Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
Woke up from a dream…
I am on a residential street in Mosul this time. It’s sunny out. Mid-morning, I think. An Iraqi woman is on the street, too, having stepped out from a gate and onto the sidewalk to tell me something important.
I can tell that what she has to say is important by the look on her face. It must be around 9 or 9:30. Eucalyptus trees rise above the walls lining the street, growing up out of front courtyards, a common sight in suburban
neighborhoods like the one in the University District. Sunlight shines down at an angle over the rooftops on the other side of the street, about the same angle a dud mortar round took once when I was in Mosul and
not in a dream. Our squad checked it out. We could see the path the mortar took, striking first the ornate stone parapet fringing the rooftop and shearing off two of its small pillars, the top of the wall by the
sidewalk echoing the impact above with its stone gouged in a direct line with the street’s dented asphalt, which then turned into scorch marks where the round apparently deflected upward again to who knows
where. I tried to imagine what it must be like to live in a city where an errant mortar round could do something like this at any given time of day. I think maybe this is the neighborhood I’ve returned to
in my dream. And this mother is here to tell me that her child is dead.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever met or seen the child before, though somehow within the logic of the dream I know her child was a teenaged boy, maybe 13 or 14. Or maybe the dream is in a different neighborhood? Could it be the dead infant Second Platoon found on that raid near the orange groves outside of Balad, the tiny body discovered under an orange tree by a canal in early January? Part of me wonders if this boy could be one of the ones I flex-cuffed and blindfolded during one of the many raids I took part in. But the age is wrong for the time I was there and this confuses me some.
I wonder if the boy is the one I watched walking toward my squad as we sat in an abandoned house in Mosul (likely vacated by a family that fled to another town or country as war refugees). The boy was small, maybe 8 or 9 years old, and he balanced an enormous silver platter with slices and slices of cantaloupe arranged on it. His mother had carved the fruit for us and sent the boy across a long swath of empty landscape in the middle of this huge city. It was late August, maybe early September. And it was, of course, very hot out. And that little boy carrying a silver tray of cantaloupe to a squad of exhausted American soldiers holed up in an abandoned house, sucking on chunks of ice to keep cool. It’s one of the kindest things I can remember from my time in Iraq.
Where does the dream world end and the waking world begin? There are moments, in the dead of night or far from home, when I seem to float between the two.
The dream suddenly shifts and I’m on a huge stage with tremendously bright sets of lights shining down on us — there is a table with a pitcher of water on it, and glasses, but the table is out of reach and I’m aware of people off in the darkness surrounding us, but all I can see are the lights and the table with the water and empty glasses and Tony Lagouranis is sitting in a chair near me, his head turned upward and looking directly into the beam of light, his skull somehow clearly visible through his face … which really isn’t all that far off from how it felt in real life when I was up on stage in Galway in 2008 moderating an audience Q&A at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature with Tony and another veteran and writer, Arkady Babchenko. Arkady is now a journalist. After serving in the Russian army during both the first and second Chechen wars, he wrote a book, “One Soldier’s War,” about his experiences. Tony was a U.S. Army interrogator in Iraq while I was there; he is co-author along with Allen Mikaelian, of the book “Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey through Iraq.” When I met him in real life, backstage at the festival just prior to walking out into those lights, I remember clearly thinking that I could see in his eyes and even the skin of his face just how much he was carrying the weight of the war within him.
And finally the dream shifts to where it often goes, a dream I started having when I was in Iraq — I’m back home in the San Joaquin Valley, about 20 miles north of Fresno, out in the country, and I’m sort of a disembodied hovering version of myself, floating over my family’s property where I was raised, drifting in and out of the eucalyptus trees, the ground everywhere — for as far as I can see — covered with red bark (like the bark chips you get from a home and garden store for planter boxes and ground cover…). It’s a dream I like, one that I always want to last longer, drifting between those trees. The clarity of this dream is far beyond most of my dreams, which are often murky, convoluted, fragmented, disjointed.
I’ve wondered more than once whether I should write these flashes into one ongoing dream. Maybe then the images and actions and people and moments might add up to a meaningful whole, some type of comprehensible narrative. What would the connections be?
There’s a mother. A dead son. Eucalyptus trees (the leaves are used as medicine). And there’s me as a soldier in Iraq. Then there’s a kind of interrogation scene where I’m supposed to be one of the facilitators and ironically I end up being among the interrogated — the bright lights, questions coming in from the darkness. Finally, I’m floating among eucalyptus from my childhood home.
It seems almost childishly simple when I try to reconstruct it. The mother’s dead child of war is my own innocence, perhaps, as its loss is being interrogated by the world, which needs the medicine of home to…? To what? Regain its form? For me to be given back my body? To be made whole again?
The thing is, if this is true, if home is the medicine my mind is telling me to search out, then why do I continually leave? Why do I travel to the far corners of the earth? If I were to stand among those eucalyptus trees back home, if I were to reach down and clear away the red bark covering everything, what would I find?
And maybe the boy isn’t me. Maybe the boy really is an Iraqi boy. Or maybe he’s a symbol not of my lost innocence or youth or possibility but of Iraq’s. Maybe the landscapes of these dream fragments aren’t so easily reduced into comprehension.
What if it’s not a dream at all? What if I really have the city of Mosul inside of me? Or at least that neighborhood on a sunny morning. Maybe when I go to sleep I’m actually entering a world in which Iraqi mothers search through the landscape of my memory in the vain hope of finding their dead sons. My body a sort of graveyard, a repository of the lost and the dead.
The word dream seems inadequate in naming this territory. My sleeping body on the mattress is the patient lying on a gurney or a stretcher, hovering above the red bark covering the ground as far as one can see. The
doctors lean over the way the trees bend and sway in the breeze, their shadows, as shadows do, stretching as far from the sunlight as they can get.
Brian Turner served seven years in the Army, most recently in 2004 as an infantry team leader in Mosul with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division. His 2005 book of poems, “Here, Bullet,” has won several awards. He is the recipient of the 2009-10 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and teaches at Sierra Nevada College.
Veterans who would like to write about dreams related to their service are invited to post a comment on this article. To read posts from the entire series, visit the Home Fires main page.