Brian Turner is a poet, essayist, and professor, best known for his poetry compilation Here, Bullet. Turner wrote poetry while he was serving in the Iraq War. He published his works in Here, bullet
when he returned after a year in service. These poems have garnered
critical acclaim and had been published in various magazines and
anthologies.
One
poem by Turner that I felt really illustrated the feeling of being in
war was “The Hurt Locker.” When you read the first stanza, “Nothing but
hurt left here./ Nothing but bullets and pain/ and the bled-out
slumping/ and all the fucks and goddamns/ and Jesus Christs
of the wounded./ Nothing left here but the hurt,” you can feel the
suffering he had seen all around him during the war. From enemies’ fire
to fellow soldiers being wounded and killed to the fear of being shot at
yourself, the battlefield would seem like an insufferable nightmare.
In the second stanza, Turner writes “Believe it when you see it./
Believe it when a twelve-year-old/ rolls a grenade into the room./ Or
when a sniper punches a hole/ deep into someone’s skull./ Believe it
when four men/ step from a taxicab in Mosul/ to shower the street in
brass/ and fire.” He expresses the feeling that the horrors of war seem
unreal, yet they are very much real. In war, soldiers see things like
snipers making their kills from unseen locations, children being used as
soldiers with explosives in hand, and enemies disguised as civilians.
It is hard to imagine these dreadful conditions.
He ends the second and final stanza with “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.” Fighting in a war is entering a
world where you are surrounded by suffering and death, where you must
kill to stay alive. The Hurt Locker
expresses that, in war, the threat of winding up in the “hurt locker”
is always there, and reminders of this are all around you.
