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Here, Bullet
Brian Turner




Bloodaxe (2007)
£8.95  (71 Pages)


I first encountered Here, Bullet - Brian Turner's debut collection written from the front lines of Iraq - in its American edition in 2005. On publication it won various awards and now Bloodaxe have had the good sense to publish it here in the UK.

Turner served seven years in the US Military, after having received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, and spent 2003 as an infantry team leader in Iraq. He served also in Bosnia, but it is Turner's experience of the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq that is recorded in Here, Bullet. Accessible and deeply moving, the poems reveal a series of tableaux illustrating the experience of modern warfare for combatants and civilians. Reading the collection is somewhat like looking through a book of war photography; individual soldiers and civilians are observed in moments of horror, or captured in their daily routines. Without an overt political agenda - in a voice that is detached but compassionate - Turner presents a compelling and tragic portrait of American troops lost hopelessly in an environment and culture they are incapable of understanding. The second poem in Here, Bullet, which opens the first of four sections, subtly compares the American experience in Iraq with that of the lost (and often dangerous) escapees of Baghdad's zoo: 'One baboon escaped the city limits./ It was found wandering in the desert, confused/ by the wind, the blowing sands of the barchan dunes.' (The Baghdad Zoo). Turner takes his epigraphs from the Qur'an, Abdul 'Ala' al-Ma'arri, Rousseau and Hemingway, among others, but the line evoked most strongly is Edmond Jabès's closing to 'The Desert': 'You only understand what you destroy.'

In writing of his own first-hand experience of warfare, Turner creates what could be defined as 'poetry of witness'. As the American poet Carolyn Forché points out in her introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, 'witness…is problematic; even if one has witnessed atrocity, one cannot necessarily speak about it, let alone for it.' In Here, Bullet, Turner avoids judgement or polemic, arguing instead that it is only possible to describe experiences and lay them in front of the reader.   

This is not an abnegation of responsibility or some form of moral cowardice on Turner's part; it is, as Forché suggests of Ariel Dorfman,  '…a sense that the story belongs to those who have undergone the extremity…' In '16 Iraqi Policemen', Turner appears to suggest God himself would find it impossible to do more:

 Allah must wander in the crowd
 as I do, dazed by the pure concussion
 of the blast, among sirens, voices
 of the injured, the boots of running soldiers,
 not knowing whom to touch first,
 for the dead policemen cannot be found,
 here a moment before, then vanished.

 (‘16 Iraqi Policemen’)

Of the forty-nine poems in the book, less than half contain the first-person singular. Those poems that mention 'I' do so briefly before our attention turns to what the speaker is observing. For example, 'In the Leupold Scope' begins 'With a 40x60mm spotting scope/ I traverse the Halanjah skyline'. However as soon as the 'I' finds the subject of the poem (in this case a woman hanging washing on a distant rooftop) it disappears. Frequently the poems are written as reportage; the absence of an elaborately defined 'I' puts the reader in the position of the observer. This positioning is increased by the poem's tendency to dwell in the present tense. We are invited to live through these moments as the poet does, which brings us nose to nose with the event. However in the same way that every photograph in war or peace is, to some degree, a composition of the photographer, these poems are skilfully composed creations, not snapshots grabbed under artillery fire. Perhaps this allows Turner to avoid further judgement. In the present tense all verdict must be premature. Even now, three years after Turner served in Iraq, history has yet to judge the US occupation.

When dealing with the Iraqi people and their history, Turner does not shy away from the fact that he is an observer looking into a culture he cannot understand, a culture that will resist him (although the poems and their appended notes suggest serious and engaged research). Turner is the outsider; he is aware of the riflescope he watches through, and is aware also that many of the civilians he encounters and wishes to know 'may dance on [his] grave tomorrow'.

What then does Turner wish us to learn from his experience? He gives a direct response as he leaves Iraq in 'Night in Blue'; he puts himself at the centre of things and asks: 'What do I know/ of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have to say of the dead…?' He answers, 'I have no words to speak of war./ … I have only the shadows under the leaves/ to take with me, the quiet of the desert'.  But of course this is disingenuous given that Turner speaks of war and sudden violence throughout, but such commentary underscores a fundamental refusal to draw conclusions; his belief is that any straightforward political or moral summation must be false and incomplete.

In several poems Turner addresses his fellow soldiers directly. He wishes to instruct but there is weariness in his tone that suggests he realises the hopelessness of the task. The introductory poem, 'A Soldier's Arabic', begins: 'The word for love, habib, is written from right/ to left, starting where we would end it/ and ending where we might begin.' It concludes: 'This is the language made of blood./ It is made of sand, and time./ To be spoken, it must be earned.' Blood and sand are key motifs. Here blood acts as the personal, the utterly human and physical; sand is an emblem of time, remorselessness and the unsympathetic hand of fate. 'A Soldier's Arabic' is a warning and Here, Bullet contains many such warnings that are frequently stark: 'You will hear the RPG coming for you./ Not so the roadside bomb.' (What Every Soldier Should Know). Elsewhere military jargon is replaced by a more abundant use of imagery and a heightened tone.

 Believe it when four men
 step from a taxicab in Mosul
 to shower the street in brass
 and fire. Open the hurt locker 
 and see what there is of knives 
 and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
 how rough men come hunting for souls.

 (‘The Hurt Locker’)

Turner sets himself the task of describing then transcending the physical horrors of war. He is fascinated by the damage inflicted by the technology of war, the contrast between the material of the body and the living person. Possibly Turner's book will be seen in the shadow of David Harsent's prize-winning Legion in the UK. Legion has a wider focus, and is more ambitiously poetic than Here, Bullet. Turner's work is direct and makes fewer demands on the reader. Despite its detachment, Here, Bullet never displays the occasional coldness of Legion. It is impossible almost to say what Here, Bullet gains from being written in situ. What can be said is that Turner gives us a first-hand account of conflict, a primary source rather than Harsent's imagining of it, but that does not necessarily make Turner's account more accurate.

Turner's debut is required reading for anyone who wishes to know about the current war in Iraq and its effects. One of the few long poems in Here, Bullet, '2000lbs', serves as an illustration. Turner gives a series of portraits of individuals, both civilian and military, caught in a suicide blast:

 The civil affairs officer, Lt Jackson, stares
 at his missing hands, which make
 no sense to him, no sense at all, to wave
 these absurd stumps held in the air
 where just a moment before he'd blown bubbles
 out the Humvee window, his left hand holding the bottle,
 his right hand dipping the plastic ring in soap,
 filling the air behind them with floating spheres
 like the oxygen trails of deep ocean divers,
 something for the children, something beautiful,
 translucent globes with their iridescent skins
 drifting on vehicle exhaust and the breeze
 that might lift one day over the Zagros mountains,
 that kind of hope, small globes which may have
 astonished someone on the sidewalk
 seven minutes before Lt Jackson blacks out
 from blood loss and shock, with no one there to bandage
 the wounds that would carry him home.