Hurt Locker

Published in 2005, Here, Bullet documents Brian Turner’s experiences of war in Iraq. The book was republished by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. Commonly known as “the Iraq War,” the war in Iraq was a protracted armed conflict that lasted from 2003 to 2011. The war began when a United States-led coalition invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein’s government. Eventually, an insurgency emerged in an attempt to overthrow the coalition. The invasion occurred as part of the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror campaign after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, even though there were no links between Iraq and the terrorist attacks. After the coalition withdrew from Iraq, sectarian violence continued. In 2020, the Iraqi government voted for all foreign troops to leave Iraq, which ended its standing agreement with the United States to allow 5,200 troops to remain in the country.

The collection Here, Bullet tells Turner’s powerful story as a soldier involved in the war in Iraq. Because the poems are unfiltered, they are graphic, unsettling, and emotional. The poems’ depictions detail not only the immediate consequences of war visible to soldiers on the ground, but also the mental, emotional, and even physical aftermath veterans experience when they leave combat zones. “The Hurt Locker” details the suffering soldiers endured in the Iraq War and implicitly addresses the epidemic of PTSD that occurred after the Iraq War. The poem also acknowledges that PTSD was a significant issue not only during the Iraq War but in every other war before it.

Turner wrote his poems secretly during his time as a team leader in the first Stryker brigade. He spent much of 2004 in Mosul.