Brian Turner

You know what I mean?

It wasn't like we worked 9 to 5 kind of thing.

If you got 45 minutes or you maybe got 3 hours, I mean, the guys would just... We'd say we'd rack out.

So you go to sleep, you know.

But I would try to take 10 or 15 minutes and...

just scribble down, not poems so much, but really diary entries.

So I'd try to write down what had happened.

And if you look at those notebooks, sometimes what you'll see is someone who's so exhausted that, and I'm sure you've done this before in life, where you write over something you've already written and you don't realize it.

So there's a lot of that.

And so some of it's illegible and you can't read it.

And some of it is legible, but it doesn't make sense.

And then there are also some sort of bird's eye view drawings of

maybe a street and where people were on the street when something happened like a mortar attack or something and so more like professional development as a soldier kind of sense trying to figure out what had happened and maybe how to do something different next time that kind of thing and then sometimes poems initially a couple lines would come out and then over time that started I got another notebook because there was that poems were announcing themselves so I started working on the poems in this other like poetry notebook

I didn't have a lot of space because we have a rucksack and there's a duffel bag with our gear but there wasn't room to put a lot in that because it was already stuffed full of stuff.

But there's this little sleeve in the back of the rucksack where I could put my notebooks and I'd fill them and then mail them home and get another one.

I had a wonderful book with me.

I couldn't carry a lot of books.

Most of the books I would cycle through and either give away or mail home.

But my lieutenant was an officer, so he had a footlocker.

And he was full of books.