This is not my genre of choice, or one I have a lot of experience with, so take this with a grain of salt. The structure and a lot of the early sections felt contrived and overwrought, like Turner is trying too hard to be clever. I'm not sure if it settled down or if I just got used to it, but the second half seemed to flow a lot smoother.

That said, this was a very approachable book, and I'm definitely in favor of exposing the vast, under-informed American public about what their armed forces are going through. ( )

Nel 2003 il sergente Brian Turner è a capo di un convoglio di soldati nel deserto iracheno. Dieci anni dopo, a casa, accanto alla moglie addormentata ha una visione: come un drone sulla mappa del mondo, sorvola Bosnia e Vietnam, Iraq, Europa e Cambogia. Figlio e nipote di soldati, le sue esperienze si fondono con quelle del padre e del nonno, con i giochi da bambino e le vite degli amici caduti in battaglia. Così, tutti i conflitti si dispiegano sotto di lui in un unico, immenso, territorio di guerra e violenza. Nel 2003 il sergente Brian Turner diventa un poeta e quando, dieci anni dopo, la visione torna nella sue notti insonni, grazie alla poesia riesce a raccontarla così da accettarne la memoria - una memoria tanto grande che l'America non basterebbe a contenerla, e che sfrega l'anima fino a scorticarla. Liberata la nostalgia, la compassione e il desiderio di verità, "La mia vita è un paese straniero" racconta in diretta le azioni, le esercitazioni, i vuoti e i rumori, la paura e il coraggio, la tragedia e la gioia dei ritorni. E riconnettendo vita e poesia, orrore e morte, riesce a dire della guerra le parole che mancano, quelle capaci di riallacciare il filo del senso a quello del silenzio.

I will be in the extreme minority in giving this book a low rating, While I have high regards for Turner's poetry, this memoir reads like notes for a series of poems. It is not a coherent memoir, and it is sometimes irresponsible in romanticizing death and in making inaccurate conclusions.

Turner is ambitious, and attempts to write the memoir using leaps back and forth in time to past wars (mostly with his own ancestors in the battle) and to the present (his own experiences, and those of others). I applaud that.

Part of this linking of histories is to try to make sense of his connection (personally and historically) to his grandfather's experience of war -- Guam in 1944, then Iwo Jima, then an invasion of Japan that did not happen because the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs were dropped first. "This is the narrative I've carried with me all my adult life. A few sentences strug together in the brief sketch of a life at war. The order of battle. The lifetime of a war. My grandfather's war." So he digs in deeply to what he knows of that experience, tries to re-imagine it, compares stories to the facts he can find, and to other people whose lives were affected by those wars. All this is good writing, good stuff, exciting structure, passionate -- I'm still applauding.

Turner has been in the middle of many battles, has seen incredible things, and he can convey that experience well. He gives you the disjointed feelings and perceptions that battle situations leave inside you. He gives you the ugly facts. He writes eloquently about the lasting damage wars leave behind -- such as sunken ordnance that, years later, a fish trawler might bring up in its nets, blowing everything up.

But finally the stacks and stacks of death images, described in almost lush imagery, begin to feel falsely romanticized -- somehow made into a dark passion where the gorgeousness of language overweights the hard facts of what is being described. It begins to feel inappropriate.

Death is ugly, and very physical. The language to describe it should align with that. If the language becomes poetic, then there is a disconnect, and I for one begin to distrust the writer. It is dangerous to love the act of writing so much that it takes over the need to be accurate.

At one point Turner describes participating in a sweatlodge ceremony, in part to help himself heal from the effects of war. The setting is near where English colonists' massacred in 1637 a group of Indians, initiating the Pequot War, The same site is where, in 1945, a German U-boat was sunk, its crew all drowned. Turner is very good at layering historical war events like this, and it's a powerful way to look at history. Most of us ignore the various pasts right under our feet, and Turner reminds us that the present day's wars do not stand alone. They're repeats, always. This aspect of the book is well done, and important. More applause (sincerely).

But where it starts to break down, for me, is that facts begin to be layered out of context. The imagery of the dead from one war overlaid by the dead from the next is a powerful thing, but Turner gets sloppy, I think, and that can be dangerous. One instance where this really jumped out was in the description of the German U-boat sinking: "About seven miles offshore, out into the Atlantic, from where the wind comes, a German submarine, U-853, rests on the ocean floor with its crew of fifty-five German sailors still manning their positions in an underwater grave. It was sunk by American forces in 1945, after Hitler's short-lived successor, Karl Doenitz, called for German units to cease fire and return home." That's all he says about it, then mentions the Indian massacre, then goes on with the sweatlodge ceremony he came there for.

The story of the U-boat is not quite so simple though, and saying it was sunk after a call for cease-fire implies it was sunk for no good reason and the deaths of the 55 were one of the senseless tragedies of war. Not so fast. You can search the internet simply for "U-853" and find stories on Wikipedia, the USS Naval Institute, and Boston newspapers that explain the U-boat had, after the ceasefire (which it either ignored or didn't know about -- that's not clear), sunk an American boat that was simply hauling coal, and did so right off the US coast. That's why the U-boat was sunk. So Turner is not giving us the whole story, but only the small slice of it that occurred near his sweatlodge. That leaves out the impetus behind the sinking of the boat though. It changes the story a bit.

That's one example, probably the most blatant, of how I see Turner's memoir slicing and dicing historical facts in a way that he hopes will layer them into a powerful emotional montage, but that sometimes sends him down the bunny-hole of inaccuracy and emotional dishonesty.

There were smaller examples throughout the book that caused me to distrust the emotions being built up by the language in this book. I do applaud Turner's intent, but I think it falls short, and with war, that's dangerous.

I'll stick with his poetry, thank you. ( )

This shattering memoir describes clear as photographs the heat signatures of memory, the “shadows articulated by light.” It is terribly beautiful and the reverse, both. Shards of sentences fracture the consciousness. Turner tells us the pop-pop-pop of machine guns is patient and sounds sometimes like laughter, or “metallic elocution.”

It is queer to see, hear, speak the gorgeous language in this book and realize it describes the brittle, blistering, terrifying. Killing people with precision instruments. Not always intentional. The discordance is terrible. Turner tells us of the cold hard smooth perfection of chrome-plated steel firing pin. Fear and pitilessness are paired.

I think as I read about these soldiers joshing and murmuring to one another about field pussy as they sight their rifles from the flat roof of an abandoned elementary school—do the Iraqi insurgents that are their targets think about these men as men? Turner imagines a bomb maker at his craft. He is an artist. The irony is cold and red and hot and black.

Turner tells us he always wanted to be a soldier. He is from a family of soldiers stretching through a flamethrower on Guam to the Franco-Prussian war and one of the very last successful cavalry charges in modern warfare, the Battle of Mars-la-Tour. These men, these soldiers, survived. As a young boy, Turner practiced surviving. In the California scrub he dug trenches stocked with provisions. He practiced martial arts with his father in a makeshift dojo. He enlists in the cavalry. He thought it would make him a man. It did. But what man is this?

His remembered images startle us into recognition and give no mercy. The language lingers like the taste of cordite on the tongue or the smell of smoke in the hair: The tremble of hair on a dead soldier’s head like sea grass on a sand dune; A moustache, found alone, on a bomb-cratered street; The dotted line traced from the Japanese kamikaze to the young woman in her homemade and heavily-laden vest.

A man is not big enough for his memories, Turner tells us. America is not big enough to hold the memories that are spilling out of the soldiers not big enough to hold them. The soldiers are dying of their memories. They could unpack some of those memories. Some of it is the detritus and the waste of war. Where do we put the waste?

A Billy Lynn moment occurs when a colonel visits Turner’s stateside training site and tells them he needs audio and visual for a video game. Wha-a-a? All in the life of a soldier…ours is not to question why…the queer cadence of the top-down command catch the exhausted men sideways.

The work, the name of Brian Turner will ever evoke in me a sighed outbreath, an inward turn...and joy, hope. The beauty and sorrow is palpable, real, painful. Spoken. Written. Acknowledged. Poet warrior. Can we ever have enough of them?



( )

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 and Brian Castner's THE LONG WALK. 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. ( )