Shek

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/m...-4923672c.html

Ex-Fort Lewis soldier captures Iraq’s horror stanza by stanza

MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune
Published: January 13th, 2006 02:30 AM

Amid a rush of Iraq war soldier memoirs making their way into print, Brian Turner’s new book stands out.

His “Here, Bullet” is a collection of poems he wrote while deployed with the Army’s first Stryker brigade, from Fort Lewis, in 2003-04. His publisher believes it is the first book of poetry about the war.

The 38-year-old former infantryman will read tonight in Tacoma and Sunday afternoon in Seattle.

“I’ve read a lot of novels about war and seen a lot of movies about war, and they all work on this larger narrative,” Turner said Thursday during a break from the drive north from his home in Fresno.

“In Iraq, I didn’t find that at all. When I was there, it was like a never-ending series of disconnected events, and it was hard to see what they all meant,” he said.

“Poetry seemed like the perfect vehicle to capture those moments.”

“Here, Bullet” published in November, has received favorable reviews from The New York Times Review of Books – it’s an “Editor’s Choice” selection – and other literary publications. It recently was featured on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

“I’m really happy that people seem to enjoy it,” Turner said. “I didn’t want to write something that would be a waste of people’s time.”

His poems are about the people he met and places he saw, Iraqi history and the Arabic language, killing and death. One eulogizes a comrade who shot himself one day down by the Tigris River.

Another, “Ashur Square, Mosul,” describes a suicide bomb attack as experienced by the bomber and the people nearby: a cab driver daydreaming about a girl he once loved, an old woman cradling her grandson as they bleed to death, a National Guardsman who thinks of his wife while dying on the street.

“Dreams About the Malaria Pills (Bosch)” is about his friend Spc. Thomas Bosch’s nightmares. He was Bosch’s team leader in the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, which was in Iraq as part of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.

Bosch said Turner kept his writing to himself. Everybody knew he was better educated than most soldiers – he has a master’s in fine arts from the University of Oregon – and the guys called him The Professor.

“But he was pretty hung up on the idea of an infantry NCO writing a book of poetry,” Bosch said, “about maybe that’s not going to look too good in the ‘hoo-ahh hoo-ahh,’ testosterone world of the infantry.”

It wasn’t until they returned to Fort Lewis in late 2004 that Turner showed Bosch some of his poems.

Bosch said his friend tells it like no news media account can convey.

“It’s the visceral description that I’ve never read before. Yep, I was there,” Bosch said. “That’s what it was like.”

Turner joined the Army in 1998 after he finished college, in part to pay off his loans, in part because his father and grandfather served. He was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 and came to Fort Lewis in 2001.

He left the Army in March. He teaches part time at a community college in Fresno and installs home-security systems. He hopes the book leads to a full-time teaching position.

Although he opposes the war – he was against it before he deployed, but he swore an oath, he said – the poems aren’t meant to make a political point about it.

“People have to make up their own minds,” Turner said. “I can never remember the writer, but somebody once said that the purpose of a writer isn’t to present solutions to problems but to pose the questions in a better way, and I really think there’s a lot to that.”


Poetry reading

WHAT: Former Stryker soldier Brian Turner will read from “Here, Bullet,” his collection of poems from the Iraq war.


WHEN: 7 p.m. today


WHERE: Blue Wolf, 765 Broadway in Tacoma


REPEAT: Turner will also read at 2 p.m. Sunday at Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., in Seattle.

“Ashbah”


The ghosts of American soldiers

wander the streets of Balad by night,

unsure of their way home, exhausted,

the desert wind blowing trash

down the narrow alleys as a voice

sounds from the minaret, a soulfull call

reminding them how alone they are,

how lost. And the Iraqi dead,

they watch in silence from rooftops

as date palms line the shore in silhouette,

leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

From “Here, Bullet” by Brian Turner (Alice James Books, 2005)


On the Net: Some of Brian Turner’s other poems are online at his publisher’s Web site, at www.alicejamesbooks.org/turner_poem.html.

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Bluesman

Anybody here think those first two facts MAY be connected to the last one?

NPR and the NYT go misty-eyed over a soldier, who just HAPPENS to be anti-war and somewhat articulate. Couldn't have seen THAT comin'.

I bet if shek were inclined to write poetry as technically excellent as this guy, he sure as hell wouldn't be welcomed into the chic, ultra-cool and definitively hip coffee-house circuit for readings, and if he were featured in the pages of the NYT, it'd probably be for the purpose of determining which of his war crimes the bushitler administration was trying to cover up.

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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

Horrido

I can just IMAGINE some of Shek's poetry:

A target exposed,
A trigger squeezed,
A silent thud,
In warm desert breeze,
Asked what he felt,
Stoic "Recoil," the report,
But concealed smirk,
Reflect truth much more.

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The black flag is raised: Ban them all... Let the Admin sort them out.

I know I'm going to have the last word... I have powers of deletion and lock.