My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner

After being mauled by a drunk trucker, his father “never had to say a word about it. It’s a record of what it means to inherit masculinity, and the skittish terror of inadequacy stamped on its backside. It’s also a loving, complicated tribute to the marital culture that runs down the male side of his family, which seems to have fought in every armed conflict since the American Civil War. The book is a love song to the infrequency of ever occupying your own body.

He imagines the “slow-moving ghosts” of Mosul, “returning to their homes each night to sleep with the ones they love.” Meanwhile the soldiers at war slip away each night to clean sheets with their girlfriends in Baton Rouge. “Soon local Iraqis will refer to us as ‘the ghosts,’” Turner writes, “because of the speed and silence of our approach.” Ghosts become a broader theme, encompassing the dead but also the living displaced. Here and elsewhere, Turner’s work emphasizes the tension between the soldier-writer as observer and as participant. The book opens with Turner’s vision of himself as a drone, a phantom hovering over his sleeping body, ready to perform reconnaissance. Ironically, Turner writes best, and most personally, about feelings of depersonalization. Even in its title, My Life as a Foreign Country seems to offer up that promised personalization of the war. Turner, who has been praised as the poet of the Iraq/Afghanistan Generation soldier-writers, has now released his much-anticipated memoir of seven years spent fighting in the Army. Ten years later, we have a crop of fine veteran-writers and a receptive market, from Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds, Phil Klay’s stories in Redeployment, and Brian Turner’s poetry collection Here, Bullet. In a decade characterized by the deterioration of public institutions and increased privatization, we wanted, oddly enough, more privatization.

Preferably we wanted soldier-poets, in the Wilfred Owen tradition, who could combine the insiders’ perspective and personalization with a capacity for irony. What we were waiting for was a sense of perspective: writers who could walk into the news cycle and persuasively inhabit the numbers. We had the relentless daily body counts, the Iraqi countryside reduced to numbers and the names of cities.

Just a few years into the Iraq invasion, I remember a certain amount of critical hand-wringing over the absence of War Literature, or the absence of an audience willing to receive it.

My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner