Red Wheelbarrow 2008 text FINAL REVISED.indd - De Anza College

me. Humans have common ground and it’s a normal thing. But vets don’t
really want to hear that, because they feel that what they’ve done is very
different; this is what I’m hearing from them. They need somebody they
can talk to. So if we can do that for them that might be helpful if they
really want to.
Joann Andrushko: So is that something that needs to happen, where
soldiers can have a chance to tell their stories?
BT: I think so, the ones that can. Some of them will go out and build a boat
and that’s like what they need to do. Most of them, unfortunately, won’t
find something productive like that—like talking about it or building a
boat. Most of them will try and bury it.
Joann Andrushko: So have you found people coming forth that have read
your book that relate to what you went through?
BT: Yeah, yeah. They’ll say, “Hey man, this is, wow, brought back a lot
of stuff.” One guy sent me a book he wrote about tactics or something in
a different war, this colonel, and he was there the same time I was, and I
just got it in the mail a couple of days ago. I opened it up, and there was
this interesting book, and it looked like he’d already signed it. And it
said “To Brian Turner, Ghost One Three Alpha.” That was my code sign.
He recognized in that poem, he knows how low I am on the food chain
basically. He’s cool, and then he put “To the son of a bitch who talks with
ghosts, and reminds me of my own.” I hear stuff like that.
Jay Donde: One of my favorite poems in the book is “Observation Post
71,” and I just thought that that was unique, because a lot of people will
pick up a book, whether it’s poetry or prose about war, and they’ll expect
to see bullets and violence and only that, and I thought that this was really
representative of the fact that there’s a lot of just boredom, a lot of hurry
up and wait, just endless periods that are kind of interrupted by these few
minutes of extreme violence, and then you go back to the boredom. Was
that intentional?
BT: That’s interesting because that’s almost exactly how I say it sometimes.
I said that one time the way you said that, endless boredom. I’ll say
sometimes there was a sort of mind numbing, teeth melting boredom, and
I’ll punctuate exactly how you said it, punctuate where there’s extreme
moments that are really hard to sort of comprehend. And at the moment
you don’t even try to comprehend them, you’re just in the moment, and
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