my life as a foreign country by brian turner

Elsewhere, and just as powerfully, the author recalls a moment when he himself was nearly killed. Miller’s mother hearing the ring of her doorbell, “too shrill, I think, too bright,” taking that duffel from somber men in dark coats and opening the memories that remain of her son.

Turner and a buddy are tasked to collect the private’s personal effects. Miller puts the muzzle of his automatic weapon in his mouth and pulls the trigger, Sgt. I could cite countless examples of combat and its aftermath, both physical and psychological, but I was especially moved by the suicide of one man from Turner’s platoon. Turner was too small of a space for a human being to live in.” His journals and his poems allowed him to keep his sanity in a time of psychotic chaos. Turner explains: “In many ways, the language of journal entries and poetry forged an internal space within me, a space that didn’t belong to the army or to the community of soldiers I served with. In between those dream-like flights, Turner recounts his personal experiences of war in language taken from his journals and the poems he drafted in Iraq, experiences then suffered in his memories, time and again. Turner opens and closes My Life as a Foreign Country with images of the narrator as a drone, traversing the landscape, memorizing the topography, zooming in on hypothetical action, recalling actual events, checking the gauges, monitoring the skies. Sometimes objective and sometimes subjective, he leaves room for the reader to evaluate what relentlessly occurs. He serves as a narrative lens, the eye of a camera capturing both real and imaged scenes. Turner looks at war and never blinks, never sugarcoats his experiences but never indulges in self-pity, either. This is not a memoir for the faint of heart. I found myself shivering as I read Turner’s words. The endless repetitions of violence and humanity, the juxtapositions of atrocities and kindnesses, the pulses of horror and beauty, sound a drum beat in the readers’ ears, the human costs for both soldiers and civilians, the graphic realities confronting everyone involved. After his Iraq deployment, Turner visits places like Nagasaki and Saigon, walks in the footsteps of his predecessors, returns to scenes from his own earlier service in Sarajevo, and relives scenes he can’t forget.

Focusing on Iraq during a 2003 tour of duty, Brian Turner’s memoir also navigates a series of other wars: Antietam, World War II as endured by his grandfather, his father’s Cold War recollections, an uncle’s time in Vietnam.

My Life as a Foreign Country takes us into the nightmare terrain of war.

My life as a foreign country by brian turner