“When one of the children we often joked with threw a grenade into the vacant building we used as an observation post, a building we’d just handed off to the Second Platoon, it was a hard lesson in the reality of war, one that steeled us away from placing any amount of trust in a single soul during our year in-country.”

-Brian Turner, “American Sniper is not the war film we need”

Brian Turner visited Chatham to give a reading while I was a student there. He read from Here, Bullet, and I still remember the clear, dextrous lyricism of those poems in his voice. His writing on war is that of both a soldier and a scholar. He’s a deeply thoughtful writer, self-aware and compassionate, and I always leave his work chewing on something troubled and sweet that I never saw on my own.