Katyusha Rockets

Katyusha Rockets

The 107s have a crackling sound
of fire and electricity, of air-ruckled heat,
and when they pinwheel over the rooftops
of Hamman al Alil,
they just keep going,
traveling for years over the horizon
to land in the meridians of Divisadero Street
where I’m standing early one morning
on a Memorial Day in Fresno, California,
the veteran’s parade scattering
at the impact,
mothers shielding their children
by instinct,
old war vets crouching
behind automobiles
as police set up an outer cordon
for the unexploded ordnance.

Rockets often fall
in the night sky of the skull,
down long avenues
of the brain’s myelin sheathing,
over synapses
and the rough structures of thought,
they fall
into the hippocampus,
into the seat of memory—
where lovers
and strangers
and old friends
entertain themselves,
unaware of the dangers
headed their way,
or that I will need
to search
among them,

the way the bomb disposal tech
walks tethered and alone
down Divisadero Street,
suited-up
as if walking on the moon’s surface
as the crowd watches
just how determined he is
to dismantle death,
to take it apart
piece by piece—
the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.


In late summer, 2004, my unit was called out to provide a large security cordon around a reported I.E.D. in the suburbs of Mosul. It was a hot day, mid-afternoon, with a helicopter circling overhead, our snipers up on the rooftops, vehicles in defensive positions, our platoon spreading out to block off roads and access to the reported bomb site. An American soldier, one of the bravest people I’ve ever seen (and part of an Explosive Ordnance unit) walked out with a white cord tied to his bomb suit, the cord unspooling behind him, as he walked out to defuse the bomb placed in an Iraqi neighborhood, there on a wide boulevard.

That image stayed with me. Later, when my platoon was stationed briefly in a small firebase southeast of Mosul, we had a Katyusha rocket fire overhead one night, missing us but producing a very loud and distinctive sound. I fused these two moments together because I knew, even while I was still there, that the bombs exploding in Iraq would follow us home.

In a psychological sense, many soldiers are returning with these bombs. Many vets will need to be defused. Many will need to find what they carry inside. This poem tries to consider PTSD (what was once called Soldier’s Heart, back in the days of the American Civil War), as well as the effects it has for all of us here at home, when the warriors return.
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Brian Turner