In Country

October 15, 2018
Martin (The Stick Soldiers), an Army National Guard veteran, reckons with the tension between occupier and occupied in these winding, rhythmic lyrics. He delves into the paranoia of American soldiers as well as Iraqis’ terror and defiance, glimpsed as an elderly farmer demands payment for a blown-up tractor: “In one hand he holds a long shovel,/ rusted spade up, & he stumbles toward us & shouts.” Martin describes well both the foreign landscape (“the creek clogged/ with black plastic bags that float,/ I think, like water lilies”) and the banality of a battle zone: “At home, they don’t know all I do:// aim at date palms.” Meanwhile, military slang (”Hescos,” “JP8,” “terp”) melds with poetic references: “No bombs but// in things. No IEDs but/ in things.” Indeed, the title is shorthand for “Indian Country,” a military euphemism for “behind enemy lines.” But that fact is never explained, a possibly revealing omission in a collection that deals with the symptoms of the war without ever considering its causes; the question from a woman at a club back home, “Should we be there?” remains unaddressed and lingers in the background throughout. Martin’s tight, muscular verse befits a soldier, but readers may wish for a less detached emotional presence and a deeper engagement with the Iraq War’s historical context.