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1765 Redefining America %u00a9 Kimberly BuchheitAt Lowe%u2019s Home Improvement Center Brian Turner Born in 1967 in California, Brian Turner earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Oregon before enlisting in the U.S. Army at the age of twentynine. During the seven years he spent as a soldier, he was deployed to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and served as an infantry team leader in Iraq. His work has been published in various journals as well as in Voices in Wartime: The Anthology , published in 2005 in conjunction with the featurelength documentary film of the same name. Turner has also published a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (2014), and five collections of poems. KEY CONTEXT In this poem, Turner blends and juxtaposes experiences in the Iraq War with a civilian trip to a large home improvement store. The disorienting and often debilitating memories of wartime experiences are characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). By some estimates, 20 percent of the more than 1.5 million veterans of the Iraq War (2003%u20132011) suffered from PTSD. Standing in aisle 16, the hammer and anchor aisle, I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails open by accident, their oily bright shanks and diamond points like firing pins from M-4s and M-16s. In a steady stream they pour onto the tile floor, constant as shells falling south of Baghdad last night, where Bosch kneeled under the chain guns of helicopters stationed above, their tracer-fire a synaptic geometry of light. At dawn, when the shelling stops, hundreds of bandages will not be enough. Bosch walks down aisle 16 now, in full combat gear, improbable, worn out from fatigue, a rifle slung at his side, his left hand guiding a ten-year-old boy who sees what war is and will never clear it from his head. Here , Bosch says, Take care of him.I%u2019m going back in for more. Sheets of plywood drop with the airy breath of mortars the moment they crack open in shrapnel. Mower blades are just mower blades and the Troy-Bilt Self-Propelled Mower doesn%u2019t resemble 5101520Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.