My Life as a Foreign Country

In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner was at the head of a convoy of 3,500 soldiers as they entered the Iraqi desert. Ten years later, he lies awake beside his sleeping wife, hallucinating: he is a drone aircraft. He hovers over a landscape in which the terrains of every conflict, of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe, are pressed together, and the violence is ongoing. The hallucination recurs, and every night Sergeant Turner is forced to observe anew all that man has done to man. My Life as a Foreign Country follows the experience of one soldier in one recent war - the preparations, actions, homecomings and infinite aftermath - but then explodes from those narrow limits. Unburdened by nostalgia, hollow sympathy or a journalistic hunger for fact, this account combines the recalled with the imagined, and leaps centuries and continents to seek parallels in the histories of other men. The result is an opportunity to enter the head of a man still stalked by war, to experience conflict with new definition and lasting effect.

Spanning pre-deployment to combat zone, World War I to Vietnam, boredom to blood lust, roadside bombs to open mic nights, this book shows what it means to be a soldier and a human being. In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner was at the head of a convoy of 3,500 US soldiers as they entered the Iraqi desert. Now, still stalked by conflict, he retraces his war experience and meditates on the echoes between his story and those of generations of soldiers marching to battle before him. Spanning pre-deployment to combat zone, World War I to Vietnam, boredom to bloodlust, roadside bombs to open mic nights, My Life as a Foreign Country asks what it means to be a soldier and a human being. ‘The most haunting book I read this year’Irish Times‘His shrapnel-like chapters come at you from all angles… Compulsive’Guardian‘Turner is a soldier with the soul of a poet’Daily Telegraph‘Wrathful, wry and incantatory’Erica Wagner, New Statesman‘Beautiful, electrifying and full of pain’Washington Post