March 19 marked the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War. Unless prodded by a newspaper headline or a CNN ticker, it’s likely many Americans forgot this—more than one Iraq vet has commented on how, upon returning home, they came back to a country that seemed to have forgotten that it was at war.
This was veteran Brian Turner’s experience, too. “To find the war here in America, it’s not impossible,” he says, “but it is difficult.” Turner, who served as an infantry team leader in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, is also a poet; his book Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005), written during his tour of duty, won the Beatrice Hawley Award and was a New York Times “Editors’ Choice,” selection; it was compared to the work of Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, and Doug Anderson and earned thumbs-up reviews from Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi, and The New Yorker. Perhaps more important, though, Here, Bullet reached an audience of people who don’t normally read poetry—people who’d numbed out on the relentless news reports of suicide bombs, sandstorms, and body counts but needed a way to “fracture the narrative” of the war. People want to talk about Iraq, Turner insists. And art gives them a way to do that.
After the success of Here, Bullet, Turner was reluctant to write another war book, but as any creative person knows, a project that wants to come to fruition can be relentless, no matter what the writer wants; Talk the Guns, a collection of war poems written after Turner’s return to civilian life, will be released next year. On April 20, Turner appears at the River Styx at Duff’s series along with a former grad-school pal, Edwardsville poet Stacey Lynn Brown, who’ll be reading from her recently published book-length narrative poem, Cradle Song (C&R Press), which Naomi Shihab Nye called “a cycle of poems that feels perfectly timed for our current American moment, as conversations and memories grow more interesting again and we imagine rising up into a better shared story.”
Turner was kind enough to speak with us over the phone a few months ago prior to taping a segment on Weekend America, which you can hear here.
River Styx at Duff’s, April 20, 7:30 p.m. $5, $4 students/seniors. 392 N. Euclid, riverstyx.org.
What are you working on now? The press kit mentioned that you were working on a screenplay... The screenplay kind of took a back burner. I’m revising my second book of poetry; it’s called Talk the Guns. It’s a book I’ve tried to avoid writing, actually. Once the first book was published, I didn’t want to be typecast as “soldier dude.” [Laughs.] There are so many things to write about, but the war kept percolating up in my daily life. At one point, I did try to start writing poems about Iraq again, and I was trying to write poems that I’d started when I was there, but they weren’t working because I was no longer there. So I switched gears and starting doing other projects, one of them being that screenplay, mostly just to get experience doing other things, and I was curious to see how a screenplay might work, for example. And as this stuff kept percolating up, my editor at Alice James Books, she asked me a really simple question, but it was so thoughtful it was profound, at least I thought so. She just said, “Where are you now?” And I started thinking about that in terms of poems: “Where are my poems now? Where’s the war in my life?” So I did end up writing a second book, and we’re editing it right now, and it should be out in the spring of 2010.
Are you going to be reading any of that work when you’re in St. Louis? I know some poets feel squeamish about that. I’ve read from these poems before, I guess I would wait to see what’s going on with Adrian [Matejka, co-director of the River Styx series] and Stacey and everybody there, and see how they envision the evening. I haven’t really had a chance to ask them yet.
Yeah, River Styx is a pretty old-fashioned, straightforward poetry reading, in my experience. Oh sure. Yeah, I’d like to try some of them out. I like test-driving them to see what works [Laughs.]
Yeah, you get immediate feedback that way … I’ve found audiences are not very good at faking appreciation. So these are back-in-the-States poems? Yeah. They’re written more in contemplation, I guess. When I wrote Here, Bullet, I was mostly back on the base. I never wrote when I was out on the job.
I hear a lot of soldiers coming back who talk about that extreme culture shock of reentry into the civilian world, because it’s so sloppy, so unpredictable, just a completely different mindset. Yeah, it is. For instance, I’d be in a base, and we’d have a mission, we’d put all our gear on, and I guess it’s like putting your head on straight, because as soon as you leave the gate, or the wire, and the perimeter of the base, then you’re out there, out in the place where people get killed, or wounded, or whatnot. I wasn’t thinking poetry at all. When you’re there, you have to be incredibly aware of the moment. The past and the future don’t play as much of a role, like they do here. Sadly, I’m not very good at it, but I’m constantly sort of living in all three in my life back here. Thinking about things I’ve said to my girlfriend, worrying that I could’ve said them better, or I’m at the bank in the middle of a transaction and at the same time remembering I’ve got to go do such-and-such. I’m only partially aware of where I am. [Laughs.] But that’s not true in Iraq.
Right. I guess most civilians think, “Oh, how terrible to be deployed,” but it’s a pretty amazing experience in some ways, to be living in the immediate like that. Yep. And it can be almost addictive in some ways, because there is an adrenaline rush, fueled by fear, and then you come back home. I was older when I joined, so I’d had other jobs before I joined the military. But I can’t imagine, myself, if I’d joined at 18 and then come back and didn’t have any other marketable skills besides polishing floors and stuff, which is what you do in the infantry! What do I do, pump gas? Meanwhile, six months before I was a crucial part of keeping people alive and getting things done. It’s just…well, I can see why a lot of vets become thrill-seekers and risk-takers, driving too fast or drinking too much or just living too fast in the moment, and a lot of them crash one way or the other.
I know there’s a pretty high suicide rate, too. It reminds me of something I’d read about how the suicide rate shot up in Europe after the Armistice, because people felt like they’d gone from having lives filled with meaning to being plunged back into a very mundane existence. Additionally, I’ve heard from some vets that they’ve come back to a country where it seems like most of the American populace acts as if there’s not a war going on in the Middle East…they’re just driving around, shopping, totally oblivious. Well, it’s a disturbing thing to me. Part of what my second book is about is this question of, “Where is the war here?” Because you don’t really see it. To find the war here in America, it’s not impossible, but it is difficult. And it says a lot about a culture, about a country that can kill, wound, and maim so many people, and then know nothing about that country. They’re out shopping. There are different estimates, but the middle one is, the last survey says there were 622,190 dead Iraqis. If you go to the low part of that one, 420,000, I mean … it’s 420,000 people! That’s an incredibly large number of people. Most of us don’t know very much about the Iraqis, and I think that indicts us as a people. How can you wage a war and not really give a shit?
I was curious—different people go into the military for different reasons, and I was wondering why you joined up, especially since you mentioned you joined when you were older, which is kind of unusual. It is, but it’s more common than it used to be. And I think with the economy, it’s gone up even more. When I joined, I was the old guy in the platoon. It seemed like every platoon had like two old guys, you know? [Laughs.] Oftentimes, the old guys had a degree already, and for seven years I had the same conversation, where someone would come up to me, because I had a master’s degree, and they’d come up and say, “Hey Sarg, I hear you had a master’s degree.” And I’d say, “Yeah, I do.” And they’d say, “What are you doing here?” They never would ask what I studied, ever! For seven years, I kept track of it. And then the last month I was in the Army, there was a newly minted officer. He’d just come from college, basically, so for him that’s a normal question, “What’d you study?” It took until then to get asked that question.
I had a B.A. in English from Fresno State, and then I got an MFA at Oregon. Even for poets, it seems more natural that people would go into the military, come out shattered and then you would need art as a release and so you’d go to school to become a poet. But it’s hard to see a track where you’d be a sensitive person, presumably, who goes to college and studies poetry, and then due to some chasm in their consciousness, they go in the military and become this brutal warrior person. But life is more complicated than all that. We live in a very military culture, and I was raised in a family where every generation had been in the military, so I was raised with the assumption that it would be part of my life. It just seemed like something, well, that I should see what it was about…I know that’s vague, but it’s as clearly as I can articulate it. [Laughs.] I almost joined twice when I was 19; I almost joined the Marine Corps. And then I decided no, no, I’ll go to college first. It was something I thought about long before I got a master’s degree in poetry. And then when I was 30, there were a lot of factors that combined together. I probably wouldn’t have done it, but there were a lot of economic factors. I was newly married, and I’d come back from overseas with a family. It was a very practical way to solve a lot of problems at the time.
I think it’s interesting, and it’s good to disabuse people of stereotypes anyway! And while we’re on that, there was one poem in particular—I think I actually heard you on NPR reading it—but the one that really got me in the solar plexus is “Jameel,” which is almost a nature poem. If I could go back and improve that book, one thing would be to go back and do even more nature poetry, because even the cover of the book—which you can see online—the cover is a classic desert-looking cover, and that was me on the cover. But if you were standing in my shoes in that photograph and looked the direction I was looking, about a quarter-mile in front of me was the Tigris River, behind the photographer. It was like the opposite of that view, this lush, green delta. Very thick and dense, and some of it just … we’d be in fields of sunflowers that were six feet tall, and when you were patrolling you’d see water buffalo and cowbirds and groves of date palms. It’s just an amazing landscape. So I think that’s one of the failings of that book; it doesn’t really bring in the beauty as much as it could, but I guess you try. [Laughs.]
That’s so great for you to mention that. I think the American public very much imagines the landscape of Iraq as something similar to those desert video games where it’s just sand and a camel or two. Well, they have to have something else, because they have go grow food and feed people, right? But I didn’t think that before I went there, I was like, desert, sandstorms. And of course that’s part of it, but there’s much more to it. There are beautiful parts of the country. I can’t really fathom doing what a lot of Vietnam veterans have done, which is to go back and pursue friendships and traveling. It’s hard for me to ever imagine doing that in Iraq, but I wish I could.
Just because you aren’t emotionally ready? I just can’t ever … to me, the Vietnamese people are incredibly forgiving. And I just don’t know if the Iraqis would be. And I wouldn’t blame them for not being forgiving, you know? We really did a number on that place. And they’re going to be struggling for a long, long time to rebuild and get their lives back on track. This is a problem; the idea of war is a never-ending one, in a sense, but here in America it seems like, well, we’re diverting troops to Afghanistan, now this is the new thing to worry about, to consider. But Iraq will never be finished in our lifetimes—for the veterans who have come back home, for many of them, and then also for the Iraqis, who we can easily forget because we don’t have to deal with them. We don’t see them, we don’t meet them, we don’t have to go visit them or help them with anything. They’re clear across the horizon in some foreign country. But we are intimately connected. And I feel we have a responsibility to that country for as long as they request our help, because we’ve invested in warfare, and I say invested and it sounds very positive, but it’s brought a lot of pain to that country, and been irresponsible to it. I question America as a whole, because I don’t see much engagement with that responsibility.
A lot of people have just…well, when you slap people in the face long enough, they just go numb. And Islam has been so demonized in this country, I wonder if some people are just afraid to push past that. It is hard to—I’ve had people come to my door and try to convert me to a certain religion, right? And I often tell them, I’ll talk with you about this stuff, if you’ll first read the Koran in translation. You’re supposed to read in the actual Arabic, to get the essence of it, but just to get a rough idea, have you read it? And I get, ‘Well, no…’ It doesn’t take that long to read. It’s not like War and Peace—now that takes a while. [Laughs.] But yet they’re going to come here and try tell me how to live? It seems like if we’re going to try to connect to this country, religion is such a big part of it. A lot of people could just sit down and maybe just read the Koran, for example, just to get an idea of where these people are coming from, just a bit. We use the word Muslim a lot in this country, and most people who talk about it have never even read the book. There is a fundamental disconnect there that just doesn’t work for me. It seems like it’s easier to be ignorant and well-fed here than to educate ourselves. And I include myself in that—I’m not just attacking other people here. I have a lot of passion for the subject, but I’m not a firebrand. But I do have a lot of some anger for the way things have gone the past few years.
It seems like your book may be a way to help people connect with Iraq—and the war—in a way that doesn’t make them feel totally squirmy, like the constant barrage of news coverage might. We were talking earlier about people being slapped in the face, that idea. There was a point about two years ago—and the war had been long-running at that point—it seemed like everyone had talked out their positions and there wasn’t a change in the narrative. The stories coming back from Iraq, the journalists’ narratives were at a point of stasis. My friends, my family members, everyone I talked to were saying, “Well, it seems like everybody knows where everyone else stands, what they think, and we got burned out.” Because there was no rupture in the narrative. I think that creates a lot of problems. I think people still very much want to talk about these things, but they don’t have that avenue. And I do think poetry and art can offer some avenues in, towards the emotional content, not so much the geopolitical possibilities and discussions, but the human content. And if we can connect that way, it works even better, because you can then formulate the political from it. But it offers people a way into a moment, and into a world that maybe they’ve never been a part of or seen and that they can experience a small portion of it and then be reconnected or reengaged to a discussion. I definitely think it’s useful. But to get back to your question about how people responded, I think they responded not necessarily because “Oh, this is great poetry,” but mostly because it led back into a discussion that they want to have but it’s very difficult to have.
What about the vets, what have they had to say? They’ve been pretty cool! I’ve been surprised; people have such very different experiences so I thought they’d think, “Oh, this is bullshit.” But they’ve been really cool. By the end of next spring, I’ll have been at every major service academy, so the military itself has been interested in talking about it, even if they don’t agree with my ideas. And that’s another stereotype that people outside the military aren’t really aware of, that it doesn’t quite work that way. There is an in-house kind of thing, where the military is its own little house and it doesn’t want the civilian world really knowing what’s going on inside the house; they want to keep a certain look and veneer on the outside, so they civilian world will let them do what they need to do, and want to join, but once you’re in, then there is an open marketplace of ideas. There’s a discussion and a debate over stuff. And it’s a lot healthier than I ever expected, before I was in the military.
