Brian Turner: Soldier
Turned Writer
Sarah Flores
Brian Turner, once a young man, with long hair and a
single earring to match, took a poetry class at Fresno State College to advance
his lyrical-writing skills for a local band he played in. Years later, little
did he know, he would be writing two critically acclaimed pieces about his 7
years spent in the U.S. army, most of which in the war on Iraq. Years later he would also be sharing his real experiences from a brutal war and begin
to explain the reasons why he chose this path in the most essential years of
his life.
As
Brian Turner stood up in a room filled with the faculty, staff, students, and
community members of Valencia Community College, he reflected on his first
published works of poetry in a book titled “Here Bullet”.
He explained, “There are some poems that we write, and look back at
multiple times, and try to figure out what they mean.” This is what he did with
“Here Bullet”.
Turner
wrote the poems in Iraq on sheets of paper while sitting in his tent, headphones
in his ears, listening to the band The Queens of Stone Age. When he returned
home he typed them all on his computer and tried to find someone willing to
publish them. Turner said at the time the words poured out and he didn’t fully
comprehend what it was he was writing.
There
is a poem in the book about a private in his platoon, Private Miller. While in
Iraq Turner’s platoon returned from a mission one night and the Sergeant began to
read off a list of men who hadn’t returned with them, Private Miller was one of
those men. Turner stated,
“It
was a very poignant moment, and when I read this poem to different audiences I
would have to kill Private Miller, bring him back to life, just to kill him
again.”
Turner relives this moment from his past frequently and on that day when he read
the poem to an audience full of accomplished and aspiring writers, he said he
was shocked about the way a person is just erased from the war, about how we,
as a country, can dismiss someone so easily.
“I
think about this writer’s festival, a 3 day event, and on average during war
there are 18 soldiers killed in a day; by the end of this festival my platoon
would be gone,” he said. He stared out into the crowd and questioned “Our
endurance for war is so great, it’s like breathing, isn’t that disturbing?”
Turner
is often asked the question “Why did you join the army?”, and while he can’t fully
answer that question he said that in his most recent memoir, “My Life as a
Foreign Country” he begins to explain it.
In this memoir Turner wanted to convey what it
was like to be a professional solider. He began to read an excerpt from the
book, stopped and said,
“At
3 am while most people back home would be sleeping, we would be in the small
villages of Iraq, kicking in doors to do body counts,” that is the reality of
being a professional soldier, according to Turner.
He
asked everyone in the room to raise their hand if they had ever served in the
military or were in some way related or connected to people who had served. Almost
everyone in the room raised their hands.
“We
grow up in America watching these brave young men prepare for this epic battle
of war, then they go to fight and they come back silent and changed; and we
look at these men and think that we have to go through something similar,” he
said.
Turner said that he is proud of his years spent serving and fighting for his country but he doesn’t fully
understand this concept of idolization. He expressed an interest in changing this pathology
and helping others “find the way into the rest of their lives”.
Turner ended his speech reading a passionate and
emotional excerpt from his book, “My Life as a Foreign Country”. In a deep and
resounding voice he read about soldiers raiding the homes in the small villages
of Iraq, seeing the families, and the children who were frightened and crying.
He
jumped back and forth with the events happening in the soldier’s lives back
home and with what was happening in the homes of these Iraqi families. The
entire room was silent and intrigued, and after he was finished he closed his
book, stared out into the crowd and spoke one last time as everyone clapped for at
least more than a couple of minutes.
“The
writer in me wants people to clap and cry after reading that, but Brian in the
field is disturbed and hears the claps as if they were small fires being shot"
