Poet, Army Veteran Brian Turner Shares War Experience At El Cajon Literary Festival

People who wage were try very hard to keep things simple. The world is reduced to us and them. Friend and enemy. Good guys and bad guys. We are right and they are wrong. That kind of environment does not lend itself to a lot of introspection and empathy. Two things almost always incompatible with the task of killing strangers. I next guest has added those elements to his memories of war zones. His acclaimed poetry collections Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise explore war and soldiering and now his memoir delves into the full spectrum of what it is to live, fight back and even die in a foreign war. Ryan Turner is an Army veteran of the wars in Bosnia and Iraq. His memoir is called My Life as a Foreign Country. Brian, it is a pleasure to welcome you. Thank you for having me. What does the name of the book, My Life as a Foreign Country, say about the way you approach to writing this memoir? I think it's a recognition that part of me is split off and separated. Part of me lives in Iraq and part of me lives here. We often talk about soldiers coming home with the war they bring with them in their memories. Part of us might also want the other space and part of my experience in this world is as circling around my wartime experience. There is a separation of self. The book is rather short for a memoir. So were the chapters. Is one chapter that is one sentence long. Why this construction? I don't think I could have written linear narrative. If you take it, 136 sections with a couple of fragments and these fragments, if you look as a whole, you could debone the fish and find the classic narrative of pre-deployment, deployment to a war zone. There's a flash. To childhood and layers in history, my family history, that fold. To the wartime experience. They return from leave and the homecoming and the soldiers return which goes to that. I couldn't write -- I had to right in a more fragmented way because I think we often -- most narratives and most films I've seen, although I enjoy them, my experience in Iraq didn't correspond with them. They didn't match to reality. What I mean by that, I would have experiences and think in my mind how it reminded me that something may have happened to my grandfather or father, or my uncles. Most narratives exclude that, that type of drink -- that type of thinking. Or else you are seeing it in a flashback. You do have a linear story in there and it does take you on a journey. Does it remind you of the way you write poetry? In the sense that they would be one fragment and a few paragraphs in Iraq and then our break for the next section. Suddenly, we are in a museum looking at a painting and there is a break and no connective tissue to make a transition between them to Iraq, again. I learn from poetry, to trust the great intelligence of the reader and that the reader, let myself, of what to be a party and the construction of the work. My imagination helps to construct the schematic, the blueprint that a book really is. What you are saying, reminds me, you've written a poem called at Lowe's improvement center which lends civilian life and war in a mind-boggling way. Is that the way you experience the world when you came home? I still do, sometimes. We think of poets, they use words that rhyme to construct a poem. Oftentimes, in terms of lines, I might see helicopter blade in the fan department at Lowe's home improvement center. What I did see, I was in Fresno, my hometown. I walked into the store and that's what started the pole and. I was looking for nails and came across the long -- came across the type used for scaffolding. It looked like the kind of pen inside the letter M 4 that I carried in Iraq. I looked for rhymes that might recognize that you have duality. We are a country at war but we don't experience it. I've never been to Afghanistan, for example. As a writer and a human being, how can I connect with responsibilities. Up we are going wage war, how do we a pension -- pay attention while we are here, not actively engage in a? You got your masters in creative writing before you were interested in writing before you join the military. Why did you decide to go into the military? I almost joined the Marines tries -- twice when I was 19. I grow my hair out and joined a band and thought we were going to toward Japan. I eventually did. I thought I was older, about 30. The cut off was 32 it and I thought I would miss my chance to be in military service. That was the extent of my thinking. I don't remember thinking to's deeply into it. Over the years, I have. What I was considering, is that I would miss an experience that formed part of the culture of manhood and masculinity and my family. In a way, I realize I wouldn't have fully understood or come close to understanding some of the aspects and experiences that belong to my grandfather, my dad and my uncle's, my cousins, my brother-in-law. We go back generations to the American Civil War. There's a deep inheritance I would have no access to. Did you personally, though, outside your family history, have a desire to do this? Yes. I didn't think of it that way. I thought of it in very simplistic terms. That's probably why I wrote the memoir. The memoir is a meditation, a chance to think into and try to ask questions that may be understand better. That was the purpose in writing the book, was trying to answer that question, to see what I was thinking about and what was layered into my subconscious that I wasn't aware of, that made me raise my hand and take the oath. Your previous books have been called, as he said, collections of poems. They are about your life as a soldier, memories of war zones and operations. Since you have this writing background, did you, during your deployments, Kinder self-consciously storing images and impressions you wanted to sort out in your writing later? You know, before I went to Bosnia, I was consciously thinking that I would write a book about it. Even before I started reading books ahead of time and a lot of what I learned about writing a book in my experience in Bosnia carried to my first published poetry book, Here, Bullet. I was the new unit among the first replacements. We went in the third of December, 2003. When we trained in Fort Lewis, Washington, we would come in from field exercises and clean our weapons and we could see in the big-screen TV, the war on television. It was as if I could see people perfecting the trigger squeeze that they might use against me once I got there. There was a kind of anxiety. I wasn't thinking about writing a book. I've always journaled, so I was slimmed -- I assumed I would do that. I did journal. About a month or so into Iraq, some lines of verse came out. Up with them and another notebook because I recognize them as poems. My first book was written while I was in country, more events in response there, them the way I'd written before and after, which is a strategic way and planned out. That's very interesting to me. The way your imagination and habits, everyone you right about -- and fact -- I'm going to ask if you would read a bit from your book. You right about your relative's, even those killed in the war and it extends to the enemy. If you could reach West from a section of My Life as a Foreign Country, we right about a small family group preparing to launch an insurgent attack on an American base. It's a father with two sons and a boat rolling down the river. The father's its still, now and then blowing a long breath into his cupped hands to warm them. Watches his sons rowing moment by moment closer to the site. He thinks about the round and nestling beneath their fit. The timer he was set to quash shortly after dawn. He'll make sure of that. There's no way to know for certain where the path of the round will take it. The pictures the rocket at it's highest point suspended a brief moment in the blue ether. He wonders if another man son will have just awoken from a dream as around pitches over and begins its descent, spinning, something catches his eye in the darkness. A head, he says in the low whisper leaning closer to them. A thicket on the left. There. That's Brian Turner reading a section from his memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country. I think people can get at least a small sense from that small reading about the fact that you imagine your self into the heads of these people that you remember from your time, or that you create, from your time in country in Iraq. That kind of empathy, getting into the head of the enemy, seeing him as human, seems the direct opposite of what it takes to fight a war, isn't it? I've have to admit that we did a lot of raids, for example. Many late at night, most late at night. Once we rolled out of the gate and went on a mission, I think most of the people around me, I was pretty much wired tight and thinking about the mission and I wasn't -- I was thinking more about triggermen and bomb makers and financiers in that type of thing. Not even that, once the door was kicked and. Just being fueled by adrenaline and doing the job, itself, being hyper focused in the moment. When I come. To the basis, wherever we were, there was more -- there was a lot of boredom, downtime in between missions. Cycles of three weeks, and times when there were vast stretches of the desert of the mind. I would right in my notebooks or think of some of these things. It's hard to imagine that other soldiers and Marines and servicemembers don't also see in a traffic circle, they scan and do their job, but some of them are sure they looking at the old man on the street corner with a white beard shaking his head slowly and wonder, what is his lifelike and what is he thinking? How has it come to this point in his life? For those who have been shot at, Shirley they must wonder what the person's life was like and what got them to the point where they wanted to shoot at me? What were the reasons behind it and what did they think afterwards? If they met me, what they still want to kill me? Do have regrets about your military service? I've been asked that question, but it's a good run. I try not to go in that direction because I'm not sure what it will yield, really do. I try to think how I can take the experiences I have and carry them in the future in a way that might be useful for myself and, maybe, help me be healthy and try to have a life that might lead toward a word like joy or happiness. At the same time, if I can share it with others, maybe it will have some utility. If you thought the other way, it would rip any hope of joy from your life? We are very messy, human creatures. I think we can have a lot of things roiling around inside us, both good and bad. I'm not sure what it would yield. I don't want to continue to circle to the trauma. If I need to circle back to something because it needs to be attended to back I need to learn from it. If I circle back and wonder why didn't to another thing, usually it leads me to a dead-end. Brian, today is the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. I recently spoke with a Vietnam War veteran who said that he thought about Vietnam and the men he served with every single day. Does that mirror your experience in any way? Not for me. To be honest, I would say not every single day. I think my best friend died of stomach cancer couple of years back. I think of him nearly every single day at some point during the day. So, there are many battles we have, many losses and many wonderful things. If we live long enough, for me, at least, there are too many things to want to be able to dwell on and need to dwell on. Is that the person you dedicated your book to? Yes. He was from Fresno, originally Minnesota. We played guitar in the band that I played in. Why do think -- what do you think, Brian, you are writing tells us about the people that have not fought in a war? I need to read those papers or hear the other side of the conversation. I share them, mostly, because I need to read it for myself, first. I wrote seven manuscripts before my first published book. There's another book I wrote for myself. The things I share with others, I mostly do it with war related experiences. I do it mostly because we often will create a hollow space, a new term, 1% of those who served in recent wars. That divorces and creates maybe too easy of a gulf between those who serve or served and those who don't. It takes some of the slack and complicity off those of us at home. I want to make sure that the wars we engage in as a nation, as a tribe, that we remain responsible to the effects. The wars will outlive us. Whether the politicians or historians want to say otherwise, they are wrong. My grandfather is still alive, he just turned 90 a few months ago. At some point during the day, when you talk about the Vietnam veteran -- every day -- at some point, he may think quietly to himself, Word War II, I'm in the presence of the. He is reliving it? It is somewhere, a part of the filter of his day. It's there with him. Very, very present. In your book, you write that America is not a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home. Even if it could, it doesn't want to. Is there anything Americans can do to change that? Sure. We could actually tried to do practical physical things then get connected to the world we live in. For example, moles will, the northern part of a rock, has now been occupied by ISIS. A lot of people fled their homes as they had done often on on throughout -- since 1991, really. What we could do is maybe folks could get a jacket drive. A lot of them are in Kirkuk and Curtis Stan. I'm just picking one place on the planet and get a jacket drive. It's called there. A lot of folks in San Diego may have extra jackets in their jacket. They don't need them. It's good weather, here. They may need one or two jet, but they don't need that fourth one. Maybe a book drive, pen pals. We could Skype with people in other countries. If they want to connect with veterans, I had newly divorced, so I found there was a site called soldiers Angels.com and I got adopted by an anonymous person in America we had an angel handle and Sunday presence and things while I was there. You could send books to soldiers. Books for soldiers.com. I am not affiliated with either of this organization, I was just a recipient. Get connected with the places and the people that constitute America's foreign policy. Yes. In terms of veterans and soldiers, don't just to shake a soldiers hand, a service members hands and say thank you for your service. Become their bread. The wheel, not just moment between the fragmentary and what larger uses -- it's hard for me to connect with those tiny things. We have larger impact on our own lives where we will be enriched by doing these things. Brian Turner will be the featured speaker at the Grossmont literary arts Festival at Grossmont College tonight at 7:00. 'S memoir is called My Life as a Foreign Country. Brian, thank you so much. Thank you.