Opening the hurt locker
A review of Brian Turner’s memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country; Kevin Powers’ Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting; and Phil Klay’s Redeployment. (And check out Bryan Cranston reading The Things They Carried for audible.co.uk)
“We knew our prelude would be different from the trenches of the First World War or the front lines of Korea,” Brian Turner writes in his fever dream of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country. Turner joined the US army in 1998 when he was almost 31 – old, for a soldier – and served with Nato forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the close of the 20th century. From the end of 2003, he served in Iraq for a year with the 3rd Stryker Brigade.
The difference Turner alludes to, in this context, is a difference in the conduct of war. There would be no front line, but instead “a 360-degree, three-dimensional environment . . . Anything was possible. A dead farm animal on the shoulder of the road could harbour an improvised bomb sewn into its belly. A bullet might ride the cool currents of air between one human being or another. A Hellcat missile or a wire-guided Tow missile might rend the moment open.”
There is also another difference, made explicit by Phil Klay in one of the stories in his debut collection, Redeployment. Klay joined the US marine corps after graduating from Dartmouth; in 2007, he served in Anbar Province, Iraq, as a public affairs officer. “Success was a matter of perspective. In Iraq it had to be,” he writes in “Money as a Weapons System”. “There was no Omaha Beach, no Vicksburg Campaign, not even an Alamo to signal a clear defeat.”
Over a decade has passed since the invasion of Iraq by US forces in March 2003. In the years since, that conflict – as depicted by some of the soldiers who served there – has become one in which the terror of war is unrelieved, even for an instant, by the idea of a cause, of a larger morality. As Kevin Powers wrote in his acclaimed first novel, The Yellow Birds, published in 2012: “I’d been trained to think war was the great unifier, that it brought people closer together than any other activity on earth. Bullshit. War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today?”