Night In Blue

Night in Blue

At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights
blacked out under the wings and America waiting,
a year of my life disappears at midnight,
the sky a deep viridian, the houselights below
small as match heads burned down to embers.

Has this year made me a better lover?
Will I understand something of hardship,
of loss, will a lover sense this
in my kiss or touch? What do I know
of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have
to say of the dead—that it was worth it,
that any of it made sense?
I have no words to speak of war.
I never dug the graves in Talafar.
I never held the mother crying in Ramadi.
I never lifted my friend’s body
when they carried him home.

I have only the shadows under the leaves
to take with me, the quiet of the desert,
the low fog of Balad, orange groves
with ice forming on the rinds of fruit.
I have a woman crying in my ear
late at night when the stars go dim
moonlight and sand as a resonance
of the dust of bones, and nothing more.


This might read like I wrote it on a plane headed home, or even from home (Fort Lewis, Wash.), but I actually wrote it sitting in a sand-bagged bunker on an air base southeast of Mosul. My unit had already signed over our Stryker vehicles to the incoming replacement unit. We’d even signed over our bullets. I didn’t have one round left to defend myself. Of course, I didn’t really need one — the base is well-protected and we just hunkered down in those bunkers and waited and waited and waited for our plane to take us to Kuwait, home our eventual destination.
A lot of the guys sat around playing card games, dreaming out loud about what they’d do once we made it home, or they “racked-out” (falling asleep, usually on the floor, using their assault pack as a pillow). There were occasional mortar attacks — the enemy knew we were in a “target rich” environment — but as long as we were inside, the possible threat felt very remote. We were simply bored, tired, and eager to get home.

The woman mentioned near the poem’s end is not fictional: she was the wife of a man we apprehended in Balad, near the very beginning of our deployment. I saw her crying as we put him in a truck to be taken away (R.P.G.s had been confiscated from the home, along with other military equipment). An elderly woman stood beside her, cursing us, waving the bottoms of her sandals at us (a huge insult in that part of the world), and spitting at us. As I wrote this poem inside that bunker, I already knew that specific moments would revisit me over the years, and vice versa.
Not only was I involved in capturing people at times, I often helped prepare the paperwork that might one day aid the Iraqi judicial system in putting them away in prison. When I spoke of “culpability” in my last posting, this is part of what I was talking about. That is, there must be family members who curse what I’ve done, people whose lives have been deeply impacted by what I’ve been a part of.
* * *
Brian Turner