My Life as a Foreign Country
Description
In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert.Now he lies awake each night beside his sleeping wife, imagining himself as a drone aircraft, hovering over the terrains of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe.
In this breathtaking memoir, award-winning poet Brian Turner retraces his war experience--pre-deployment to combat zone, homecoming to aftermath. Free of self-indulgence or self-glorification, his account combines recollection with the imagination's efforts to make reality comprehensible. Across time, he seeks parallels in the histories of others who have gone to war, especially his taciturn grandfather (World War II), father (Cold War), and uncle (Vietnam). Turner also offers something that is truly rare in a memoir of violent conflict--he sees through the eyes of the enemy, imagining his way into the experience of the other. Through it all, he paints a devastating portrait of what it means to be a soldier and a human being.
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About the Author
Reviews
[A] praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing.... Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present.... History can only be served by this kind of attention. Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly.--Jen Percy
Turner is...a poet, and he cannot help but see the world, even the world of combat, in terms of beauty, fragility and heartbreaking splendor.... [His] eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.--Roxana Robinson
Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis--their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives.--George Packer
Turner's voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity...Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful.--Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the Bomb
A book...about the haunted past and a haunted man... A story of working through trauma, but above all it's a book about a man, a country, even a species beleaguered by a terrible attachment to war.--Tomas Hachard
The psychological consequences of war are movingly portrayed... [a] standout.
My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered--a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.--Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
