My life is a foreign country is a singular text which slips the reader as rarely into the rangers of a soldier. In this work fragmented into 136 chapters, Turner begins by recounting the training received before leaving and during which an instructor ordered them to never put two pieces of corpse in the same bag… “Believe me, you don’t want to be the guy who causes a family to bury their soldier with pieces that don’t belong to them. Understood?” Yes, boss… Premise of the absurd and terrible situation they were going to experience. Other mind-blowing injunctions will follow: “If you see an AK-47, shoot it” ; “Fire any known or suspected enemy target” ; “You are allowed to shoot children.”
Men have never stopped waging war
If he barely mentions the fake weapons of mass destruction, the pretext given by George W. Bush to attack Iraq, Turner does not seem to avoid the abuses (interrogation rooms with deafening music, strobes and barking dogs ), nor blunders (like when the Americans questioned Iraqi civilians, pointing a rifle at their backs, in front of their children, before realizing that they had targeted the wrong target).
Obviously erudite on the military level, Turner mixes his story with information on the battles, but also previous conflicts, notably led by his ancestors. One of his family participated in the Civil War, his great-grandfather was gassed during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918, his grandfather killed Japanese with flamethrowers on Guam during the Second World War. World War. His uncle was in the Vietnam War, and his stepfather made Brian read infantry manuals when he was little. It was also the virilist injunctions that pushed Turner into this mess. “I would have been ashamed not to have done it,” he wrote of his commitment.
“War and Rain” by Velibor Čolić: a great autobiographical novel about the absurdity of war
The poet accepts his vulnerability, quotes Marcus Aurelius and evokes, on the contrary in sensitive texts, the suicide of a soldier who shot himself and whose belongings he packed, his visceral fear of dying, of making a mistake which would cause the death of a colleague, his enemies who come to visit him or even his post-traumatic stress. In hallucinatory passages, the man who remained in the army for seven years describes the visions which assailed him upon his return. Precious confessions.
“My life is a foreign country” Narrative | Brian Turner | Translated from English (United States) by Nathalie Peronny, Phébus, 224 pp. | Price €20, digital €15
