My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner

There is a distinct sense of the past and the future being erased at the horizon’s edge. 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. In Iraq, he writes, “I step outside the tent to get a breath of air and quiet. Yet Turner is also a poet, and he cannot help but see the world, even the world of combat, in terms of beauty, fragility and heartbreaking splendor.

With this education, and his father’s stories of reconnaissance flights over Russia, his uncle’s stories from Vietnam, his grandfathers’ from World War II, Turner enlisted in the military: In his family, this is what it means to be a man. Hammerfists to the sternum.” When Turner was 13, his father taught him the useful craft of making napalm. “Ridge hands and palm strikes to the temple and to the hollow below the ear.

Turner’s father, a tough, hard-drinking former military pilot and a motorcycle rider, set up a dojo in the garage and there taught his son the solemn rites of mortal combat. This idea holds that war is transcendent, heroic, an endeavor too mysterious and profound to question. This idea allows young men to embrace war with open eyes and courageous hearts, ready to take a warrior’s life or die a warrior’s death. The idea of the battlefield as sacred space is one of the things that perpetuate war in our world. The space where war disentangles itself from the structure of human norms to thrash into the natural world, the idea of beauty, all that some might view as the closest this world can come to a kind of sacred perfection.” people from Fresno can outcrawl on the planet, or at least crawl with the best of them, low and cold and reptilian.”Īs a child, Turner was taught of the nobility of the battlefield: “The theater of war some call it. that I was from Fresno and people from Fresno can take it. that I was willing and prepared to crawl through the mud and muck any time of day or night. But “I wanted the man in the polyester suit to know. “I said Infantry because I didn’t really know if I could do it,” he explains. “I signed the paper and joined the infantry for reasons I won’t tell you,” he writes, “and for reasons I will. But the beauty of the language offers solace for the somberness of the message.

His mission isn’t an easy one, and his new memoir doesn’t make for easy reading.

My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner