Brian Turner

Brian Turner is a poet whose recently-published first book of poems, entitled Here, Bullet, won Alice James Books’ Beatrice Hawley Award. Turner wrote the majority of the poems in Here, Bullet while serving in 2003 and 2004 as an infantry sergeant for the US Army in Iraq. For this powerful essay, written exclusively for NYFA Current, Turner relives his tenure in Iraq and explains how poetry was not only a refuge, but a shield and a taunt.

Brian Turner (2004) in Mosul, Iraq (Photo: Tom Bosch)

MOSUL, mid-February, 2004—America no longer exists. America, like all of my life up until this moment, is an abstraction, a place of memory, a dream visited in sleep.

Tonight, in Iraq, the city of Mosul is hushed by snowfall. The horizon seals the world in blurry, hermetic darkness. I am an infantry sergeant in a squad of Ghostryders from 1st platoon, Bravo Company of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, setting up a counter-mortar position out in the middle of the Nineveh ruins. Treeless, barren, and only partly inhabited, the ruins are a vast metropolitan park, similar in scale to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park or New York’s Central Park. Our job is to listen for enemy mortar launches from within the city itself.

Here’s an excerpt from an email I sent to a friend at the time:

Hi _____,
I only have a few moments but thought I'd stop by to say hello. I'm in Mosul, where it snowed the last two days and is amazingly cold. I spent part of last night on a snowy hilltop within the city center—this is where the ancient ruins of the city of Nineveh is located. Strange to be there spread out in snowflats with other soldiers moving silently in a wedge formation, with me as the point man, wearing NVGs and carrying an M4 and thinking about wind direction and dogs and looking for tracks of those who would carry out mortar attacks against bases nearby. And cold.

I've been in 3 RPG attacks and one night ambush against us. So far, for me, it’s indescribable in the sense that I cannot possibly capture in words how the air feels in a firefight. How loud the heart is. That adrenaline-rushed feeling. More importantly to me is that I'm still here and I can complain about the cold, you know? One RPG struck the vehicle I was in on the fuel tank, about 7 feet from me!

Steve Mumford Charlie I-153 off Haifa Street Ink and watercolor on paper Courtesy the artist and Postmasters, New York

I experienced many moments similar to what is described in this email during my year-long deployment to Iraq (2003-2004). With the exception of a couple of poems, nearly all of Here, Bullet was written in-country and between missions—when my unit had downtime. Skipping the first 20 or 30 minutes of sleep, I would often use a red-lens flashlight to illuminate the pages of my journal, where I stored fragments of the day’s events: mortar attacks, RPG ambushes, Katyusha rockets, roadside bombs, snipers, details of the many raids we conducted, grapevine stories, and news heard through friends or over the radio, as well as lines of poetry that had surfaced and resisted submergence into my subconscious.

While in-country, I didn’t share this work with my fellow soldiers. When PFC Miller killed himself in March, I wrote a poem about it within days of his death, but I didn’t share it with anyone there until our unit returned stateside. When I did show it to those who had been there, I wanted to know if it was right. The poem doesn’t talk about the suicide note and how it was so bloodied it was nearly unreadable. It doesn’t mention my being one of the soldiers chosen to inventory and pack his gear and personal belongings. It seemed more important to find a place of peace.

Eulogy

It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 a.m.,
as tower guards eat sandwiches
and seagulls drift by on the Tigris river.
Prisoners tilt their heads to the west
though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them.
The sound reverberates down concertina coils
the way piano wire thrums when given slack.
And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun,
when Private Miller pulls the trigger
to take brass and fire into his mouth:
the sound lifts the birds up off the water,
a mongoose pauses under the orange trees,
and nothing can stop it now, no matter what
blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices
crackle over the radio in static confusion,
because if only for this moment the earth is stilled,
and Private Miller has found what low hush there is
down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.

PFC B. Miller (1980-March 22, 2003)

My journals, and the poems which began within them, were an attempt to understand the world around me, a world which made less and less sense as time went on. I wanted to understand where I was. And the people I pointed the muzzle of my weapon at, the people whose front doors I kicked in or blew open with explosive charges, the people I flex-cuffed in the middle of the street at 3 am—and their wives, their children, and their neighbors—I wanted to understand them, to know their history, to know the land itself. I read as much Iraqi poetry and history as I could find. (Check out Iraqi Poetry Today, guest edited by Saadi Simawe, King’s College, London, 2003.) I learned a great deal from our Iraqi translators—Harith, Jargis, Louie, Saier, and Koder—men whose last names I cannot speak to this very day because it could get them and their families killed.

Steve Mumford Soldier on Guard Duty, Bravo Co. Ink and watercolor on paper Courtesy the artist and Postmasters, New York

In Iraq, I was a sergeant. I was a team leader. My job was to accomplish the missions given to me and to see that my men made it home safe when it was all over. At the same time, I saw myself as an embedded poet; it was my job to witness, to provide testimony, however limited and filtered through the lens of my own faulty perceptions, to the ongoing war. Death hovered over all of this. In fact, the possibility of death hovers over every moment in Iraq. This may seem too melodramatic to some. But it’s true. Ask the soldiers who ran into the small store on the airbase north of Baghdad (Forward Operating Base Anaconda); they were desperate to find maxi-pads and Tampax for the soldiers wounded and dying from a mortar that had just exploded among them as they smoked cigarettes and reminisced about home. Ask one of the Iraqis in Mosul whose car engine I shot holes into when it drove too close to our trail vehicle. Ask me about the roadside bomb that exploded near our convoy with the sound of air thundering open and about how I froze with fear and failed to shoot out into the desert as I’d been trained to do. In an excerpt from a email to another friend, I touch on the subject of writing in this environment:

Dear _____,
...I am writing some, when time permits and I've got that urge to sort of make sense of something, or not forget it in the oncoming rush of events. But kicking in doors and patrolling through the river deltas that look absolutely like my vision of Viet Nam (replete with helicopters overhead and 15 foot tall elephant grasses swaying under the rotorwash, and muddy boots, and water buffalo staring in silence as you pass them, and the white cowbirds in the palm groves stretching their wings), well, it's hard to sort of come down from the adrenaline long enough to have a sense of what's going on here. But it helps.

The title poem of my book, "Here, Bullet," is a poem of potential loss, certainly, and it speaks to the fear of death, but it’s also a dare, a taunt to death spurred on by that thrill adrenaline produces in such an extreme environment.

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.

Had I been killed, someone would have found a handwritten copy of “Here, Bullet” neatly folded and sealed in a Ziploc bag located in the left chest pocket of my uniform. I still don’t know if it felt more like a shield or an invitation. But that’s where the poem lived for most of the year I was in Iraq.

Brian Turner’s book of poetry Here, Bullet is available through Alice James Books.

For more information on Brian Turner, visit:
www.alicejamesbooks.org/turner_interview.html
www.voicesinwartime.org/VoicesInWartime/Books/VIWTheAnthology.aspx
www.fishousepoems.org/archives/brian_turner/index.shtml
www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/baghdadjournal.asp