A Poet/Combat Vet Cuts to the Core on Iraq
Posted: 1/19/2008 | By: Dennis Anderson
A poem about an Army private first class who blows his brains out by reeds of the Tigris River. The poem is called ?Eulogy.? Another poem about 16 Iraqi policemen, blown to kingdom come, along with some American G.I.s. And yet another poem about a young American female soldier, who hides nightly beneath a 2 1/2 ton supply truck, a ?deuce and a half? so the sergeant who craves her will leave her alone. This is not happy stuff.
This poetry is the extension of the military service and the mind of Brian Turner, who spent a year in Iraq with the 2nd Infantry Division?s 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
When the Army committed the still-in-development phased Stryker armored infantry carriers to the fight against Iraqi insurgents in late 2003, as a former embed and military father I exhaled a sigh of hope.
As it happened, Sgt. Turner was in-country navigating his tour of anxiety and fright, blood and fire, comradeship and life and death in the kill zone the same time I made a second trip embedded to report out the return of our local National Guard unit, which was driving heavy trucks up the bomb-laden roads in early 2004. Around the first battle of Fallujah.
Turner, as poet and combat veteran, is not bitter about the war?s journalism. But he believes, accurately, that the boundaries of journalism prose impose intellectual limitations on people back home and their ability to grasp the emotional and psychological and experiential truth of living and dying in the Iraq war.
?In journalism, 16 Iraqi policemen died,? he said. ?It?s expressed in that past tense, and that already distances it somewhat, doesn?t it??
At Thursday evening?s poetry reading for graduate students and poetry lovers held at the Antelope Valley campus of California State University, Bakersfield, Turner read poems and spoke. He spoke about PFC Bruce Miller, and his own offense taken that when the unit returned, Miller?s name was not read aloud with the other dead from the deployment.
?It seemed to be a fundamental injustice to his name,? Turner said. And so the sergeant-poet wrote the ?Eulogy? poem, and for the graduate students and poetry fans he eulogized aloud that Miller was a ?a young 23 ... a young soul? a ?good guy? and someone who liked hand-held video games and that his death was ?very sad.?
Turner recalled also that a senior officer nearby at the end of Miller?s short life put his hands in his pockets and asked the shocked troops circling him ?What are three things we can to do alleviate this situation??
Clearly, the officer was also trying to cope, and Turner suggested gently, without judging, that the officer himself seemed to lack skills to deal with what just happened. There?s really no way to ?alleviate? that situation.
That same week I passed through Camp Victory near the Iraq-Kuwait border and learned that a young Marine had followed a similar blind alley, killing himself with his weapon in the camp?s chapel. I was so shocked I hadn?t recalled it until now, until hearing sergeant-poet Turner?s eulogy. What a blind alley at the passage between life and death in youth.
I?m not writing about soldiers? suicides. The larger truth is the heartlessness and hopelessness that are the handmaidens of living and dying in war. And that, yes, journalism, print or visual, has failed to convey what our troops experience, and the sum total of suffering absorbed by our people and the innocent bystanders drawn into the post-invasion death orgy.
So, it wasn?t such a bad thing that Turner from Fresno had a master?s in fine arts degree tucked in his ruck sack when he enlisted at the age of 30. He delivers another language medium to help blind people learn the colors of war.
Fewer Americans are killed in Iraq right now. And, thank God, fewer Iraqis. Although the killing goes on, because as Turner relates, ?We are at war with an entire country? without really grasping how to wage that war.
History records that for so long as there have been foot soldiers and armies, there were poets. Turner notes the earliest literary work of war and kings -- the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh -- emerged from what is now Iraq. It was Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon who brought home a vision of life in the trenches of World War I.
Turner?s unsparing verse is not about glorifying war. It is about describing it.
Turner?s book of poetry, ?Here, Bullet? earned the Pen Center USA ?Best in the West? award in 2006 and the New York Times ?Editor?s Choice? selection in 2005. It is published by Alice James Books.
?You can say, ?This sucks. This is horrible. This is gonna bum you out,? Turner says. ?There?s no comedy here. No candy.?
There is, however, a view of truth as experienced by the ones we pay to experience our war for us. In defense of us. Whether the war can be defended is an argument that fades to blinding white like the Iraqi land in hearing about the raw nerves lacerated in this long dance of death in the 21st century.
This poetry is the extension of the military service and the mind of Brian Turner, who spent a year in Iraq with the 2nd Infantry Division?s 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
When the Army committed the still-in-development phased Stryker armored infantry carriers to the fight against Iraqi insurgents in late 2003, as a former embed and military father I exhaled a sigh of hope.
As it happened, Sgt. Turner was in-country navigating his tour of anxiety and fright, blood and fire, comradeship and life and death in the kill zone the same time I made a second trip embedded to report out the return of our local National Guard unit, which was driving heavy trucks up the bomb-laden roads in early 2004. Around the first battle of Fallujah.
Turner, as poet and combat veteran, is not bitter about the war?s journalism. But he believes, accurately, that the boundaries of journalism prose impose intellectual limitations on people back home and their ability to grasp the emotional and psychological and experiential truth of living and dying in the Iraq war.
?In journalism, 16 Iraqi policemen died,? he said. ?It?s expressed in that past tense, and that already distances it somewhat, doesn?t it??
At Thursday evening?s poetry reading for graduate students and poetry lovers held at the Antelope Valley campus of California State University, Bakersfield, Turner read poems and spoke. He spoke about PFC Bruce Miller, and his own offense taken that when the unit returned, Miller?s name was not read aloud with the other dead from the deployment.
?It seemed to be a fundamental injustice to his name,? Turner said. And so the sergeant-poet wrote the ?Eulogy? poem, and for the graduate students and poetry fans he eulogized aloud that Miller was a ?a young 23 ... a young soul? a ?good guy? and someone who liked hand-held video games and that his death was ?very sad.?
Turner recalled also that a senior officer nearby at the end of Miller?s short life put his hands in his pockets and asked the shocked troops circling him ?What are three things we can to do alleviate this situation??
Clearly, the officer was also trying to cope, and Turner suggested gently, without judging, that the officer himself seemed to lack skills to deal with what just happened. There?s really no way to ?alleviate? that situation.
That same week I passed through Camp Victory near the Iraq-Kuwait border and learned that a young Marine had followed a similar blind alley, killing himself with his weapon in the camp?s chapel. I was so shocked I hadn?t recalled it until now, until hearing sergeant-poet Turner?s eulogy. What a blind alley at the passage between life and death in youth.
I?m not writing about soldiers? suicides. The larger truth is the heartlessness and hopelessness that are the handmaidens of living and dying in war. And that, yes, journalism, print or visual, has failed to convey what our troops experience, and the sum total of suffering absorbed by our people and the innocent bystanders drawn into the post-invasion death orgy.
So, it wasn?t such a bad thing that Turner from Fresno had a master?s in fine arts degree tucked in his ruck sack when he enlisted at the age of 30. He delivers another language medium to help blind people learn the colors of war.
Fewer Americans are killed in Iraq right now. And, thank God, fewer Iraqis. Although the killing goes on, because as Turner relates, ?We are at war with an entire country? without really grasping how to wage that war.
History records that for so long as there have been foot soldiers and armies, there were poets. Turner notes the earliest literary work of war and kings -- the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh -- emerged from what is now Iraq. It was Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon who brought home a vision of life in the trenches of World War I.
Turner?s unsparing verse is not about glorifying war. It is about describing it.
Turner?s book of poetry, ?Here, Bullet? earned the Pen Center USA ?Best in the West? award in 2006 and the New York Times ?Editor?s Choice? selection in 2005. It is published by Alice James Books.
?You can say, ?This sucks. This is horrible. This is gonna bum you out,? Turner says. ?There?s no comedy here. No candy.?
There is, however, a view of truth as experienced by the ones we pay to experience our war for us. In defense of us. Whether the war can be defended is an argument that fades to blinding white like the Iraqi land in hearing about the raw nerves lacerated in this long dance of death in the 21st century.