Brian Turner and Tim O'Brien: Comrades?

Brian Turner is a poet and former soldier of Iraq who expresses a feeling of connectivity towards Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried. Although Turner and O'Brien fought in different wars, different decades, and different countries, it is not uncommon that Turner feels a sense of comradeship towards O'Brien. For these men, there is an incomprehensible communion that common citizens do not understand. The fact that both men are authors can bring them even closer.

Having met Brian Turner, listening to him read his poetry, I was able to glance through my imagination into his experience as a soldier. After reading Tim O'Brien's novel, I have a better sense of a soldier's perception of war. Currently, I am unable to understand what life on the front of war is like, but perhaps (one day) I will. I have no anticipation to join the military (and am quite a pacifist), but one never knows where life may lead.

I
don't.

It is through writers such as Turner and O'Brien that one begins to comprehend the things that seem out of reach.

The following is taken from an interview with Brian Turner performed by Alice James Books:

AJB: Having earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon, you enlisted in the army and spent seven years as a soldier. What was the impetus for that decision?

Brian Turner: Hmmm…If we could drink a bottle of vodka and talk about this until dawn, I might be able to answer that particular question.

This response seems very much like a response that one would receive from O'Brien. Throughout the entirety of The Things They Carried, the reader witnesses his attempt to explain the inexplicable.

This draws my attention to “On the Rainy River.” In this chapter, O’Brien talks about choices. He delves into the struggle of one’s feelings and other people’s expectations. He says, “It was a kind of schizophrenia. A moral split. I couldn’t make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile” (44). This use of language is incredibly honest and powerful. It is very effective that he used the word “schizophrenia”, as opposed to insanity or craziness. This use of diction is more specific than other words. Schizophrenia effects the emotions of a person, often involving hallucinations, delusions, disorder in thoughts, or muteness and a loss of normal traits. The reader can better understand how the character was feeling with this understanding of the word. There were outcomes to fear on both ends, and for this reason there is no easy answer.

Turner says later in the interview:
"While in Iraq, I felt very isolated from the relevance of what felt like a prior life. All that existed was the here and now. That said, the novels of Tim O’Brien probably held the most resonance for me."

The “here and now” that Turner speaks of was a very prevalent idea in The Things They Carried. Death was something that the men experienced all the time. As graphic, disturbing, or sentimental as death made them want to feel, they put it out of their everyday thought. It was always there, but they made light of it with jokes in order to distract themselves. If they let their thoughts of death consume them, they would not be able to function. This feeling was emphasized by the casual remark of, “there it is” (14).

The following is a poem by Brian Turner:

Click below to watch/listen to him read it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LguxNDdyky8

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

This poem emphasizes how many soldiers felt or feel. There is a common belief held that soldiers are playing a game with death. "Here, Bullet," the title, is a taunting phrase. It is a way of conveying, through personification, that he wants to bullet to come to him (much like a dog). He does not wish for death, but knows that it is inevitable.

He speaks of the adrenaline rush that the bullet craves, which also represents his rush. There is a constant rush that surges through him as a soldier. Even after death, this rush remains. He emphasizes in the first line that he is only giving up a body. Just as the men in O'Brien's novel, a body was not a being. A body was just a body.

Speaking of this poem, in an article from the NY Foundation for the Arts, he says:

"Had I been killed, someone would have found a handwritten copy of “Here, Bullet” neatly folded and sealed in a Ziploc bag located in the left chest pocket of my uniform. I still don’t know if it felt more like a shield or an invitation. But that’s where the poem lived for most of the year I was in Iraq."

When I heard Turner speak at a reading, he shared this piece of information with the intrigued audience. One could view this in a morbidly depressed way, but I choose not to see it in that manner. The fact that he wrote this poem while in Iraq and kept it in his chest pocket, makes him more real and humanized to the reader. O'Brien, in comparison, used his novel to try and humanize the men of war. There is no way to humanize war, but there is a way to make those who fought in it feel closer to humanity. Both used empathy to draw the reader closer.