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My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir, by Brian Turner
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A war memoir of unusual literary beauty and power from the acclaimed poet who wrote the poem “The Hurt Locker.”
In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert.Now he lies awake each night beside his sleeping wife, imagining himself as a drone aircraft, hovering over the terrains of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe.
In this breathtaking memoir, award-winning poet Brian Turner retraces his war experience―pre-deployment to combat zone, homecoming to aftermath. Free of self-indulgence or self-glorification, his account combines recollection with the imagination's efforts to make reality comprehensible. Across time, he seeks parallels in the histories of others who have gone to war, especially his taciturn grandfather (World War II), father (Cold War), and uncle (Vietnam). Turner also offers something that is truly rare in a memoir of violent conflict―he sees through the eyes of the enemy, imagining his way into the experience of the "other." Through it all, he paints a devastating portrait of what it means to be a soldier and a human being.
- Sales Rank: #334828 in Books
- Published on: 2014-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.60" h x .90" w x 5.80" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
“[A] praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing…. Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present…. History can only be served by this kind of attention. Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly.” (Jen Percy - The New York Times Book Review)
“Turner is…a poet, and he cannot help but see the world, even the world of combat, in terms of beauty, fragility and heartbreaking splendor…. [His] eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.” (Roxana Robinson - Washington Post)
“Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis―their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives.” (George Packer - The New Yorker)
“My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered―a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.” (Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried)
“In Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that his words won't allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real. My Life as a Foreign Country is lyrical and restless, both ironic and profoundly empathetic.” (Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award)
“Turner's voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity…Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful.” (Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the Bomb)
“A brilliant fever dream of war's surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art.” (Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust)
“A book…about the haunted past and a haunted man… A story of working through trauma, but above all it's a book about a man, a country, even a species beleaguered by a terrible attachment to war.” (Tomas Hachard - NPR)
“The psychological consequences of war are movingly portrayed… [a] standout.” (Publishers Weekly)
About the Author
Brian Turner is the director of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and the prize-winning author of two poetry collections about his seven years in the United States Army. He lives in Orlando, Florida.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
An important addition to the literature of war. My highest recommendation
By Timothy J. Bazzett
As horrific, ill-planned and misguided as the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may have been, they have, in spite of themselves, yielded a bumper crop of beautifully written books. Two such books, both memoirs from combat veterans, that immediately come to mind are Benjamin Busch's Dust to Dust: A Memoir and Brian Castner's The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows. To those books I will now add Brian Turner's moving memoir, MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY.
Busch's book moved effortlessly between memories of his combat experiences in Iraq and his childhood. Ironically, of the latter time, the former Marine begins his narrative with, "I was not allowed to have a gun." Later he tells us, "There is something to be said about being dust. It is where we are all headed." There is a telling matter-of-factness in Busch's treatment of death and its inevitability.
Castner, haunted by his harrowing experiences as a bomb disposal specialist with the Air Force, tells us calmly from the outset: "The first thing you should know about me is that I'm crazy."
In his own memoir, Turner tells us: "Sgt. Turner is dead." And he thinks of himself, alternately, as a drone and its operator-pilot, flying over hostile territory, photo-mapping and gathering intelligence.
Death, insanity, and, again, death. These are hardly surprising themes in books that deal with war and its aftermath. Like Busch and Castner before him, Turner maps the landscape of war, both external and internal, assesses the damage, and meditates on its consequences. Words are his medium.
Brian Turner has already published two critically acclaimed volumes of war poetry, Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. This time using prose, he continues to try to understand what he did in war, and what it did to him. He also tries to put his army service (seven years) into the larger context of a family with a military tradition, giving us graphic glimpses of a father who flew intelligence-gathering missions during the Cold War, an uncle who fought in Vietnam, a grandfather who fought with the Marines in the South Pacific during WWII, and others, all the way back to the Civil War. Struggling to explain, he says -
"I signed the paper and joined the infantry for reasons I won't tell you, and for reasons I will." And then, after listing possible reasons, he concludes, "I joined the infantry because I knew, even then, that most of what I've just said is total bulls**t, or that it really won't answer a thing."
But regardless of why he joined, Turner still struggles with what he saw and what he did during his tour in and around Mosul, Iraq. Things like manning a turret gun on convoy duty and firing at civilian cars that came too close or tried to force their way into the column. Or setting up a security perimeter around an Iraqi police station.
"This is where sixteen Iraqi policemen stood on the sidewalk in one moment, vanished in the next. A forearm still attached to a hand, a wedding band shining on a finger. Dust. A strange and momentary silence ... There is a mustache, alone, on a sidewalk."
Home on leave, Turner feels ashamed at feeling so relieved to be in America, safe, and thinks himself a coward for such feelings. And after his discharge he travels, to numerous foreign countries, many of them scenes of wars, still looking for answers. Even in bed with his wife, he is plagued by hallucinatory nightmares of the war and its victims.
"My wife and I make love in sheets the color of rare wine. As we kiss and roll over in bed ... a nurse wheels a shallow-breathing veteran into our bedroom - a man with pellets from a shotgun lodged in his brain, the surgeons following behind and standing over his gurney, whispering how they might proceed ... And they wait for us to finish making love ... The surgeons whispering over their critical patients. The dead in their bathtubs. The dead with their mouths given to foam. The dead strung from ropes under cones of light."
Death and insanity - constants of war. In that eerie opening image - dreaming of himself as a drone, Turner says -
"Each night I do this ... I bank and turn, gathering circuit by circuit the necessary intelligence, all that I have done, all that we have done ..."
"All that we have done" indeed. And yet the wars go on and on. Brian Turner's MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY is an important addition to the literature of war, bleakly beautiful and profoundly disturbing. I give it my highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Death, Waste, Sorrow, Beauty
By Janet Brown
I’ve never been to war, nor have any of my family, after the generation of my father and uncles. The country I live in has never been occupied, other than by a brief stint of Japan in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. I’ve always been grateful for that good fortune, but in an abstract way, until Brian Turner brought war home to me in My Life as a Foreign Country.
Turner calls his book a memoir but it takes that genre into a whole new territory. He is a poet and that burnished and economical use of language is what shapes his narrative. It’s a song, a meditation, a violent introspection, a reporting of stories that are close to unbearable. That’s what this man carries with him; that’s what every combat veteran has as his legacy of battle, and that’s My Life as a Foreign Country brings to us.
The universality of war, through place and time, is made clear through the terse 203-page volume, with stories of generations of soldiers in Turner’s own family, and in Cambodia, England, Bosnia, Antietam, Guam, Saigon, and Iraq. He shows a multitude of people of all ages, who carry a world of war in their heads, a world that is untranslatable to the rest of us who have never been there. Then he uses art as a common language that will blow our comfortable universes wide open.
Tight portraits and essays and fragments of conversations that are frequently obscene, nightmares and dreams of love that is made on clean, domestic sheets, reenactments of acts of war told in the voice of a poet-warrior—Turner reaches back into the realm of classical epics to shape his modern counterpart.
“The soldiers enter the house, the soldiers enter the house.”
And in less than four pages, Turner takes his readers along on that entry, and he changes their lives with maybe as many as a thousand words. Nobody can read that 49th essay and ever look at a veteran or a “war movie,” or a television news clip of an occupied area in the same way ever again.
Standing with Brian Turner and his brigade at Fort Lewis, Washington, listening to a Colonel read the names of “those who did not come back,” realizing he omitted the name of “a young man from New Jersey who wrote poetry and wanted to become a lawyer one day,” who had sat in a Port-O-Let in Mosul and “put six rounds through the top of his skull,” you understand why a soldier in line suddenly “locked up his knees and passed out, instantly pissing his pants.” You see this New Jersey boy’s body with the other dead soldiers, “wind blowing through them, as through a flute.”
"How does anyone leave a war behind them, no matter what war it is, and somehow walk into the rest of his life?" Brian Turner’s reply to his own question echoes through his book, which should be read and reread by all of us who have been sheltered and have never paid the price for that.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The unanswerable question about war
By JET
This is a beautifully literate account of war, a narrative poem written by an American soldier with the same name as NZ poet Brian Turner.
I heard the American Turner interviewed by Wallace Chapman on Radio NZ's Sunday programme last weekend and Chapman later said the book was the best he'd read in a while.
A sound judgement.
Turner relates his mind-numbing experiences in Iraq to his family's long history of warriordom. It's visceral in its awfulness, a gruelling account of the fear, mindlessness, boredom, brutality and sheer ugliness of war.
The only question left at the end is why do men do this. It's an unanswerable one.
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