Posted on 02/04/2005 5:48:43 AM PST by Cagey
The control booth at Globalsound Recording Studio in Broomfield rings with artillery fire as the sounds of rockets exploding and rounds firing from AK-47 and M-16 rifles boom through the speakers. In the vacuum of the studio, soundproofed and windowless, it's a violent, percussive wall of noise.
"That's freakin' scary," says engineer John Taylor. "That's like twenty bullets a second. Listen to how fast that is."
John ramps up the audio to full volume.
"This stuff wasn't recorded during live combat, was it?" he asks Dave Childress, who's carefully watching the levels on the digital readout.
"Nah," Dave says. "During combat, you kind of have a few other things to worry about."
John is helping Dave, Luis Castellanos, Geoff Burgess and Chris Wolfe through the final mix of a CD by their band, Lucid Dissent, which formed in the deserts of Iraq while the guys were serving in the United States Army. Dave, Lu, Geoff and Chris recorded a lot of the battle sounds themselves, using handheld recorders, digital cameras and MP3 players during training missions in the field. More than a year later, they found out that the samples make kick-ass sound effects.
Tonight they're at the board working on "Downslide," a brooding dirge of distorted guitars with a rapped refrain lain over the chorus, like a call-and-response between two halves of the same person. The song's lyrics were pulled straight out of Lu's war diary:
If this is life, then I'm closing the door Don't wanna feel this pain, see the truth no more No need to look through my eyes The world was better in disguise.
"Downslide" is one of four songs that Lucid Dissent is putting on GetAfterIt, an EP of material the four wrote overseas. They've kept John at the studio for long stretches, recording and re-recording vocal tracks, patching over less-than-stellar takes. It's precise, painstaking work. John had a feeling when he met the guys that they'd be hard workers.
"They're definitely perfectionists, but that's okay with me, because what winds up coming out sounds great," John says. "One thing I've noticed about this band is that there's always at least two of them here. They are all really involved in the whole process. There's not one guy who takes the responsibility or all the control."
When the intro is synching up just right, Chris heads into the studio to re-record some of the rap parts on "Downslide." After Chris rhymes into the microphone, John plays the track back through the headset.
"Yeah," Chris says. "I think that's hot. I think that's the one."
In the control room, Geoff, Lu and Dave nod at each other: The general rule in the band is that each guy calls the shots on his parts of a song. If Chris likes how he rapped, the track stays in the song. Democracy in action.
"It can be hard to be in a band with four leaders, because we're all leaders," Geoff says. "But we're pretty good at working stuff out even when we disagree. One of the major things you learn in the Army is that you can't let little things get to you. It puts things into perspective really quick when you're worrying about some stupid things and your friends are deploying to a war."
When Geoff, Lu, Dave and Chris came back from Iraq in the spring of 2004, they had a new mission. Forget fighting: It was time to rock and roll.
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First Lieutenant Dave Childress was smaller than most of the guys in Tiger Squadron -- wiry, with glasses and an angular face. But the engineer and West Point graduate was smart, and he was a natural leader. At 25, he was second in command of Apache Troop, a 150-man platoon based at Fort Carson.
Dave had trained for combat at Fort Carson since landing there in 2001, spending freezing nights in Piñon Canyon in the middle of winter -- a spot soldiers joke is the coldest, windiest place in the world. But those were just exercises, pantomimes. Dave never really expected to see an actual war. Then 9/11 happened, and he felt the military mobilize. During a training mission in Egypt not long after the terrorist attacks, he began to wonder if he might soon be back in the Middle East.
Then came the letter from Colonel David A. Teeples in February 2003, as Coalition forces were preparing for the possibility of a ground war in Iraq: The Global War on Terrorism requires that the United States Army deploy to a foreign country and fight an enemy that would do harm to the United States of America. It requires us to defeat the enemy so that all Americans can continue to live in freedom, now and in the future.
Dave wasn't exactly happy to go, but he didn't join the Army to sit on the sidelines. The fact was, America was at war, and he knew he should be a part of it. The feeling around Fort Carson was that it would be a relatively quick mission, anyway. The major ground operations were over. In early May, President George Bush declared from the platform of an aircraft carrier that the war had been won. The job of the Third Armored Cavalry, Tiger Squadron's parent regiment, would be to help clean things up, bring some stability to Iraq and get the hell out of there. It would take six months, tops. Before he left, Dave bought a ski pass, wagering he'd be back in Colorado before the close of the season.
Apache Troop spent a couple of weeks getting ready at a base camp in Kuwait City before crossing the Iraqi border headed for Al Qa'im, a rural enclave just a few miles west of the porous Syrian border in Al Anbar Province. On a road south of Baghdad, the convoy ran across a group of Iraqis in a truck full of stolen munitions. Guns drawn, the Apache soldiers did a hasty traffic-control operation, confiscated the ammo and took the Iraqis to a U.S. Army jail, zip-tied and blindfolded in the back of their Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
"It was a huge catch, a substantial amount of munitions," Dave says. "It was a huge confidence-builder for us. When you're on base training, you always wonder if your guys are going to get complacent. The mindset is, 'When's it gonna happen?' At that point, I think the war became a reality for all of us."
When Apache Troop rolled up on Al Qa'im in mid-April, they made sure the Iraqis felt it. The area was an entry point for Islamic fundamentalists and others who saw unfinished business, and opportunity, in the rubble of Iraq. Al Qa'im would make news in June, when a convoy of tanks from Tiger Squadron's Bandit Troop crossed the Syrian border in pursuit of a party they believed was transporting Saddam Hussein and his sons out of Iraq. But for now the big news was the American troops who were wreaking havoc both on the ground and in the sky. From inside a Bradley parked on a hilltop command post overlooking town, Dave choreographed the arrival of tanks, choppers and F-16s, a symphony of shock and awe.
Most of Apache's missions were far less dramatic. The troop patrolled gas stations, helped rebuild hospitals and distributed school supplies to kids. But occasionally they got to round up the "bad guys" -- the soldier term for those loyal to Saddam Hussein. Once, after Al Qa'im residents complained that they hadn't had access to their money since Hussein was yanked from power in April, Apache Troop raided two bank branches and arrested the Baathist leaders who controlled them. On several occasions, they did smash-and-grab raids to round up prominent pro-Saddam sheikhs, crashing their tanks into the palatial residences on the outskirts of town.
These were not the kinds of missions they'd prepared for in officer training. "Out of 130 guys, you might have six people who are really good at urban-type stuff, so you had to improvise a certain amount in the field," Dave says. "Sometimes we'd just park our damn tanks in their yard instead of doing it the doctrine way. We'd be like, 'Well, let's just smash into their shit.' We'd do a grab on a guy while he's sitting there eating his Camel-os. He's shaking his shoe at you to show you he hates you, and the next thing he knows he's surrounded by eighty guys and crapping his pants."
After a couple of months on the ground, Dave began to suspect he was going to be there a while. In a letter to his girlfriend in Colorado Springs, he wrote: Better send my guitar.
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Dave and First Lieutenant Luis Castellanos led parallel lives in the military. Both were Army brats, with fathers in the military. Both had helped each other endure four years at West Point, where they met as sophomore yuks in 1997. When they discovered that they both liked to sing and play guitar, they cobbled together some covers and played gigs at the Firsty Club, an upperclassman hangout on campus. After graduation, they did their officer-training course together at Fort Knox and ascended quickly through the ranks. In 2001 they landed at Fort Carson, lieutenants by 23.
"We're both pretty highly competitive," says Lu. "We wound up in the same squads during our trainings, and we were always two of the better guys. We'd help each other out, but we'd challenge each other. West Point, in particular, is absolute hell, especially your first year. You really come to rely on your friends to get you through."
Lu got Colonel Teeples's letter, too. At the end of March, he found himself on the ground in Kuwait City, getting ready to cross over into an unfriendly new world. "I think it's hard to be scared of death unless you really know what could happen," he says. "When we got to Kuwait, and we were driving around with loaded pistols, getting ready to go into a hostile country. That's when I started to feel that fear of going to war. Of possibly dying."
As the executive officer of Dragon Company, Lu was second in command of a one-hundred-man platoon with thirteen tanks. Many of Dragon's soldiers were green -- eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kids from all over the country -- and their job was to provide heavy reinforcement for the squadron and secure the Haditha Dam, a major power supply plant on the Euphrates River. The dam supplied the entire Al Anbar Province, and the Army considered it to be a potential terrorist target.
Dragon soldiers sometimes got sick from mosquitoes that carried malaria out of the river, but the post was still better than some in Al Anbar. There was a quasi-beach area where soldiers stripped down and swam in the Euphrates, a temporary escape from the unrelenting Iraqi sun.
After a few months, Lu began moving back and forth between Al Qa'im and the dam, working with the S2 intelligence unit in Al Qa'im to track information on insurgents and terrorists. Lu helped the unit figure out what houses to hit, where to roust out potential bombers and militants. And he had moved into a position as a battle captain, so he was running raids out of Haditha's tactical-operations center.
It was stimulating work, but it was lonely. When Lu was at the dam, he worked mostly by himself, alone in the TOC. Soldiers occasionally came and talked to him about what was going on with the war, but Lu kept his own feelings to himself. "There was a separation between me and the soldiers, and I missed working with them," he says. "When you're a soldier, it's your boys that get you through. But when you're a leader, an officer, your job is to help the soldiers out."
Lu kept a diary, and its entries grew darker as the war went on. He was depressed and anxious, unable to shake things he'd seen go down in the S2. "A lot of times we would be interrogating people who weren't doing anything, and we'd ride them pretty hard," he says. "They'd get caught up in the mix, and they were innocent. It was a little depressing, because it was so hard to tell the good guys from the bad. They could be innocent or they could be Mujahideen.
"I think maybe I was a little more emotional, because I found myself caring for the Iraqis," he continues. "A lot of our guys were trying to do the right thing. But other times other soldiers were like 'Fuck 'em. Kill 'em all.' There was a lack of regard for life. When Iraqis died, no one cared."
Dragon Company survived the first six months of the war without any casualties. But by the end of September, two of Lu's own guys had died. In late August, Private First Class Vorn Mack jumped into the Euphrates to rinse off after a haircut. Lu was in the TOC when the call came in saying Mack had been swept away by the currents. When he tried to coordinate a search effort, he was told divers wouldn't reach the dam for hours. Lu was a good swimmer -- he'd studied at the Navy Scuba School -- and even though he figured Mack was dead, he didn't want to wait. He grabbed a couple of broken fins and a pair of goggles, tied a rope around his waist and held his breath as he was lowered forty feet over the dam wall and into the river. When Lu made his way to Mack's body, he gave the tug to be pulled up, the dead man tied to him.
Lu received the Soldier's Medal for his part in the incident, which was seen as a freak accident. But about a month later, the call came that another soldier was lost in the water, having fallen from a height roughly equivalent to that of a seven-story building. Again, Lu volunteered to go in after him. The guy couldn't have been in the water that long. This time, Lu thought he could save him.
"There were about twenty guys on the rope, and they pulled us up too fast, and he hit his head as we came up," Lu says. "He was like a rag doll when we got him up. His legs were broken. His head had been hit pretty hard. We did CPR on him, but we couldn't bring him back to life. It was a very frustrating death, because I think the guy still had a chance after he jumped."
The quiet belief in the unit was that the death had been a suicide, but nobody wanted to talk about it. "For one thing, if you commit suicide in the Army, you lose all of your benefits," Lu says. "And the unspoken feeling is that it's just a weak thing to do. People don't talk about the fact that soldiers think about suicide, but everyone does. It's an extremely psychologically trying environment."
After the deaths, Lu logged this entry in his diary: I wish I had a loaded pistol at my side.
"I'm a pretty religious person, so I would never carry through," he says, "but there were times after that all went down that I thought I'd be much happier dead than to have to go through all this shit."
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Some Iraqis in Al Anbar Province believed that American soldiers had X-ray vision and could see inside their skulls. Some of the homemade bombs that were thrown at Coalition forces landed wrapped in burqas, thrown by insurgents who believed that the cloth could penetrate the force field that surrounded the foreigners. The further the Americans moved away from Baghdad, the further they seemed to go back in time.
The time warp, and the war, had begun to discourage First Lieutenant Chris Wolfe.
As the executive officer of King Battery, an armored unit, part of Chris's job was to train the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a ragtag militia that took all comers -- kids as young as fifteen, old men who looked as worn as the landscape. The unit also worked to secure the Al Dulyam ammunition supply post, a large store of munitions left behind by the Iraqi Army that had become a dangerous destination for insurgents, fundamentalists and looters.
Chris's job was frustrating. Soldiers in King Battery would spend days putting up a grid to supply the city with power; overnight it would be cut down, the lines stripped for their copper. They built wooden shelters for Iraqis who'd volunteered to police points along the Syrian border; the structures were burned as firewood. Several Iraqis died at the Al Dulyam post while trying to strip munitions for brass that could be sold in Baghdad or at the Husaybah market district in Al Qa'im. A few others lit the place up by smoking cigarettes while standing in gunpowder.
"A lot of the Iraqis didn't understand what we were even doing in their city," Chris says. "We were trying to help them, but they couldn't see how. There was a whole hierarchy of needs that they had. Under Saddam's day, they'd have their power cut off all the time. They were used to not having it. There wasn't any kind of regularity in their lives."
There was even less regularity to the war. Around the time the Third Armored Cavalry arrived in Iraq, the country was just beginning to shake off the shell shock of the previous few months. Iraqis found themselves without a leader or much clue about what to do next. Which put them, roughly, in the same boat as the U.S. Army.
Chris's training -- at West Point; at officer's basic training in Oklahoma; in Korea, where he spent a year before landing at Fort Carson -- had prepared him for battleground scenarios. He knew tank-on-tank, one army fighting another in an articulated battlefield. In Iraq, Chris was seeing very little battle combat, but lots of small, unpredictable fire. American soldiers were getting blown up in their Humvees, at roadside checkpoints, in suicide missions. A friend from his unit was killed while traveling in a convoy that Chris had originally planned to join.
"After he got killed, it kind of made it all real for me, like, something's changing here, something's going on," he says. "We started to see more organized resistance from the insurgents, these guys with hoods throwing IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and carrying out ambushes. I was working with young guys, tanker guys, who'd been trained on things like how to secure a prisoner. Suddenly they're up against guys who are proficient enough to wire an artillery round out of random parts."
Chris dropped nearly twenty pounds after arriving in Iraq, the result of a combination of Army rations and unrelenting sweat. In the field, all soldiers were required to wear a fifteen-pound vest and a Kevlar helmet even though temperatures often reached 120 degrees. On top of everything else, Chris was going through a breakup with his longtime girlfriend, someone he'd planned to live with when he got back from the war. Lu, Geoff and Dave tried to cheer him up by driving into the middle of the desert and letting him smash the living shit out of an old out-of-commission copy machine.
There wasn't much else to do.
Chris learned to ride a motorcycle, and, like every other soldier, he watched the mail.
Captain Geoff Burgess was in charge of sorting the letters and care packages that were sent to the members of Tiger Squadron. As convoy commander for the HHT (a supply unit that looked after logistics and materials), Geoff made sure the soldiers and officers of Tiger Squadron had what they needed both in the field and on base. But his own unit led a very minimal existence at the Al Asad Airbase. There was no running water, electricity, toilets or showers. Geoff shared a room with eight other guys and dug holes in the desert for toilets. There were already holes in the doors and windows, which the first wave of American troops had smashed out during the ground war. There was nothing to keep out the heat or the debris from the sandstorms that swarmed the desert, turning the whole sky red. Geoff took a picture of his bunk after one storm; a layer of dust lies on top of his cot and clothes like a fleece blanket.
"You could never get it out of there, and you could never get it off you, because you would never stop sweating," he says.
Technically, the HHT is a combat-support unit. But as the violence escalated in Iraq, it became one of the most dangerous in the squad. Geoff and his soldiers led convoys from the relative safety of the base out to far-flung posts, driving on roads and through territory that the enemy knew much better than the Army did. They went along on patrols and missions to support the tank and Bradley crews. The constant travel left them vulnerable and exposed.
"It was so hot when we first got there, we took the doors of some of the vehicles," Geoff says. "But when we started to see a rise in the insurgent attacks, the way we approached travel changed a lot. It took a few months, but we put the doors back on."
In October, Geoff was riding in a convoy to Rhamadi when his vehicle, an unarmored Humvee, hit a land mine. Geoff blacked out for a few minutes; the heat was so intense when he came to that he felt like he'd woken up in the middle of the sun. His driver was bleeding from the eyes, but neither was seriously injured: The land mine had been made of plastic, so there wasn't much shrapnel. The scene could have been much worse: The bomb had been wired to an additional four artillery shells, two mortar shells and another land mine that didn't detonate. Faulty wiring had saved the convoy's life.
"I think we smoked an entire pack of cigarettes on the way back to the base," Geoff says.
Geoff was awarded the Purple Heart after the incident, but he didn't tell anyone at home about what had happened.
"I didn't want them to worry," he says. "They worried enough. I wasn't going to call them up and say, 'Hey, I almost died today.' Most soldiers are that way. If you're not seriously injured, you just tell them, 'Hi, and thanks for the letters.'"
At the time Geoff and his driver had been hit, they were listening to Barenaked Ladies on a system rigged through the Humvee's controls. When Geoff got back to the base, he made a new rule: From that day forward, no one in Tiger Squadron was to listen to Barenaked Ladies ever again.
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The Iraqi desert can be cruel to stereo equipment. Soldiers would wire a system into the controls of a combat vehicle or mount a speaker in the belly of a Bradley only to see it destroyed by dust by a week later. They'd jury-rig some new parts and start all over again, strapping boomboxes and radios into the backs of Humvees with bungee cords and duct tape. Tank commanders would wire their vehicles for patrols and combat missions, and the soldiers would blaze across the landscape with headphones strapped to their ears.
Music was that important.
"When you're in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, and you hear that music from your own country, it gives you some distance. You can almost forget that it's 90 degrees outside at six in the morning," Dave says. "Music was a cultural lifeline -- a big one."
Music was also useful against the enemy. The Special Forces guys sometimes kept detainees up for hours, playing tracks from Guns N' Roses or Metallica in loops throughout the night. Lu had seen them do it. He'd been working more closely with intelligence since October, when he'd been promoted to captain.
Dave and Chris had made captain, too. Dave became the executive officer of HHT; Chris became a squadron maintenance officer. Geoff was working with the S4, the brain center for logistical operations throughout the squadron. Tiger was now based out of an abandoned train station in Al Qa'im. During their downtime, the four would congregate in Geoff's office to shoot the shit, sometimes talking late into the night about everything from God to girlfriends to music.
Geoff had brought a guitar over on the plane from Fort Carson, a Fender acoustic he bought from his roommate in Colorado Springs, and Dave's had arrived from Colorado Springs. They'd pass them around, playing songs everyone knew and making up goofy tunes that took the piss out of their superiors and unfriendly Iraqis. Older officers called them the frat boys because they never finished a song. But a few of their tunes had become soldier favorites: When music was coming out of Geoff's office, guys would stop by and request "Stick It to the Man" or "Iraqi Christmas Song."
But after a while, they started playing a little more often, and a little more seriously. Chris and Lu paid some Iraqis to pick up a couple of cheap acoustic guitars from a market in Baghdad: They named them Uday and Qusay, after the doomed princes of Iraq. Soon they were writing their own songs, making up their own soundtrack for the war. One person would come up with an idea and present it to the other guys, sometimes by recording a melody on a digital camera or an MP3 player. They kept each other occupied. Sometimes it felt like they were keeping each other sane.
"Playing music was such a great way to relieve stress," Lu says. "You can get mad, sad. You can actually bang on the guitar, change the tunings and the keys to change the mood. It was really relaxing. It was really the only thing over there that we did that was relaxing."
"Some of the songs definitely have a feeling of despair and hopelessness," Chris says. "They reflect what we were going through over there. It was day after day, this question of, 'When is this going to be over?' We believed in what we were doing, but at some point, you know, you want to go home.
"Every time we thought we were going to go home, they'd come back at us with a different date," he continues. "At first I heard six months. Then it was Christmas. It was like, 'Shit. We're never going to get out of here.' You get sick of that lifestyle. You feel like, 'I'm not gonna lay down on this shit.' The music captures some of that frustration."
In January, the guys finally got word that the regiment was going home in April, after a couple of weeks of cleanup and decompression in the relative safety of Kuwait. When the convoy finally rolled up on Kuwait City, the tanks and Bradleys were greeted by young men with "I Love Bush" stickers stuck all over their motorcycles. The Kuwaitis were happy to see the Americans -- and the feeling was mutual.
At base camp, there were forms to fill out. Medical and psych evaluations to endure. Did you see live combat? See dead bodies or anyone killed? They all had. The Third Armored Calvary Regimental Combat Team lost 43 men in its first deployment to Iraq. The last casualty came on the return convoy to Kuwait City, when a soldier was killed after the gun mounted on his Humvee swung around and hit him in the head.
The base sported a huge rec center, the Marble Palace, that felt like Vegas compared with the morale centers they'd had in Al Qa'im. It had pool tables, a pool -- and a music room stocked with guitars, a piano and a drum set. The guys seized the stuff. Lu and Dave grabbed the guitars; Geoff headed for the drums.
"Before, when we were messing around writing songs, Geoff had been like, 'You know, I play the drums. I've seen drums,'" Dave says. "And he sits down all nonchalant, doing some adjustments, getting situated. All of a sudden he starts getting into it. He played this crazy roll and threw his drum in the air. Then he goes and sits down at the piano and starts playing it. His thing had been to learn to play guitar in Iraq, but it turned out he could already play everything but the guitar."
They decided right then that when they finally got home from this godforsaken war, they were going to start playing for real.
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When Lu and Dave got home from Iraq, they sprinkled their house with mementos of their time spent overseas. A huge portrait of Saddam Hussein -- confiscated from the home of some Mujahideen and then presented as a going-away present from Apache Troop -- went up in the garage. A photo of Dave holding an M-4 in a combat vest was hung over the fireplace. Lu's favorite souvenir from the war wound up over his bed: an American flag ringed with holes and covered with smudgy signatures from some of the guys in Dragon Company.
"That's the best thing I brought back from that country," Lu says, "aside from all my limbs."
Dave and Lu live off Woodmen Avenue in Colorado Springs, in a sprawling, split-level home painted roughly the same industrial cream color as a platoon tank. From the outside, the house looks like any other on the block, but a look inside betrays its inhabitants' Army background. It has the airtight gleam of a barracks. In the upstairs bedrooms, comforters are pulled taut and cornered over mattresses. Shiny fixtures line every sink. On a mat near the front door, pairs of heavy black Army boots sit in a neat line.
"Dave's a little bit more anal than I am, but we're both pretty bad," says Lu. "We can't really help it. It was just ingrained in us. This place is like Fort Knox."
The basement of the house is filled with amps and recording equipment, stuff the guys bought with money that accumulated while they were fighting overseas. After a year with nothing to buy, they went on a little shopping spree: They got a new Shure digital mixing board, four Bose speaker towers, a forest of shiny chrome microphone stands and a black lacquered Pearl drum set.
On a snowy Tuesday night, the guys crowd around, noodling with the gear. Dave replaces a string on a Gibson electric guitar. Roger, Chris's fawn-colored Boxer, drools on a leather couch near the window while Chris absentmindedly thumps a bass at the foot of the stairs. Geoff tunes up the snare drum in the center of the room.
"We got all this through the Baghdad Savings Plan," he jokes.
When Dave plugs in his electric guitar and cranks the volume, the Bose monitors hum with feedback.
"We're still figuring out how this stuff works," Lu says, dialing down on the mixing board. "When we first got it, we had to learn how to use it. We were like, 'Hmmm. This is a nice recorder. But how the hell does it work, and what the hell does it do?'"
"The good thing about our background is that we're all engineers by nature -- be it systems, civil, nuclear or mechanical -- so we just dove in," Dave says.
Dave, Lu, Chris and Geoff had been home from Iraq for about two months when they played their first gig -- in the bed of a truck on the Fourth of July. They coasted through downtown Vail on a parade float, trying to keep time as a crowd waved and cheered at the all-soldier lineup. It was a patriotic atmosphere -- yellow ribbons everywhere, people thanking them for their time overseas. When it was over, they went to a party and drank a fridge full of beer.
By then the band had acquired a name -- Lucid Dissent -- but the music was still rough. The songs were sloppy, the harmonies out of key. Chris was still learning to play the bass, and he dragged behind Geoff, throwing the melodies off. The guys vowed to get better. They approached the project strategically, as if it were a combat operation.
The basement is now the command center, where Lucid Dissent gets together to play a couple of times a week. The music, a dark combination of moody, grinding rock and hip-hop, gets tighter with each session.
"It was utter chaos when we started," Dave says. "We didn't really know what we were doing. We got all these books in the beginning, like, 'How to Make it in the Music Business.' We learned to write this stuff in the middle of the desert. Since then I think we've figured out how to improve the songs. We're better writers now. We practice a lot."
Tonight they're fine-tuning "Through It All," a song Dave started writing at West Point and finished in Iraq. It's a strummy pop tune, brighter than a lot of the material Lucid Dissent brought back from Iraq. Dave and Lu sing the alternating harmonies of its chorus; at times their voices are nearly indistinguishable:
You took my side when you knew I was wrong Fought my fights when we shouldn't have won On roads untraveled, outside these lines We stood through it all.
"A lot of the early songs were spawned by the frustration of being in the desert, of getting constantly beat down," Geoff says. "There were a lot of emotions that we had over there, and the songs were one of the only outlets for them."
"Now that we're back, we're writing happier stuff, different stuff," Lu adds, laughing. "We've got a love song, a heartbreak song. Now, that's uncharted territory."
Around 11 o'clock, the guys take a break for beer. Lu takes a pull on his bottle and points it at Chris:
"Do you know," he asks, his eyebrow raised, "about tomorrow?"
Lu and Chris are both due to take an Army physical-fitness test in the morning. Before the sun fully rises on Colorado Springs, they'll run miles, do hundreds of sit-ups and push-ups in the snow.
"God, am I glad I don't have to do that anymore," Geoff says.
Geoff left the Army a couple of months after he got back from Iraq, having completed the five-year obligation that came with his West Point education. He traveled for a while and then took a job as a construction manager for Pulte Homes last month.
"When I was thinking of leaving, I sought the advice of a lot of people who had made a career out of the Army, and many of them told me that I needed to stay," he continues. "And I was proud to have served, but my five years were up, and I realized that this is not where I wanted to be for the next twenty years. I think it's much easier to leave after five years than waiting eight or nine; by that point, you might figure, 'I'm halfway to my pension. I might as well stay.'
"What I do now is actually a lot like what I did in the S4," he says, "but it's a heck of a lot easier."
The other guys are getting ready to leave the service, too. They each decided not to renew their commissions with the Department of the Army when they expire this summer. The war wasn't quite what they bargained for. They want to do more normal things, like get non-military jobs, wear regular clothes and try to make a go of the band.
"You get to a point where you have to ask yourself, 'What's the next step after the Army?'" says Dave. "Most folks get out and go ten different ways, away from each other. We don't want to do that. Someday we all want to live on the same street with our wives, and our kids can come over and play. We saw the band as a way to have that camaraderie outside of the Army.
"When someone asks you, 'What do you want to do with your life?' and you say, 'I want to be in a rock band,' that's something that transcends to everyone," he continues. "Our goal isn't to get rich and famous, but to have a way to stay together."
When other officers found out that they were leaving the Army to play in a band, they laughed a little before realizing that the friends were completely serious.
"We'd play our music for them, blast it in their offices," Chris says. "The word spread through the chain of command. At first some of the senior officers were kind of like, 'Um, you're doing what, now? A band? What are you two clowns doing?' People had a hard time understanding."
Similarly, they expect some people on the other side won't understand what the hell four Army dudes are doing with guitars -- especially right now. The music industry isn't exactly rife with pro-Army sentiment. But Lucid Dissent won't try to hide its military roots. All proceeds from the sale of GetAfterIt will go to charities that support soldiers and their families. (The recording is available through www.luciddissent.com.) The band's T-shirt is embossed with a "Support Our Troops" logo. The guys plan to send copies of the CD to members of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is getting ready to redeploy to Iraq this spring.
"A lot of people will assume that we're conservative or pro-war or non-creative just because we wanted to serve our country," says Lu. "No matter what anyone's feelings on the war are, I think everyone who thinks about it knows that it's not the soldiers' fault. Soldiers are individuals like everyone else. If you just met us, you wouldn't think: 'These guys are robotic soldier guys.' Hopefully you'd think, 'These are four level-headed, cool guys who like to play music.'"
Lu, Dave, Geoff and Chris will also send their music to managers, publishers and record labels, just to see what happens. In show business, the question of who survives and who doesn't usually comes down to timing, strategy and luck. Which, in a certain sense, makes it a lot like war.
"We know that we are literally starting from nowhere," Dave says. "But we've been in worse places and done okay. Our attitude is, compared to what we've been doing, this is all right. If we work hard, something will happen. How hard could it be?"
Geoff was awarded the Purple Heart after the incident, but he didn't tell anyone at home about what had happened.
"I didn't want them to worry," he says. "They worried enough. I wasn't going to call them up and say, 'Hey, I almost died today.' Most soldiers are that way. If you're not seriously injured, you just tell them, 'Hi, and thanks for the letters.'"
I wonder how many letters/phone calls John Kerry wrote/made?
Geoff was awarded the Purple Heart after the incident, but he didn't tell anyone at home about what had happened.
You're so right, Kerry had to tell millions of us about his Purple Hearts and this guy wants to keep his quiet. That says so much.
It is a great story. Thanks for posting it.
Rock and Roll PING! email Weegee to get on/off this list (or grab it yourself to PING the rest)
Horns up for these guys...
hell ya,Military SDMF Bump
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