Episode 5: My Life As A Foreign Country

Justin Hudnall, Host: Welcome to Incoming: the series that features true stories by America’s veterans, told in their own words, straight from their own mouths. I’m Justin Hudnall Today, we’re spending the next twenty some minutes with Brian Turner, playing clips from our fall 2015 conversation, along with three pieces from his collections. I refer to Brian as the “poet laureate of veteran writers,” though he has plenty of actual awards and accolades to his name. His collection, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, and his following collection, Phantom Noise, was shortlisted for the 2010 TS Eliot Prize. He received the 2006 PEN Center USA "Best in the West" Literary Award in Poetr. But before he became one of the best known post-9/11 veteran writers, he was Sgt. Turner, serving in the Iraq War with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry, and with the 10th Mountain Division before that in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He’s currently serving as the MFA Program Chair at Sierra Nevada College, where many of the writers on this show studied under him, and its that perspective as a teacher of returning veterans that made me especially eager to talk with him. So, let’s get to it then. Brian Turner: Hi, my name is Brian Turner, and this an an excerpt from my memior, My Life As A Foreign Country. The soldiers enter the house, the soldiers enter the house. Soldiers, determined and bored and searing with adrenaline, enter the house with shouting and curses and muzzle flash, det cord and 5.56mm ball ammunition. The soldiers enter the house with pixelated camouflage, flex-cuffs, chem lights, door markings, duct tape. The soldiers enter the house with ghillie suits and Remington sniper rifles, phoenix beacons and night-vision goggles, lasers invisible to the naked eye, rotorblades, Hellfire missiles, bandoliers strapped across their chests. The soldiers enter the house one fire team after another, and they fight brutal, dirty, nasty, the only way to fight. The soldiers enter the house with the flag of their nation sewn onto the sleeves of their uniforms. They enter the house with Toledo and Baton Rouge imprinted on the rubber soles of their desert combat boots. They enter the house and shout ‘Honey, I’m home!’ and ‘Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!’ The soldiers enter the house with conversations of Monday Night Football and the bouncing tits of the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleaders. The soldiers enter the house with cunt and cooch, cock wallet and butcher’s bin on their tongues. The soldiers enter the house with paperbacks in their cargo pockets, Starship Troopers and Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers Once and Young. The soldiers enter the house Straight Outta Compton or with Eminem saying, ‘Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity’. They enter the house with their left foot, they enter the house the way one enters cemeteries or unclean places. The soldiers enter the house with their insurance policies filled out, signed, beneficiaries named, last will and testaments sealed in manila envelopes half a world away. The soldiers enter the house having just ordered a new set of chrome mufflers on eBay for the Mustang stored under blankets in a garage north of San Francisco. The soldiers enter the house with only nine credits earned toward an associate’s degree in history from the University of Maryland. They kick in the door and enter the house with the memory of backyard barbecues on their minds. They kick in the door while cradling their little sisters in their arms. They kick in the door and pull in the toboggans and canoes from the hillsides and lakes of Minnesota. They kick in the door and bring in the horses from the barn, hitching them to the kitchen table inside. The soldiers enter the house with Mrs Ingram from the 2nd grade at Vinland Elementary School. The soldiers enter the house with Mrs Garoupa from Senior English at Madera High. The soldiers kick in the door and enter the house with their arms filled with all the homework they ever did. They enter the house and sit down to consider the quadratic equation, the Socratic Method. The soldiers enter the house to sit cross-legged on the floor as the family inside watches on, watches how the soldiers interrogate them, saying, How do I say the word for ‘friend’ in Arabic? How do I say the word ‘love’? How do I tell you that Pvt Miller is dead, that Pvt Miller has holes in the top of his head? And what is the word for ghosts in Arabic? And how many live here? And are the ghosts Baath Party supporters? Are the ghosts in favor of the coalition forces? Are the ghosts here with us now? Can you tell us where the ghosts are hiding? And where the ghosts keep their weapons cache and where they sleep at night? And what can you tell us about Ali Baba? Is Ali Baba in the neighborhood? The soldiers enter the house and take off their dusty combat boots and pull out an anthology of poetry from an assault pack, Iraqi Poetry Today, and commence reading poems aloud. The soldiers say, ‘This is war then: All is well.’ They say, ‘The missiles bomb the cities, and the airplanes bid the clouds farewell.’ The soldiers remove their flak vests and turn off their radios. The soldiers smile and stretch their arms, one of them yawning, another asking for a second cup of chai. The soldiers give chocolates to the frightened little children in the shadows of the house. The soldiers give chocolates to the frightened little children and teach them how to say f**k you and how to flip off the world. The soldiers recite poetry as trays of chai and tea and cigarettes are brought into the room. The soldiers, there in the candlelight of the front room, with the Iraqi men of military age zip-tied with flex-cuffs, kneeling, sandbags over their heads, read verses from Iraqi Poetry Today. The soldiers switch off their night-vision goggles and set their padded helmets on the floor while the frightened little children pretend to eat the chocolate they’ve been given, their mothers shushing them when they begin to cry. And the soldiers, men from Kansas and California, Tacoma and College Station — these soldiers remove the black gloves from their hands to show the frightened little children how they mean no harm, how American the soldiers are, how they might bring in a pitcher of water for the bound and blinded men to drink from soon, perhaps, if there’s time, and how they read poetry for them, their own poetry, in English, saying, ‘Between time and time, between blood and blood. All is well.’ All is well, the soldiers say. The soldiers kick in the doors and enter the house and zip-tie the men of military age and shush the women and the frightened little children and drink the spooned sugar stirred into the hot chai and remove their stinking boots and take off their flak vests and stack their weapons and turn off their night-vision goggles and say to the frightened little children, softly, with their palms held out in the most tender of gestures they can offer, their eyes as brown as the hills that lead to the mountains, or as blue as the rivers that lead to the sea — ‘All is well, little ones, all is well.’ [Transition music.] Brian Turner: I almost joined the Marines twice when I was 19 years old. 18,19, around there. Both times, I went down to the recruiter, took the tests and talked to them. Both times, he said I maxed out the tests. Both times, I didn’t believe him. I thought maybe my verbal acuity on a good day, maybe. My mechanic aptitude? No, not a chance and not possible. I thought they were pulling my leg to pull me in. I thought well, if the the reverse is true and I'm the smart guy in the room with mechanical things, like when the 50 Cal goes down, and Turner, fix the 50 cal! Wow, yeah I would not want to be in that spot. So, I grew my hair out pretty long halfway down my back to play bass guitar in a band called the Los Muertos Muchachos, the dead guys, in Fresno California—I’m from the Central Valley—and I thought, I’m going to follow this band thing, finish college and maybe we’ll tour Japan. Things like that. I started studying poetry classes thinking that might help me with lyrics for the band. It did help, but the band never took off in terms of CDs and that kind of thing. I do still enjoy playing with the guys. To circle back to your question, when I was about 30, almost 31, I remember thinking that the cutoff is 32 for joining. I remember thinking in my head, I’ll miss it. I’m going to miss the timing. I wouldn't be allowed to join. I wish I could go back to that guy, that other version of me, Brian Turner, and ask him what exactly, because I don’t think it was fully formed in my mind. In fact, I wrote a poetry collection, “Here Bullet, when I was in Iraq as an infantry sergeant. I wrote “Phantom Noise,” another collection, five years after I came home. One is written as the soldier in the war, the other is the war coming home with me. Neither really gets into your question, which is something people have been asking me for the last 10 years, mostly at poetry readings. Why did you join the Army? That was the impetus that led me into the memoir that I wrote, although the memoir doesn't answer the question, really. It skirts around it, just as I'm doing now, but I think there is an inheritance in my family. I noticed this is true with a lot of families throughout our country. When I was asked that question by reporters, I would say I come from a long line of military tradition in my family, which seem to answer the question but if you think about it, it doesn't really say anything at all. What does that really mean? Justin Hudnall: Right. Brian Turner: How did it get me to sign up and carry a weapon, put a weapon in my hand and actually get me on the tarmac to climb up into the plane to take me to a combat zone? I do think it has something to do with manhood and masculinity in my case. Not necessarily for other men and women that served in uniform. I speak for my own personal experience. I think it has something to do with a rite of passage about the unknown. It seems like in a culture, about once every generation, in a large-scale way, we sort of follow— the tribe sends out its warrior class out into some far away, unknown place for most of us. They go through some type of test of fire to come back changed or augmented or altered and they don't talk about it. That's true for the most part in my own family, and as a boy I looked up to my uncles, my father, my grandfather, and I heard the stories of those before them. There’s always sort of this peripheral discussion of violence and war, especially military service in general, so violence in combat were never talked about. What was talked about was the edges of things, sort of the National Geographic version of military service. It was about how big the ocean was, what this island was like, and what it was like flying over this particular landscape etc. Never inside that moment. I think I learned early on, but I wasn't aware of this even up until I was 30 when I was about to join the service, when I thought I was going to miss it. I think what I was learning was that in order to become like the men I most revered in my family, I would have to do something like them. Go to some foreign place and come back changed, never to return to myself. [Transition music.] Brian Turner: This is a piece from my second collection of poems, Here, Bullet. AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)

Thalia Fields lies under a grey ceiling of clouds,
just under the turbulence, with anesthetics
dripping from an IV into her arm,
and the flight surgeon says The shrapnel
cauterized as it traveled through her
here, breaking this rib as it entered,
burning a hole through the left lung
to finish in her back, and all of this
she doesn’t hear, except perhaps as music—
that faraway music of people’s voices
when they speak gently and with care,
a comfort to her on a stretcher
in a flying hospital en route to Landstuhl,
just under the rain at midnight, and Thalia
drifts in and out of consciousness
as a nurse dabs her lips with a moist towel,
her palm on Thalia’s forehead, her vitals
slipping some, as burned flesh gives way
to the heat of the blood, the tunnels within
opening to fill her, just enough blood
to cough up and drown in; Thalia
sees the shadows of people working
to save her, but she cannot feel their hands,
cannot hear them any longer,
and when she closes her eyes
the most beautiful colors rise in darkness,
tangerine washing into Russian blue,
with the droning engine humming on
in a dragonfly’s wings, island palms
painting the sky an impossible hue
with their thick brushes dripping green…
a way of dealing with the fact
that Thalia Fields is gone, long gone,
about as far from Mississippi
as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq
with a blanket draped over her body
and an exhausted surgeon in tears,
his bloodied hands on her chest, his head
sunk down, the nurse guiding him
to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries,
though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard
where pilots fly in blackout, the plane
like a shadow guiding the rain, here
in the droning engines of midnight. [Transition music.] Justin Hudnall: Do you think it's part of your job as a writer to confront civilians with their complicity? Brian Turner: Yeah, and you know, me too, me too. After this, I'll probably stop by at a coffee shop and get an iced coffee, get sugar and cream and if it's too sugary, probably not be happy with it and think I should have put it in myself. What am I doing? Sometimes the trivial seems to permeate throughout the day and I know that halfway across the globe there is massive trauma being inflicted. Whether it needs to happen, doesn't need to happen, there is no conversation about it. As I look around the people driving in their cars, and here in Florida, everybody seems to be texting and driving. They’re very good at it, and I'm just wondering like there's so much conversation going on, but very little taking place that has to do with things that should be addressed. Part of the reason I say this is because if we were Iraqi for example, from 1991 until now, it would seem as if there was some type of war or occupation that was connected to America continuously. We call the years from 1991 to 2003 sanction years, and the word sanction itself was pretty sterile. Would we call them sanction years if Iraqi jets were flying over Los Angeles or San Diego or Birmingham, Alabama and every now and then, bombing, or targeting an installation, which we would call building and eliminating enemy targets, which we might call uncles or friend. We might know people by name in that building, people we lost, and people we love. It might feel more like a low-level conflict or war or something. What I'm saying is, we are in our 25th anniversary of war just in Iraq and with Iraq. When I say endurance, and we have endurance. Justin Hudnall: There's couple more questions I really want to ask. Sebastian Junger gave this really interesting TED talk. It went along with an article he wrote about his theory on why coming back from— he’s an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, and struggled a lot as has a lot of his soldier counterparts did with coming home. He had this take on it. For him, it was specifically about the act of being separated from a tribe of heavily armed men where he knew exactly who is on his side and who wasn’t. All of a sudden, he's no longer in the war zone. He never felt more in danger then when he'd come back to America and lost that tribe. We talk a lot about the reentry sickness and the difficulties with coming home, but because it's different for everybody, I wanted to ask you what, reflecting on it, was the specific qualities that made transitioning back to civilian life difficult for you? Brian Turner: Initially, it was just trying to slough away Sgt. Turner and become Brian. I remember right at the very beginning, I have to do things like stop my eyes from scanning the street the way I would do on rooftops, down to the levels of the building and checking the corners of street. When walking on streets, doing the slow pirouette-like spin to see my 360, see what's behind me. Not looking under overpasses as I was driving through, watching the top of the overpass in case someone popped up from there. Once we go under an overpass and I'm exiting on the other side of the freeway, not looking back in my rearview mirror to see if there's someone up on the other side of the overpass on top. Some basic things like that. Sloughing away the job of the soldier and the trained part of it. I guess eventually, trying to figure out who this guy Brian is and I think I did a pretty good job. I went back with National Geographic. I went back to Baghdad to write an essay about the city, no longer in uniform, no longer a soldier. This is 2011, I think. I was there for a while in December 2011, and I remember walking down Mutanabbi Street. There was a guy with me who was a bodyguard, so he’s got a pistol under his jacket and I think he had a black belt in tae kwon do. I remember thinking, “I don’t think that’s really going to help.” That might help in a bar in Fresno maybe, but I didn't think it was gonna help with guns and that kind of thing. Also, he had a pistol, but how invested is this guy in keeping me alive whatever it is that hits the fan? As we're walking, it had been a few years since I’d been in uniform, but I did that slow turn, that circle turn, as I was walking forward, that pirouette forward, looking back around me to see, looking back around me to see to make sure I'm checking my six. As soon as I stopped at a turn I completed, and I was walking forward again, or looking forward again, the voice in my head was do not do that again, do not do that again. I didn't look Kurdish, I was hoping I looked Kurdish, I guess what I'm saying is I began to quickly revert back into that, given the right situation, and I think that's a good thing, but it’s also may be a dangerous thing. Even last night, my wife and I met a friend at a burger joint here in College Park and Orlando. We're sitting down and there was a picnic table outside, and the friends sat on the table that was parallel to the street. He sat on the one side of the picnic bench, you're looking out towards the street. Sitting on the other you have your back to the street, and can't see anything. Initially, I started to sit there but it was just so uncomfortable. I remember I always sit by my wife, but this one instance, I sat across the table from her because it was just too uncomfortable. So, it's been 10 years. I'm sure that'll happen for much of the rest of my life. It's small things like this, but many of don’t get talked about. I know this is common for many. [Transition music] Brian Turner: This is a poem is from my first collection, Phantom Noise. Insignia One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military. She hides under a deuce n’ half this time—sleeping on a roll of foam, draped in mosquito netting. Sandflies hover throughout the night. She sleeps under vehicle exhaust and heat, dreaming of mortars buried beside her, three stripes painted on each cold tube, a rocker of yellow hung below. It’s you she’s dreaming of Sergeant—she’ll dream of you for years to come. If she makes if out of this country alive, which she probably will. You will be the fire and the hovering breath. Not the sniper. Not the bomber in the streets. You. So I’m here to ask this one night’s reprieve. Let her sleep tonight. Let her sleep. Pause a moment under the gibbous moon. Smoke. The gin your wife sent from New Jersey, colored mint green in food dye disguised in a bottle of mouthwash: take a long swig of it. Take the edge out of your knuckles. Let it blur your vision into a tremor of lights. The explosions in the distance are not your own. In these long hours before dawn, on the banks of the Tigris river, let her sleep. In her dream, your eyes are pools of rifle oil. You unsheathe the bayonet from its scabbard while she waits. On a mattress of sand and foam, there in the motor pool, she waits to kiss bullets into your mouth. [Transition music.] Justin Hudnall: Whenever anyone is known for anything, that they can also feel like they're trapped by it. Do you feel like you can no more not be a soldier, veteran than I could be a unicorn? Do you ever feel like I'm ready to be known as not the veteran writer anymore? Brian Turner: You know as soon as you said I could be a unicorn, I know people out there are going to very quickly— they'll see you as a unicorn for a moment. Justin Hudnall: Maybe that was my intent all along, to plant that image. Brian Turner: That dream has come true. Justin Hudnall: Brian Turner, interviewed by a unicorn. Brian Turner: I think it's crucial to continue. I don't want to erase the past, all of the things that have happened in the past or the lens that I see the world through now. We all do it like that, so as I write something new, I know it's going to be in conversation at least in some way that I have no idea taking place, in some way the past will be involved with the present and with the future, if I'm lucky to have a future. I do sometimes feel like the work— I'm often invited to places and will be introduced as soldier poet Brian, a soldier-writer, and I'm no longer a soldier. I'm a civilian, I'm a veteran, and so a soldier-poet, like I'm fighting for poetry? I do, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like I'm hoping that if I'm fortunate enough to write more, that might change and shift. Brian Turner: The one thing I’d like to say— there so many things, but one just in case it's useful, with the current wars—you know, I’m a book lover and a book junkie and I love to read. There's this wave of war literature that's come to America, and it's a bright time for writing in America. It's a busy time for writing in America. There's a lot of new books being put out on the shelves, but what I'm waiting for is that combat narrative, that collection of poems or that novel or an amazing memoir or some or all of these, but that book written by a female veteran or service member, that is put up on that rare high shelf among the Michael Herr’s, Sebastian Junger’s, Dexter Filkins, the Carolyn Forché’s, the Tim O'Brien’s; put on that shelf, and I know it's coming. I know a lot of them are in writing programs right now, some of them are scribbling away on chapter 17 right now in some town that I've never been to, but I'm waiting and I'm looking forward to reading that work learning from it. It's time. It's way overdue. Looking forward to it. Justin Hudnall: Maybe you’ve already taught her. Brian Turner: I’ve been very fortunate. There are a couple I’m thinking of. Absolutely. Justin Hudnall: If you were to come across a Marine/soldier, air man, woman, sailor, who is about to rotate out in about two weeks and you could give one piece of advice, what would it be? Brian Turner: They're about to rotate out in a couple of weeks and then come home, right? One piece of advice is tricky, but I think I'd encourage them to just take it slow, not expect. Part of it will be that a coming back to the world will be a slow process and not to put too much on the civilian population around them. Sometimes, I feel like I, myself, put too much on people in this country. We have busy lives. People are trying to put food on the table and working hard. It may not seem like it at any given moment. If you look at an ant when it's walking, it's one individual ant in the dirt, walking on an ant trail, it looks pretty purposeless. What is it doing? Do you ever just watch one, and it rambles around, checking things out. You can't really see why that one needs to be there. But, you start to see, if you step back and look at a lot of them. You can start to see the formation of an idea, and you can see a community and you can see an organism of these ants as they try to help each other to survive and make their way in the world. And similar, I was complaining about people punching letters into their cell phones and driving in traffic, and it looks inane to me and banal and just pointless oftentimes, and I know I'm included in that but I'm also trying to take things a little bit easier on the people around us and recognize it. Some of them have cancer, they have loved ones in the hospital with diseases that won't be treated, some of them have failed marriages, etc. We have different hurdles in our lives. Everyone plays the blues if they live long enough, right? To recognize that in those around him and just take it slow. I encourage people who meet veterans and service members who come back in and those who didn't serve overseas, those in the military community when they're transitioning into civilian life oftentimes— I hear people ask me, what should I do for them, what should I say, “thank you for serving,” etc. I've heard one person say this once, and I repeat the advice: if it seems like something you want to do, if it seems natural and just be their friend. I think that's probably the biggest gift you could give anybody. Justin Hudnall: Brian Turner thanks for being on Incoming. Brian Turner: Hey man, thanks a lot. I appreciate it.. [Outro music plays, “Blue Little” by 10:32.] Justin Hudnall: You can follow Brian and his doings at brianturner.org, and that concludes our show. Incoming is produced by myself, Justin Hudnall. Our composer and musicians include: Chris Warren, Ariana Warren, Kristopher Apple, Christian Kjeldsen, Sol Jorge Moscol, and Nicolee Kuester. Thomas Torres is our assistant editor, and Ikoi Hiroe provides transcription services In the studio: Nate John is web editor. Kurt Kohnen is our Production Manager & Audio Engineer. Emily Jankowski is our audio technician, and John Decker is Program Director. You can find us on the web at kpbs.org/incoming to at incomingradio.org. Thanks for listening, we’ll talk again soon.