Brian Turner recently completed a tour in Iraq and wrote a book of poetry about it. He’s had a book published, and today has a nice place of honor on the NY Times “Home Fires” blog page for his commentary and a few pieces of his work.

He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. He received a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry.

For anyone out there who might hear the word “poetry” and cringe, or having just read the word here, immediately look to click to some other article, silently cursing this guy Turner for not sticking with the Home Fires mission — don’t worry: I am going to be writing about my time in Iraq, where I served as an infantry team leader. But Iraq is also the place where I wrote my first book of poetry — “Here, Bullet” — during my unit’s deployment there. (It was published by Alice James Books.) So today I want to look back and talk about some of the things that went on in my head then, not only fighting, but observing, witnessing and writing. Poetry.

I believe in the saying, Poetry finishes in the reader. I can (and will) tell you about some of the things I wrote in-country, there in the sand, or what was going on in my head at the time (I use my journals from back then to help refresh my memory). But in the end, I truly believe you’ll take it with a grain of salt and decide for yourself what the poem itself is all about.

To Sand

To sand go tracers and ball ammunition.
To sand the green smoke goes.
Each finned mortar, spinning in light.
Each star cluster, bursting above.
To sand go the skeletons of war, year by year.
To sand go the reticles of the brain,
the minarets and steeple bells, brackish
sludge from the open sewers, trashfires,
the silent cowbirds resting
on the shoulders of a yak. To sand
each head of cabbage unravels its leaves
the way dreams burn in the oilfires of night.

“To Sand” is the final poem in “Here, Bullet.” When I wrote this, I felt an overwhelming sense that we, as a nation, will not learn from what is happening in Iraq. The sand itself is a process of memory in this poem, washing over and burying the specific, the historic. As the old saying goes — those who do not know their history may be doomed to repeat it.

Maybe we can learn. Maybe, just maybe, when the next possible conflict begins to stir somewhere in the world — maybe we’ll be a great deal more reluctant to jump the gun. Maybe, like in our own homes, we won’t reach for the gun unless we know — without the shadow of a doubt — that there simply is no other alternative for our self-protection, or for the protection of our good friends abroad.

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It’s very hard to write commentary on this because of my own partially-repressed memories of Nam. I wrote journals too, although with less regularity due to the exigencies of service there. Writing in the field is all but impossible; daylight was spent in movement, and when the day’s march was finished the Night Defensive Position had to be hurriedly (but carefully) constructed. There were weapons to clean, rations to eat, rucks and web gear to straighten up and clean and suddenly it was dark. Writing had to be done in those few spare moments of fading twilight and journal was in competition with letters home. Poetry is challenging because it requires a distillation of thought into a pure format – expansion is often expressed by a single word. It is a very visual medium. Turner seems like an excellent photographer.