Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Brian Turner
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Sections of this book have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (‘My Life as a Foreign Country’, Fall 2011) and in the Connecticut Review (‘Firebase Eagle’, Fall 2010). Many thanks to Peter Catapano at the New York Times, Victoria Pope and Peter Miller at National Geographic, and to Ted Genoways – who challenged me to write this book and helped me to grapple with the material from the very beginning.
My editor at Jonathan Cape, Alex Bowler, took the raw blocks of language I gave him and helped me to shape them into the book you now hold in your hands. He’s proof that the word editor can be synonymous with the word artist.
I’m grateful for the steadfast friendship, belief, and patience of Samar Hammam, who has seen this project through from beginning to end (and, truly, for several years before that – expecting a novel). Samar has offered her keen ear to each draft along the way. Likewise, I’d like to thank Alison Granucci, with Blue Flower Arts, for the profound and lasting impact she’s had on my life and for the doors she continually opens to the greater world.
To Donald Anderson, Benjamin Busch, Kelle Groom, Patrick Hicks, Col. Tom McGuire, Pete Molin and Alexi Zentner – I give thanks for their generosity of spirit and the deep attention they offered to multiple drafts of this book. I’d especially like to thank my dear friend, Stacey Lynn Brown, for her insights, suggestions and close reading of this work.
I’m grateful to the Lannan Foundation; Margeret Mihori, Christopher Blasdel, and Manami Maeda with the Japan-United States Friendship Commission; the International House Librarian in Tokyo – Rie Hayashi; the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship; United States Artists; the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences; Matt O’Donnell at From the Fishouse (www.fishousepoems.org); Neil Astley at Bloodaxe Books; Carey Salerno at Alice James Books; and the Kerouac Project of Orlando, for support, guidance and encouragement.
Portions of this book were written in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Macedonia, Portugal, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom, as well as in the Moore family bungalow (Donaghadee, Northern Ireland), the Artist’s Suite at the Betsy (Miami Beach, Florida), the Federal Association of Globetrotters bar (Belgrade, Serbia), the Bright Lotus Lodge (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), the Metropole Hotel (Hanoi, Vietnam), and on the 3rd Floor Cancer Unit at Winter Park Memorial Hospital in Orlando, Florida.
To the many friends who’ve made this work possible, in one way or another – Tony Barnstone, Shannon Beets, Jeff Bell, Kevin Bowen, Matt Cashion, Russell Conrad, Patsy Garoupa, Corrinne Clegg Hales, Nathalie Handal, Lee Herrick, Devin High, Garrett Hongo, T.R. Hummer, Kwang Ho Lee, Haider Al-Kabi, Maura Kennedy, Declan Meade, Dunya Mikhail, Sadek Mohammed, Sarah Mustafa, Soheil Najm, Oliver de la Paz, Suzanne Roberts, Mike Robinson, June Saraceno, Jared Silvia, Ryan Southerland, Matthew Sweeney, Bill Tuell, Bruce Weigl, Ofer Ziv, and to those whose names I cannot write here (due to the possibility of danger to their lives or to their loved ones) – thank you. If I have forgotten anyone in the process it is simply because there are so many who have given so generously of their time, talent and energy, and for that I will always be grateful.
To those I served with – thank you for making the rest of my life possible.
My thanks also to those who didn’t kill me – whether by mistake or by choice. I owe my days, in part, to you.
My love and thanks to friends and family both near and far.
Of course, none of this would be possible without my writing partner and collaborator – my love, my wife, the poet Ilyse Kusnetz – who pored over each sentence and every word, offering nuanced line edits, draft by draft.
Ilyse, you are the gift I do not deserve – the surprise and wonder I am daily grateful for.
In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner was at the head of a convoy of 3,500 soldiers as they entered the Iraqi desert.
Ten years later, he lies awake beside his sleeping wife, hallucinating: he is a drone aircraft. He hovers over a landscape in which the terrains of every conflict, of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe, are pressed together, and the violence is ongoing. The hallucination recurs, and every night Sergeant Turner is forced to observe anew all that man has done to man.
My Life as a Foreign Country follows the experience of one soldier in one recent war – the preparations, actions, homecomings and infinite aftermath – but then explodes from those narrow limits. Unburdened by nostalgia, hollow sympathy or a journalistic hunger for fact, this account combines the recalled with the imagined, and leaps centuries and continents to seek parallels in the histories of other men. The result is an opportunity to enter the head of a man still stalked by war, to experience conflict with new definition and lasting effect.
Brian Turner, born in 1967, is an American poet, essayist and professor. He won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise.
Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division.
POETRY
Here, Bullet
Phantom Noise
AS EDITOR
The Strangest of Theatres: Poets
Writing Across Borders
Sgt Turner is dead.
Some nights he walks the streets and alleys of Mosul, in the company of the dead. Others, he steps into the homes of the living, perches on the beds of lovers, and considers the world as it continues on.
Tonight, he sits in a cockpit situated in a portable connex, the connex mounted on a vehicle driving through a desert or bivouacked in a low wadi somewhere in the world. It’s difficult to tell from inside of the vehicle. He leans back against a foam-cushioned swivel chair, each hand gripping the controls, his thumb on the safety, index finger over the trigger, with a bank of monitors arrayed before him, streams of remote data computed and digitised into analytics an air force officer considers while drinking from a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew at the desk behind him, near the door. Another officer sits in the chair beside him, typing away at the many letters and numbers printed on the keyboard in front of him. Targets on the dry erase board coded in red, blue, green, purple, black and brown. Small plastic flags in a metal canister below. Radio traffic breaking in through the squelch over the speakers and through their headsets. In-country language. Language from another time, he thinks. And the language from back in the world, the language he’s listening for.
Sgt Turner flips a toggle switch to shift from black-hot to white-hot. Takes a swig of harsh coffee, flattened some by powdered non-dairy creamer spooned in. Then he lowers the nose of the Predator drone to drop down in altitude as the bird arrives on approach to the target. He watches the altimeter and checks the angle of the flaps as the rush of wind on the bird’s nose begins to transpose into red numbers rising in the speed gauge before him. After checking the map coordinates, he levels out the drone and begins to bank north, north-west, as he sets the drone in a circuit around the target house in the darkness below.
Florida. College Park. A three-bedroom house in a suburban neighborhood. A small wood deck off the back of the home. A stand of trees. A front lawn sloping out toward an unmarked roadway where a few streetlights glow at intervals over the road. Cones of light appearing like round warm discs from the onboard cameras fixed in their stations high above. The drone well out of sight. Out of earshot. Sgt Turner conscious of the necessary standoff distance. His attention wholly given to the two bright forms sleeping side by side in the bedroom, curling into each other, near the back of the house. The heat and intensity of their bodies blurring one into another, the sheets and mattress forming a cool black border around them. Sgt Turner takes another swig of coffee as the drone banks and turns in another circuit around the target. He considers the landscape of dream constructing itself in that tiny room below.
He will continue to monitor the house like this, zooming in sometimes, switching camera angles and lenses, collecting data, checking his gauges, flight speed, altitude. Sgt Turner will watch as night turns to morning, as the sun circles the earth, as night returns, circuit by circuit keeping his watch, even when the cardinals begin to sing from the branches of the golden raintree in the front yard, even when the trumpet flowers fill with light.
He will maintain his standoff distance. He will steady his hand on the weapon systems at his disposal. He will monitor the heat signatures of the living. And, because Sgt Turner is dead, he will remain at his post.
There is nothing strange in this at all.
‘HERE’S THE SITUATION,’ Sergeant First Class Fredrickson said, gesturing to the tiny plastic red and blue flags driven into the ground on thin metal poles. There must have been thirty or forty of them arrayed in the grass around us, in no discernible pattern. It was September 2003, and, like some of the others gathered around SFC Fredrickson on that clipped green field outside our classroom, I’d been scanning the scene to gauge what the flags might represent. On the big-screen television in the company dayroom, the war waited for us. Fighters who shot at American soldiers in Baghdad and Samarra and Tikrit were perfecting their trigger squeeze for us.
‘We are surrounded by the dead. And by parts of the dead,’ Fredrickson said, emphasising the word parts. ‘Your unit has come upon the scene of a possible ambush. Everybody’s dead. This is not a mass casualty exercise. So. What’s the first thing we should do?’
One of the students in the back said, ‘We better start scrounging up a shitload of body bags.’
Fredrickson smiled.
‘No. Like everything else, the first thing you do, the first thing: set up security. Create a perimeter, and then you can get to work.’ He went on to explain that a certain number of soldiers would be needed to deal with the task at hand, especially if time was of the essence, as it always was in these situations. ‘You’ll want to photograph the scene from several angles, if you have a digital camera and if you have the time. That’s why the flags are here. You have to place one flag at the spot of each body, or body part, that you find. If you don’t have a camera, do a field sketch.’ We practice drawing hasty field sketches in our pocket notebooks, creating small legends in the margins, crossed lines with tiny arrowheads: a rough guide to the cardinal directions.
He tells us to use a certain Department of Defense form to label and keep track of the dead sealed up in their body bags. ‘And remember, this is very important: never place two separated parts into the same bag.’ He pauses. ‘I’ll give you an example.’ He points to the nearest soldier and tells him to lie down and act like he’s dead.
Sgt Gordon kneels on the damp grass and then lies down prostrate, with his right arm stretched out from his side, as if pointing to something beyond us. His mouth is open and at first he stares blankly at the few clouds above. Then, he closes his eyes and assumes the role of the dead.
A few of us joke about Gordon and his ability to sham, to loaf, no matter the circumstances as Fredrickson steps closer to the body. ‘Imagine that this arm,’ he says, gesturing toward Gordon’s outstretched limb, ‘has been blown off, here at the armpit. And there’s no other body nearby, and you can plainly see that it’s the same uniform and everything. Still, you have to put his body in one bag and give it a number and then you have to put this arm in another bag with a different number.’ He looks across our faces. ‘Don’t assume anything. They’ll figure it out back home. They’ll test for DNA and all that jazz.’ A pause, and then he continues: ‘Let me tell you something – you don’t want to be the one who makes some poor family bury their soldier with somebody else’s body part. Roger that?’
As he carries on explaining the work at hand, my eyes wander over the grassy field and the bright flags stationed in the earth around us. It’s a rare day of sun in Ft Lewis, Washington state, and the early morning light illuminates the translucent nature of the grass in its subtle gesture toward infinity. The dead assume their positions. Some of them lie on their sides, others rest on their backs, their faces lifted toward the sky. Each with a numbered flag beside him. Some turn their heads slowly toward me, their eyes crossed over into the landscape of clouds as they call out with hoarse voices, quietly, asking for a drink of water. A small sip, they say. Just a sip of water.
THE 1ST PLATOON of Blackhorse Company sits on the tile floor of the weight room cleaning weapons with CLP2 and bore snakes and dental tools after running lanes in the woods and conducting live-fire exercises. The men are dirty and exhausted. They laugh and shout out their orders as bags of burritos are delivered from the twenty-four-hour Taco Bell off post. I’m in the adjacent room with my squad leader, Staff Sergeant Bruzik, and Sergeant Zapata, my fellow team leader. We watch more of the war on television. Several Marines rush under fire to a bridge in Nasiriyah, Iraq.
They crawl on the concrete and asphalt of the roadway as the invisible trails of bullets zip past them from the far shore of the river. They return fire, shooting at what I’ve been trained to think of as known and suspected enemy targets3. The Marines rush the bridge over and over as the newscast replays the scene.
The television is on mute. I don’t know what Bruzik and Zapata are thinking, but I’m looking at the far shore and trying to make out the muzzle flashes. Those on the other side of the river are honing the same fundamentals of marksmanship we’ve studied at the rifle ranges of Ft Lewis. It isn’t something I mention to Bruzik and Zapata. I feel remote, somewhat cold, my mind working out the possible trajectories that might bring me home. I’m Sgt Turner and I’m a team leader preparing to deploy to combat. But there’s something echoing through the branches and channels of my central nervous system.
On the other side of that river, Iraqis continue to crouch along walls and lie on rooftops in the prone. Even when I fall asleep tonight, they’ll continue to fire their weapons. The news anchor will narrate the action. On replay. Figures in the distance. Soldiers running toward the bridge. The sight picture4 placed over them as I dream and sleep in the state of Washington. The Iraqi men, again and again, pulling the trigger.
ONCE THE PLANE comes to a stop in the dry waves of heat and the orange night air of Kuwait, we’re bussed north to one of the many camps along the border with Iraq. The military supply system begins delivering a staggering amount of new equipment to my unit. We shuffle through three different sight systems for our carbines until settling on a sight we’re told Special Forces use, too5. Among other things, I am given a coil of metal with an eyepiece at one end and a tiny optical instrument at the other – for snaking under a door and peering into a room. Journalists report of units lacking the proper gear, like body armor for flak vests and slat armor for Humvees or five-ton trucks; we are given so much new and expensive equipment that our unit has to stow much of it away in metal connexes, the large cargo boxes used by the military to ship much of its inventory. I am in the first Stryker brigade to deploy to combat and the path of a number of careers depends upon how lethal and how durable this unit will be during its time in-country – maybe that’s why we’re getting special attention. Our Strykers weigh nineteen tons and are fitted with wheels rather than the tracks of traditional armored personnel carriers; soon local Iraqis will refer to us as the ghosts because of the speed and silence of our approach. When we learn about this, our platoon sergeant, SFC Daigle, changes our platoon nickname from The Bonecrushers to The Ghostriders. My new call sign: Ghost 1–3 Alpha.
SSG Kaha, who will later go AWOL, packs away some of this equipment when I pass him on my way to the showers. He’s been fired from his job as squad leader due to perceived incompetence. I nod as he continues to sing ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’. Long after dusk has shifted to stars, I lie back on my bunk and think about the divorce paperwork signed a few months earlier, the few addresses where I might mail a letter if I were to write one, and it occurs to me that if I were to die in the country north of our camp during the year ahead, my death wouldn’t irreparably alter the life of another. My address is now my Name, Rank, Unit, and the last four digits of my social security number are stenciled in black spray paint onto the duffel bag containing my worldly goods. It doesn’t seem possible that in the years to come, in the years after the war, I’ll get married and move across country and start my life over. Why should it seem plausible? No one stood at the unit staging area in Ft Lewis to wish me goodbye and, however I make it home, in a body bag, on a gurney or stepping off onto the tarmac with my duffel in the belly of the plane, no one will be there to welcome me home.
I step outside the tent to get a breath of air and quiet. A slight breeze lifts fine grains of sand from the landscape of the desert as if a white gossamer veil were slowly being drawn over the surface of the earth. There is a distinct sense of the past and the future being erased at the horizon’s edge. The circumference of the world retracts itself until it comes to a rest beneath the nightfall of stars within my field of vision.
Later tonight, I will read a book, a translation of Meditations6 by Marcus Aurelius. I will think about the idea of home, what the country before me might have in store, and know that I have become, as Aurelius had quoted centuries before, one of the many ‘leaves that the wind drives earthward’.
THE SAND UNDER our feet has turned to a fired-brick orange after a night of rain. Soldiers cluster in small groups up and down the column of several hundred vehicles in a loggerhead formation, waiting for the word, waiting to roll out. Smoking Marlboro 100s and unfiltered Camels, army coffee steaming from the metal canteen cups in their hands. And as we prepare to head north, I remembered these words:
Facing us in the field of battle7 are teachers, fathers and sons; / grandsons, grandfathers, wives’ brothers; mothers’ brothers / and fathers of wives.
We lock and load our weapons, mount up and move out.
It is 3 December 2003. Our first day in Iraq. We are traveling roughly 480 km to our new home north of Baghdad: Firebase Eagle. From build-up through deployment – from Herodotus to Xenophon, from Cornelius Ryan to Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore – I am aware of a variety of insertion narratives. As a boy, I was fascinated by historical accounts which followed the trail of Custer’s cavalry in 1876, from the quartermaster’s logistics that supplied the campaign to the mule skinners and scouts and newspapermen who accompanied Custer into the Battle of the Greasy Grass, otherwise known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn8.
We know our prelude will be different from the trenches of the First World War or the front lines of Korea. We won’t hear the battle in progress and work our way toward it as baggage trains of wounded, exhausted soldiers and civilians carrying their lives on their backs travel in the opposite direction. Our battle space – and perhaps it’s a cliché now – will occur in a 360-degree, three-dimensional environment. When we entered this desert, the available calculus involved in the creation of any new moment changed. Anything is possible. A dead farm animal on the shoulder of the road could harbor an improvised bomb sewn into its belly. A bullet might ride the cool currents between one human being and another. A Hellcat missile or a wire-guided Tow missile might rend the moment open.
A few hours in, my squad leader needed a break. He’d been up in the forward hatch, in the full blast of the desert wind and engine exhaust, since early that morning. I covered for him, took over in the hatch for a while. Our Stryker was the lead vehicle for the entire convoy. Behind me – nearly 3,500 soldiers. In front of me – Iraq, history, combat. We rode on a war elephant made of steel. Blackhawk helicopters escorted us from their stations in the sky.
Up ahead: an old white- and orange-paneled beat-up sedan parked on the left shoulder of the road. On the opposite side of the road and walking through a thin vegetation of desert scrubland, four men, all dressed in jeans and thin black jackets, one with a lightly checked shemagh wrapped loosely around his neck. Four men in civilian clothes walking single file and evenly spaced, the way soldiers do, each trying to conceal an AK-47 by holding it against the far side of their bodies as they crossed the road.
They didn’t stop. I pointed my M4 at them. I belted out a series of linked obscenities and the Stryker bore down on them. My thumb had already flipped the selector lever on my weapon from safe to semi and all the moment needed were the bullets I was leaning in to sight on the medium-sized man, second from the left, the one with the potbelly. The sight’s center dot, small and red, the premonition of an entry wound, focused right about where his first or second rib curved beneath his coat. My finger in the trigger housing.
The world disappeared around those four men and their car the way house lights in a theater go dark, a spotlight focusing in on the killer and those about to be killed. I pressed the weapon deeper into my shoulder and exhaled.
Parazoo, our vehicle commander, broke in over the intercom – ‘Badge! I got a badge!’
He was below, watching the moment unfold through a gun-mount camera. That shout, that fraction of a second, saved the man’s life. He was a civilian contractor (a mercenary in any other war). And the man to the left of him, the man who wore a shiny badge hanging from a black cord around his neck – he was from Chicago.
IN A MUSEUM in Kyoto, Japan, years later, I find myself mesmerised by an oil painting9 of an archer. He kneels to stretch a bow fully back, an arrow poised at the moment of flight. There is a wall made of cloth behind him. The branch of a cherry tree, at the end of its bloom, bends into the frame. The archer shows no sign of strain, despite the tension of the bow. He simply gazes forward at something out of view. Maybe there is a target and maybe there isn’t. The painting doesn’t show us. That’s not the point. The point is to become one with the moment. To meld with the motion of the instrument. To become the archer and the bow combined.
FIREBASE EAGLE IS an hour’s drive north of Baghdad, set among farmland and orchards, just south of the winding Tigris River. Unlike the dry, flat, barren solitude of the desert I’d expected, there are eucalyptus groves, water buffalo, stands of sunflower grown six feet tall and swaying overhead for a quarter of a mile or more. In the winter mornings a thick fog rolls off the Tigris just like it does back home in California, in the vineyards and olive groves along the San Joaquin River.