WASHINGTON — Brian Turner was focused on staying alive, not poetry, when he served as an infantry team leader in Iraq. But he quickly saw that his experience — “a year of complete boredom punctuated by these very intense moments” — lent itself to the tautness of verse.
Brian Turner in Mosul during his service as an infantry team leader in Iraq, which later inspired a collection of poetry.
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Op-Ed Contributor: Military Time, Civilian Time (December 11, 2009)
The result was a collection called “Here, Bullet,” with a title poem inspired by Mr. Turner’s realization during combat patrols that he was bait to lure the enemy.
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh,
... because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.
“Poetry was the perfect vehicle,” said Mr. Turner, who had a master’s in fine arts from the University of Oregon before joining the Army. “The page was the place where I could think about what had happened.”
Mr. Turner is a literal foot soldier in what might be called the well-written war: a recent outpouring of memoirs, fiction, poetry, blogs and even some readable military reports by combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Soldier-writers have long produced American literature, from Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs about the Civil War to Norman Mailer’s World War II novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” to Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” about Vietnam.
The current group is different. As part of a modern all-volunteer force, they explore the timeless theme of the futility of war — but wars that they for the most part support. The books, many written as rites of passage by members of a highly educated young officer corps, are filled with gore, inept commanders and anguish over men lost in combat, but not questions about the conflicts themselves. “They look at war as an aspect of glory, of finding honor,” said Mr. O’Brien, who was drafted for Vietnam in 1968 out of Macalester College in St. Paul. “It’s almost an old-fashioned, Victorian way of looking at war.”
The writers say one goal is to explain the complexities of the wars — Afghan and Iraqi politics, technology, the counterinsurgency doctrine of protecting local populations rather than just killing bad guys — to a wider audience. Their efforts, embraced by top commanders, have even bled into military reports that stand out for their accessible prose.
“The importance of good official writing is so critical in reaching a broader audience to get people to understand what we’re trying to do,” said Capt. Matt Pottinger, a Marine and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is a co-author of the report “Fixing Intel,” an indictment of American intelligence-gathering efforts in Afghanistan released last month. “Even formal military doctrine is well served by a colloquial style of writing.”
The report, overseen by the top military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, is an anecdote-rich argument against intelligence officers who pursue secrets about insurgents but ignore data for winning the war right in front of them — local economics, village politics and tribal power brokers. The report compares the American war in Afghanistan to a political campaign, “albeit a violent one,” and observes, “To paraphrase former Speaker of the House Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill’s famous quote, ‘all counterinsurgency is local.’ ”
Another report, an unreleased Army history about the battle of Wanat in July 2008 — the “Black Hawk Down” of Afghanistan — unfolds in stiffer prose but builds a strong narrative. Written by Douglas R. Cubbison, a military historian at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the draft report lays bare the failures of an American unit to engage the local population in a village in eastern Afghanistan — “these people, they disgust me,” one soldier is quoted as saying — and graphically tells the story of the firefight that killed nine Americans.
Most of the writing by combatants has been memoirs that bear witness to battles of their own. Craig M. Mullaney, a former Ranger and Army captain, writes in “The Unforgiving Minute” of a 2003 ambush on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that killed one of his men, Pfc. Evan W. O’Neill.
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