My Life as a Foreign Country

Product Description

In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner lead a convoy of 3,500 soldiers into the Iraqi desert. In 2013, 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 on-going. 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 is a war memoir from the man whose poetry gave birth to the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. It follows the experience of one soldier in one recent war u the preparations, actions, homecomings and infinite aftermath u 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 not a lesson of any kind. It is an opportunity to travel in time and space; to stand beside a man in conflict, to maybe watch him die, to walk amongst the dead and draw your own conclusions.