poems have been published in The Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Georgia Review, Rattle, Virginia Quarterly Review, and ZYZZYVA, in the 2007 edition of The Best American Poetry, and in anthologies including Voices in Wartime: The Anthology (Whit Press, 2005) and Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Random House, 2006).  Turner received major media attention for Here, Bullet.  He was interviewed or featured in The New Yorker, New York Times, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Verb on BBC, and many other venues. 

He was featured in the film, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for a 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary.  He is Director of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College at Lake Tahoe. 

Turner married fellow poet IIyse Kusnetz  in 2010 in Orlando FL.  She died six years later from cancer, another excruciatingly painful loss for Turner.  Her poetry about dying is powerful too.

* https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2016/8/3/reviewing-here-bullet-turners-trinity-of-love-death-and-poems

* On the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina:   https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/10/belgrade-serbia

His recent memoir: My life as a Foreign Country,  reviewed in https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/books/review/my-life-as-a-foreign-country-by-brian-turner.html 

Phantom Noise,  by Brian Turner 

There is this ringing hum  this

bullet-borne language  ringing

shell-fall and static this  late-night

ringing of threadwork and carpet  ringing

bodies ringing in steel  humming these

hiss and steam  this wing-beat

of rotors and tanks  broken

ringing these children their gravestones

voices of dust  these years ringing

rifles in Babylon  rifles in Sumer

this eardrum  this rifled symphonic  this

and candy  their limbs gone missing  their

static-borne television  their ringing

threading of bullets in muscle and bone  this ringing

ringing of midnight in gunpowder and oil this

brake pad gone useless  this muzzle-flash singing  this

ringing

hum  this ringing hum  this