By Capt. John Byron, U.S. Navy (Ret.)

Best Defense department of officers and gentlemen

It's a tough competition, the contest for the military's most egregious example of conduct unbecoming. All fiction entries are likely to be rejected: You just can't make up tales as lurid and stupid as we've seen in real life.

My list of the leading entries (some not widely known) is included below, true tales that are the gold standard for abuse of privilege and sexual misconduct by military men in leadership (and missionary?) positions.

I'm sure many other like these could come to mind and that the future holds still more titillation and stupidity. But we now have before us what seems to me the winner for the ages: The worst case of conduct unbecoming an officer, of dishonorable behavior, of simple wrong behavior by an officer in authority that ever we're likely to find. And the case illustrates not only how far from honor an officer can move himself, but also how incredibly tone deaf is the military system, unable to find the correct answer in situations where an officer judged useful for professional skills is given a bye on a matter directly challenging his honesty and trustworthiness in a position of authority in our nation's military.

Here's the story. A civilian academic with a Ph.D. in physical oceanography and a distinguished career falls in love with a senior Navy officer holding command of a warship. Perhaps some naiveté involved, but clearly an affair of the heart on the woman's side. It's permanent. They get engaged. They will be married. He says his next duty station will be Guam and so at his insistence she leaves the mainland and moves there for a life together, taking an administrative post at the University of Guam.

Then, having turned her life upside down for this man, she finds out that her hero has rejected her and hung her out to dry. Her soulmate is not coming to Guam. He's dumping her. Too, it turns out: He's also got elsewhere a second girlfriend he's been deeply entangled with (and engaged to), another female he's deceived and he had just discarded her in the same disgraceful way. In short, he is an equal-opportunity cad, dishonorable in his treatment of both women and at the same time.

The first woman is devastated (the second, too, but this is not her story). Right away she goes to the officer's chain of command and to the DOD inspector general asking if this is approved conduct...and they gaff her off. She then hires an attorney and they contact both the head of this coward's warfare community and the chief of naval operations. And they gaff her off too.

And then she does something of incredible courage: She documents the tale in a lengthy letter published in the Spring 2013 issue of Naval War College Review on page 133. She and the editors take pains to avoid disclosing the miscreant's name or even his warfare community, but the use of "boat" to describe his command, the length of his command tour, and absence of any senior jobs on Guam for aviators or surface warfare officers pretty much lets the cat out of the sack: He serves in the submarine force (I have other confirmation also).

Is she credible? I've corresponded with her and find she is, a tough, smart professional paying a personal price for falling in love and trusting an officer to be a gentleman. The editors at the Review did their due diligence as well and they put their journal's reputation behind this person's truthfulness.

The wronged woman claims she's not seeking revenge and the facts bear this out. Instead, citing Captain Mark Light's great study of the topic, she wonders if in matters of sexual conduct, the Navy even cares about honor and honesty and proper ethical behavior, and if so, why does the system have an officer of such low character still on active duty and moving forward in his career.

I have the same questions, a challenge to the CNO and the secretary of the Navy to answer why such a moral midget remains a commissioned officer in good standing, and to the leaders of the submarine force on why it continues to retain and advance officers like this dirtbag.

Fairness requires opportunity for the harming party to have his say, to explain why he thinks it OK for a Navy officer to lie and cheat and devastate two innocent women...and still wear a cover with a gold chinstrap. It's open-mike time, buddy: Post here why you did what you did and why you're still a wonderful guy.

A final note. Fellows, let's not screw this up with in-blog towel-snapping that makes a joke of a sad situation. We habitués of this blog are a great group, funny, clever, and deeply interested in our nation's defense. But at times we do get a bit frisky in our comments. In this case I ask you to respect the courage and honesty of our heroine and leave off attacking her or commenting unfavorably on her conduct. Her personal and professional lives have suffered great harm at the hands of a despicable officer -- she deserves respect and praise for the classy way she found the high road to seek redress. Frankly, I find her most admirable.

And I am appalled at her treatment by a fellow submariner.

This is a rare opportunity to look hard at how the military services deal with matters of honor. It stands on its own and deserves direct answer from the system. In the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 133 proscribes conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. If this ain't that, the law is meaningless.

Some goodies from the past:

• The captain of a major surface ship caught in his in-port cabin doing the deed with a junior enlisted female while underway.

• The overseas rear admiral dismissed from service for his weird and repeated stalking of an enlisted dental tech he became fixated on after she'd cleaned his teeth.

• The second admiral fired from another high visibility overseas post for cavorting with a junior officer under him (tee hee).

• The chief petty officer relieved of his duties after he drunkenly tried to grope a civilian stranger in the seat next to him all the way across the Pacific on a commercial flight.

• The flag-bound submariner of fantastic promise who got off track after telling his immediate superior that he'd ended his affair with the female lieutenant on their staff -- and then got caught by that same senior canoodling with the lieutenant on the golf course.

• The two captains stationed in the Med who got sacked because of Navy's puritanical standards finding disfavor with them for openly swapping wives.

• The admiral in charge of Navy recruiting fired when he was found boffing the wife of one of his recruiter-of-the-year finalists in the hotel parking garage as the ceremony was being held.

• The flag-bound O-6 engineering-duty officer with a Ph.D. arrested as the Burke Lake Flasher.

Moving to more recent times,

• The submarine skipper who lasted only seven days in command, fired for having a pregnant 23-year old mistress who he misled with fantastic tales of daring-do on secret assignment and then faking his own death.

• The 33 Air Force drill instructors undergoing courts martial for using their female recruits as sexual pawns.

• The Air Force general in trouble for mindlessly dismissing all charges against an officer convicted in the military justice system of raw sexual harassment of a junior.

• The other Air Force general who downgraded a likewise valid sexual misconduct conviction after magically determining on no apparent basis that the abused was less credible than the accused and to hell with the due process that said otherwise.

• Yet another submarine skipper recently relieved for inappropriate intimate relations with a junior.

• May 2013: the Air Force lieutenant colonel in charge of that service's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit...until his arrest for drunkenly groping a women -- total stranger -- in a parking lot (see: you can't make this up).

• And this just in: The DOD study estimating that last year 26,000 service personnel were victims of "unwanted sexual contact" from fellow servicemembers, a 35 percent increase from the year before and a situation egregious enough to infuriate the Commander In Chief.

"The Chief of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch of the U.S. Air Force was arrested and charged with sexual battery in Arlington over the weekend."

As several e-mailers noted yesterday, you can't make this stuff up.

By Col. Margaret Cope, USAF (Ret.)

Best Defense guest columnist

After serving 30 years in the Air Force, I am passionate about our country providing the opportunity for young men and women to serve. Since the draft ended, the American public has become disconnected from the men and women in the military.

Even our former secretary of defense Robert Gates stated that our citizens view our wars as an "abstraction" that does not affect them personally. After 9/11 our country missed an enormous opportunity to engage the citizenry, particularly folks in the 18-26 age range who are beginning their adult lives and have the ability to contribute the rest of their lives.

Our country has a democratic form of government, which by definition is a participatory government, not a spectator government. All citizens must be engaged or we risk losing our democracy. Our founding fathers believed all would participate as stated by George Washington, "It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it."

Currently less than 1 percent of Americans serve in our military. The rest of the population -- 99 percent, for the most part -- is unaware of the military. Although other forms of national service exist, with the budget constraints, now is the time to consolidate and provide more structured, safer, and meaningful opportunities.

My concept of the national service framework is comprehensive and bold; it's not for those who like small steps and fear transformative, big ideas. National Service will be voluntary and must include the military -- the most committed, professional, well-trained example of national service.

This framework is based on voluntary participation and provides a menu of opportunities for citizens between the ages of 18-26 to serve. All volunteers will serve a minimum of two years and will receive lodging, uniforms, healthcare and food allowances, stipends, and upon completion of their term of service, numerous government incentives tied to performance, to include at least an education debt reduction or an education allowance similar to the GI Bill and other options to support the national service mission, its culture. Libertarians who don't want to serve would be ineligible for some government incentives including student loans, to be given upon completion of the term of service.

National Service will be the umbrella organization for the entire enterprise with the pillars being: the military, which would include recruitment, orientation training, and upon completion of service, the same national service benefits along with military benefits; the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) organizations including Americorps, VISTA, Equal Justice Works, Teach for America, and Children's Corps; the Peace Corps; a revival of the Civilian Conservation Corps; a medical corps; a legal corps (move Equal Justice Works from CNCS); an administrative corps; a cybersecurity corps; and others. All of these functions could support our military and serve on military reservations.

As a nation, we cannot underestimate the importance in a moral democracy to serve. We must engage our greatest resource, our young citizens, to serve others and uphold our democratic principles to attain opportunity and inspire hope.

Margaret Cope, a retired U.S. Air Force logistics colonel, serves on the Executive Committee at the Reserve Officers Association (ROA), consults, and is a former senior advisor at the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR).

A friend writes that he "smells a rat" in the recent relief of the commander of the Marine Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. 

"You are responsible for what goes on inside your unit," the Marine commandant said in explaining the removal of Col. Stillings. "Period."

Oh? wonders my friend. If that is the standard, he notes, it begs the question of why there has not been a Marine general relieved in many moons. On General Amos' watch as commandant, he observes, "the Marine Corps has seen Marines urinating on Taliban bodies, scout snipers posing with an SS flag, a sexual assault pandemic that the Commandant himself has described as ‘incompatible with our core values of honor, courage and commitment,' rising suicide rates, the catastrophic Camp Bastion attack, and the hazing-cum-suicide of Lance Corporal Harry Lew." So, he asks, "If 2.5 bad happenings were enough to soul-crush Colonel Stillings, what is the magic number which would cause a service chief to resign?"   

By "One Gone Cat"

Best Defense guest columnist

I thought of offering to write an essay for you that gave my own reasons or that made my own arguments for how the officer corps can be improved to retain the best and the brightest, but thinking about it just made me angry. It made me angry because I knew it would not make any difference, just as the countless opinion pieces written by disgruntled junior officers and NCOs or concerned senior officers and NCOs won't make any difference. The military is too inflexible, the senior officers are too comfortable with the status quo, human resources command believes too strongly in whatever crazy algorithm they have determining entry assignments, and the civilian leadership is too intimidated by a bunch of men who just lost two wars to force a change.

Writing about my experience won't make a difference because senior leaders will look at it and say that it's an anomaly, or that I don't have the ability yet to see the big picture, or that I cannot reflect and see how things actually work very well, or maybe that I got the career I deserved based on my abilities. I understand that they cannot understand me, because I don't understand them.

• I don't understand how the military can go on pretending that we didn't lose the war in Iraq or that we're not about to lose the war in Afghanistan. Withdrawing with honor can still be losing. Lee withdrew with honor at Gettysburg. He also lost. He lost because the conditions on the battlefield as he withdrew were not in his favor, but they were in the favor of his enemy. The same is true of Iraq today. They might argue that the American people did not support the resources needed to win in Iraq or that the politicians made errors that could not be overcome by military genius. I do not know if that is true, but if it is true, we still lost -- we just should not blame generals.

• I don't understand how senior officers can avoid feeling ashamed that we seem to have no idea how to have a smaller budget without damaging training and readiness. I guess the Marines really are the best branch of service. The rest of us were simply propped up with ever-increasing budgets, and we wasted more of the taxpayers' money during the wars than anyone will ever know (no one will ever audit the amount wasted on things like the rent-a-captain program).

• I don't understand how the chief of staff of the Army can have a plan for decreasing troop levels that relies almost entirely on natural attrition without any discussion of a plan to ensure that our best stay and our worst are separated from service.

• I don't understand how they can waste so much money on education for officers through ROTC, and then show no desire to use the skills gained through specific degree programs. They should get rid of scholarships at every private school in the country. Hell, get rid of scholarships for everything but the cheapest state school in every state. The military doesn't care if you learn anything in college, right? They have no interest in recruiting and retaining officers with an intellectual bent. The military might be right that the elite, highly selective schools are no better than any other institution of higher learning. But I do know that the private sector and the rest of the federal government want the elite college graduates very badly, so let the kids go where they are wanted to work for employers interested in developing their passion and offering them direction.

Sorry for the rant. I had to get it out there. You seem like the right person to send it to, since my mentors wouldn't appreciate the tone very much. It probably figures that a bunch of guys trained in an Army that didn't want to admit it lost Vietnam are pretty schooled in the art of self-delusion. But I became an Army officer because I wanted to be among the best, not because I wanted to be part of a group so adept at making excuses and criticizing anyone who doesn't want to stay in for the glorious pension at the end of the rainbow of mediocrity.

"One Gone Cat" is, for a bit longer, a U.S. Army officer. But guess what? The views presented here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Army or the Defense Department. 

This comment was written the other day in the discussion of how much the military needs to adjust policies and cultures to accommodate the modern two-career marriage.

I've been seeing a lot of blimpish comments about how today's younger officers need to pull up their socks and adjust. But a major difference is that wives 50 years ago typically didn't arrive at Camp Swampy with a huge law school debt.

I am a lawyer married to my high school sweetheart whose dream was always to join the military. I've known about his Army aspirations almost as long as I've known him and he has known about my dream to become a lawyer. I just never dreamed it would be this difficult to find any kind of work that requires a degree. I even was hired to work for JAG the summer between law school years as a GS 7. Now that I actually have a degree and a license, I cannot even get an interview for ANY federal job, let alone a legal one. I am not whining, because I chose this life when I chose my husband. But, it's a sad state of affairs for anyone who graduates with a law degree from a top school in the top 15 percent of her class to have to settle for an $8 an hour receptionist position. I wouldn't lose as much sleep over it if I wasn't over $200K in debt from law school.

I'm incredibly proud of my husband's career and accomplishments. He loves serving our country and I have loved supporting him through training and two deployments. But our future is uncertain, and everyday I pray that I find an opportunity that will give me a chance at a professional life of my own. I have sacrificed and invested in my own future as well and I just want to put my skills to use and earn a living.

By Capt. Troy Peterson, U.S. Army

Best Defense guest husband

I'm at my 5-year point (initial commissioning obligation complete) and although I've signed up for ~3 more years, my desire for an Army career is being seriously challenged by the Army's career progression model and the inherent difficulty in supporting my wife's career. The lack of self-determination needed to coordinate our careers is a major problem for us, and this concern seems to be growing in the younger generation in the Army.

Like the Marine's wife in your most recent post on this topic, my wife is a true professional and a career woman. She's worked on Capitol Hill, worked abroad for the U.S. government, and now she's getting her master's degree from an Ivy League school (while we live apart for a couple years) -- all so she can continue to work in the public sector and we can both stay true to the ideals that mean so much to us.

Many of my peers face this situation; married to an educated, professional spouse who can't just pick up every 2 or 3 years to relocate to wherever the Army decides we should be, and continue their own meaningful professional career. It's a fact of life that opportunities vary with location -- Fayetteville, NC, and Columbus, GA, don't have the same job prospects as DC or New York. We don't expect the Army or anyone else to change that. I want nothing more than to continue my Army career, but if I have to, I'll find another way to continue serving my country and my ideals while allowing my wife to do something she finds professionally significant.

From the Army's perspective, this issue is a major part of the larger concerns about career satisfaction, retaining talented and strong performers, and competing with other professions for talent. My question is this: If the Army can have a great program for dual-Army career couples, why can't we also be more accommodating of dual-career couples who happen not to both wear ACUs?

My wife's "civilian" status doesn't mean her desire for a career of service is any less valid. Instead, the rigid career progression and lack of self-determination are forcing me to consider leaving the military entirely in order to preserve my marriage. However, the Army can adjust to prevent this stark decision from being a reality for many families. I've seen many couples get good results from the Married Army Couples Program. The answer for the rest of us isn't another, bigger Army program, but instead to reform the rigid career tracks and allow greater personal autonomy in job selection and relocation. Enabling individual initiative and greater personal control would facilitate dual-career couples achieving greater satisfaction, prevent us from facing a decision to leave the force just to preserve our families, and allow the Army to better retain what we so often say is our most precious resource -- our people.

CPT Troy Peterson is an infantry officer stationed at Ft. Benning. He served previously in the Second Cavalry Regiment in Vilseck, Germany and Zabul Province, Afghanistan. This article represents his own personal views and not those of Infantry Branch, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, the U.S. government, nor even the pitching staff of the Florida Marlins.

By Jesse Sloman

Best Defense office of Junior Officer Issues

Millions of electrons have been spilled in the last few months on the subject of junior officer retention. As a company grade officer in the Marine Corps, I've been following the widening debate with great interest. Although assertions of a crisis in the JO community have yet to be proven empirically, the volume of interest this topic has generated speaks to its importance as a national security issue. It's also clear that questions about retention resonate among my generation of officers, many of whom are currently mulling their own decisions about whether to remain on active duty.

Despite this outpouring, one critical factor in manpower retention has remained unexplored: quality of life for spouses, over 90 percent of whom are women. Relationship status and spousal satisfaction are crucial influences on a servicemember's decision to stay or leave the armed forces, yet these issues have so far been largely overlooked. As women take on ever greater roles in American professional life -- they now make up a larger share of the national work force than men -- their attitudes and expectations will be increasingly at odds with the traditional role of the military spouse. This is especially true for the spouses of junior officers, most of whom possess bachelor's degrees, strong employment prospects, and belong to a generation of women who have been raised with the assumption that they have as much right to long and fulfilling careers as their husbands. I have seen this dynamic firsthand among my peers. Two of the most promising lieutenants I know, including one who graduated at the top of his TBS class, are planning to curtail their military careers primarily out of consideration for their wives.

Consider the difficulties a young educated woman faces when her husband commissions into the armed forces. As she watches her friends enter the workforce and embark on their new careers, she will almost certainly be forced to move to an entirely new community with little in the way of local employment options. If she is lucky enough to find a good job, her excitement will undoubtedly be tempered by the knowledge that within a year or two she'll be forced to move and start over. Every time she begins a new job search she'll be competing against not just all the other recently arrived spouses, but also against non-military locals who employers know will not be leaving in the near future.

The numbers attest to the difficulties spouses face in finding employment. A 2004 Rand Corporation study found that military spouses are less likely to be employed than their civilian peers and earn less money when they are employed. This holds true even when they are compared against civilian spouses with similar employability characteristics. Given these obstacles, it's little wonder that 85 percent of military spouses say they either want or need work. Of those who are employed, it's not uncommon to find spouses working in positions for which they are manifestly overqualified. I know a former government lawyer currently employed at a nearby unit as a Family Readiness Officer, a job that does not even require a bachelor's degree.

None of these issues is new for military spouses, but it is surely not lost on them that today they are being largely excluded from one of the most important demographic shifts in American history. As Hanna Rosin, journalist and author of The End of Men, explains: "For the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce [has] tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation's jobs.... Women dominate today's colleges and professional schools -- for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women."

To its credit, the Department of Defense has taken recent action to try and improve spousal employment with the creation of the Spouse Education and Career Opportunities (SECO) initiative in 2009. SECO is made up of three programs: the Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts (MyCAA) tuition assistance program, the Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP), and the Military Spouse Career Center. Unfortunately, a 2012 Government Accountability Office report noted that, "DOD is not yet able to measure the overall effectiveness of its spouse employment programs," so it is impossible to know if they are proving beneficial.

I suspect that, given the obstacles arrayed against it, SECO will prove inadequate to the task of providing JO wives with fulfilling long-term employment. Instead, the military may need to come up with more radical measures, such as reinstituting homesteading and increasing the number of unaccompanied tours to locations suffering from limited employment opportunities. Another option is to ensure that spouses' careers are given weight when assigning servicemembers to new duty stations. There are significant practical obstacles to both of these ideas, but over time they may grow to be considered preferable to the problems brought on by spousal discontent.

Ultimately, effective solutions will only be possible when there is widespread recognition that the military's current social model is a legacy of a different time. Today's young women will be increasingly unwilling to sacrifice their professional ambitions for their husband's military career. The choice for young officers will become stark: Stay in the military and make their wives unhappy, or get out and give them a chance to pursue their dreams as well. Unless positive measures are taken to increase spousal satisfaction, I fear more and more JOs will choose the latter.

Jesse Sloman is a lieutenant in the Marine Corps currently based in Okinawa, Japan.

I am told this about the misconducted West Point superintendent, Lt. Gen. David Huntoon. Apparently there was an investigation of his relationship with a woman he brought in as director of strategic communications, whose influence was resented by some faculty members. But the Army keeps on stonewalling and saying only that he was cleared on that -- but won't drop the other shoe and provide information on the misconduct charge that the DOD IG did substantiate.

So what was he nailed on? I asked someone in the know. He told me this:

In the end, all they got him for was, he offered to take care of her cats....[But] the chief of staff wound up doing it. He had to buy cat food. So, after all the investigating, all they got him on was coercing a subordinate to do personal favors.... It's ironic because Huntoon has been all about the ‘image' of West Point.

Tom again: A bigger concern to me -- and to some civilians at West Point -- is the effect that the image campaign has had on the academic freedom of faculty members. I asked about that, and the person I was talking to said, "I think it's fair to say, there is concern that we cannot speak freely. We get messages all the time: ‘Don't talk about this.' There's a lot of concern about image."

A little transparency here would go a long way. But apparently the Army cares more about the feelings of its generals than about informing the people who pay its bills.

It looks like that may be the case. But we don't know because he and the Army are stonewalling. They're hiding behind a statement that an allegation of an improper relationship was investigated and was unsubstantiated, and that he is retiring as planned.

But they aren't saying what was substantiated. The Washington Post found out through a FOIA request that the Defense Department inspector general did find some wrongdoing. So it appears to me that General Huntoon misled me when he told me in January that "there's no investigation here." Which leads to the question: Are cadets held to a higher standard of conduct than superintendents?

As of 10 am today, General Huntoon hasn't responded to the question I sent him last weekend asking him what is going on.

That's what my friend Rosa Brooks assumes, writing that, "Even if humans are somewhat less nasty to one another than they used to be, the complexity of our world has increased exponentially, and our ability to inadvertently mess the world up has similarly increased." I know and like Rosa, but I think she's wrong here.

Yes, we can mess up the world pretty well. But I disagree with her other assertion. That is, I don't think life is infinitely more complex these days than it was in the 18th or 19th centuries. I think life changed faster then than now. Those times saw huge leaps in the capabilities and reach of the human race. Until the Industrial Revolution, it was hard to move people or goods much faster than six miles per hour, and that depended on the vagaries of sail. And almost all information moved at the same tortoise-like pace. Then came the railroad, the telegraph, and the precise measurement of time and goods. This all was accompanied by a massive shift of people from farms to factories, from countryside to cities. In response, the professional governments we know now in the West were created. (London didn't have a police force until the 19th century, for example.)

In my view, the Internet is just a faster, more colorful telegraph. And the sense of change was greater in the 19th century than it is now.

That said, I think historians will regard global warming as the most important trend of our time, and will wonder why we didn't focus on it more. So I think Rosa B. might be fundamentally correct that we are in the handbasket, which was her real point. 

By Peter Molin

Best Defense bureau of war poetry

Jason Dempsey's 13 February post on this site decried the lack of poetry by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Nostalgic for the kind of poetry written by great World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dempsey writes that from verse, "we get a tactile feel for the war paired with examinations of what it means for life writ large -- the purpose of art, as it were."

I agree with Dempsey that poetry helps us understand war (and all experience) best, but disagree with his claim that our contemporary wars have been left uncharted by poets. Since December of 2012 I have been reviewing art, film, and literature associated with the war at my blog Time Now (www.acolytesofwar.com) in an effort to publicize authors and artists who take the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as their subjects. I have already posted on three poets -- Walter E. Piatt, Paul Wasserman, and Elyse Fenton -- who explore how the contemporary wars have wrought alterations of perspective and emotion on those who fight them and those who have been affected by them. Below I offer a few comments on Brian Turner, by far the most well-known and important of contemporary war poets.

The author of two volumes of verse, Here Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010), Turner combines an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon with seven years of service as an enlisted infantryman, to include a tour in Iraq with the 2nd Infantry Division. His poetry is at once subtle and sensational, accessible and complex. A good example is the title poem of his first volume:

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta's opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you've started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

here is where the world ends, every time.

Interesting about the poem is the marriage of modern war imagery and emotion with the classical verse form of the apostrophe (a direct address to a non-human thing), all informed by a poetic smartness about half-rhymes, assonance, alliteration, and other forms of sonic alertness. Thematically, the poem presents an original take on bravery. The poem is half-taunt and half-cry of pain, the challenge to the onrushing bullet a futile effort to both resist and understand war's deadliness. The blur of emotions is matched by the interpenetration of the imagery, where the rifle and bullet are given human qualities and the soldier-speaker's body parts are weaponized, as in "the barrel's cold esophagus" and "my tongue's explosives."

The metaphysical musing of "Here, Bullet" is typical of many Turner's poems, which rarely stop to consider events in which he personally participated. Occasionally though he works in a biographical vein, too. A great example is "Night in Blue," from Here, Bullet. Many readers have told me it is their favorite Turner poem:

Night in Blue

At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights

blacked out under the wings and America waiting,

a year of my life disappears at midnight,

the sky a deep viridian, the houselights below

small as match heads burned down to embers.

 

Has this year made me a better lover?

Will I understand something of hardship,

of loss, will a lover sense this

in my kiss or touch? What do I know

of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have

to say of the dead -- that it was worth it,

that any of it made sense?

I have no words to speak of war.

I never dug the graves of Talafar.

I never held the mother crying in Ramadi.

I never lifted my friend's body

when they carried him home.

 

I have only the shadows under the leaves

to take with me, the quiet of the desert,

the low fog of Balad, orange groves

with ice forming on the rinds of fruit.

I have a woman crying in my ear

late at night when the stars go dim,

moonlight and sand as a resonance

of the dust of bones, and nothing more.

When Turner isn't considering his own emotions or the cosmological significance of war, his dominant mode is empathy for those with whom and against whom he fights. Two examples will suffice, one recording a birth in Iraq and one a death:

Helping Her Breath

Subtract each sound. Subtract it all.

Lower the contrailed decibels of fighter jets

below the threshold of human hearing.

Lower the skylining helicopters down

to the subconscious and let them hover

like spiders over a film of water.

 

Silence the rifle reports. The hissing

bullets wandering like strays

through the old neighborhoods.

Let the dogs rest their muzzles

as the voices on telephone lines

pause to listen, as bats hanging

from their roosts pause to listen,

as all of Baghdad listens.

 

Dip the rag in the pail of water

and let it soak full. It cools exhaustion

when pressed lightly to her forehead.

In the slow beads of water sliding

down the skin of her temples --

the hush we have been waiting for.

 

She is giving birth in the middle of war --

the soft dome of a skull begins to crown

into our candlelit mystery. And when

the infant rises through quickening muscle

in a guided shudder, slick in the gore

of birth, vast distances are joined,

the brain's landscape equal to the stars.

"Eulogy"

It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 A.M.,

as tower guards eat sandwiches

and seagulls drift by on the Tigris River.

Prisoners tilt their heads to the west

though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them.

The sound reverberates down concertina coils

the way piano wire thrums when given slack.

And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun,

when Private Miller pulls the trigger

to take brass and fire into his mouth:

the sound lifts the birds up off the water,

a mongoose pauses under the orange trees,

and nothing can stop it now, no matter what

blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices

crackle over the radio in static confusion,

because if only for this moment the earth is stilled,

and Private Miller has found what low hush there is

down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.

                   PFC B. Miller

                   (1980-March 22, 2004)

Turner poems record such facts of modern war experience as IEDs, women in uniform, and PTSD, but the characteristic most worth mentioning in conclusion is his deep interest in history. Turner's not particularly interested in the war's political dimensions, but unlike 99 percent of American soldiers, he is ever conscious that the Iraq soil on which he fought had a long, richly-recorded existence before America turned it into a 21st century battleground. This pre-history of Operation Iraqi Freedom wells up in Turner's poetry in the form of references to ancient texts, images of ghosts, evocations of ancestors, and readiness to consider contemporary events in a temporal context extending deep into the past and into the future.

To Sand

To sand go tracers and ball ammunition.

To sand the green smoke goes.

Each finned mortar, spinning in light.

Each star cluster, bursting above.

To sand go the skeletons of war, year by year.

To sand go reticles of the brain,

the minarets and steeple bells, brackish

sludge from the open sewers, trashfires,

the silent cowbirds resting

on the shoulders of a yak. To sand

each head of cabbage unravels its leaves

the way dreams burn in the oilfires of night.

Turner, the first or near-first Iraq veteran to turn his war experience into verse, has established an impressive standard of both poetic craft and thematic depth for the poets who have followed him. Still, no one artist says it all, and other poets such as Piatt, Wasserman, and Fenton have also found interesting and important ways to use their verse to document how the war has been fought and how it has been felt. We wait to see what they bring us in the future and what other poets join the conversation.

Peter Molin is a U.S. Army infantry officer with deployment experience in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Indiana University. The opinions expressed herein are his alone and do not reflect DA or DOD policy. 

Arthur Graeme West leads a small night patrol that encounters

...half a dozen men

All blown to bits, an archipelago

Of corrupt fragments, vexing to us three.

Even more horribly, Edgell Rickword grows comfortable with a corpse lying out in front of his position, and reads aloud to him -- until the body rot grows too repulsive:

He stank so badly, though we were great chums

I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

William Noel Hodgson prayed ambivalently in his poem "Before Action":

By all delights that I shall miss,

Help me to die, O Lord.

At about the same time, Siegfried Sassoon's thoughts were running colder as he marched past a corps commander:

‘Eyes right!' The corpse-commander was a Mute;

And Death leered round him, taking our salute.