SHOT FROM THE WAR: ex–National Guardsman and Worcester hip-hop producer Denoh Grear |
Sand and the city
Asked if a particular song captured the experience of the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Abe Cho, 24, of Allston-Brighton, hardly hesitates. “Bodies.” That thunderous, percussive anthem by nu-metal mooks Drowning Pool.Immediately after 9/11, the song — with its screaming refrain, “Let the bodies hit the floor!” — was on Clear Channel’s infamous “Songs of Questionable Content” list, banned from the media behemoth’s stations for weeks. But in Iraq, violent music was made to order. “I remember being in a tank battalion and they would hook that up to the com helmets,” he says. “It just goes so well. It builds up so slow and then gets really intense.”
And it serves as a handy soundtrack to real-time death, mediated by technology. “The lyrics are what you’re seeing,” says Cho. “When you’re in a tank, using thermal IR, all you see are little white dots that kind of appear like bodies. And inside the tank, you kind of hear the main gunfire. So it almost looks like a video game. That’s what you’re thinking when you’re shooting.”
(Cho offers another chilling glimpse inside the turret. “They teach you when you press the trigger, to say ‘Die, motherfucker, die.’ The time it takes for you to say that phrase is the length of an eight-to-10 round burst.”)
Cho had enlisted in the Marines when he was a high-school student on Long Island. He joined and completed infantry training in a pre-9/11 world. “I distinctly remember being stationed out in California and thinking, ‘It’s gonna be okay, I only have two or three years left,’ ” he says. “But September 11, that’s when everything changed.”
In October 2001, his unit was sent to North Africa for a pre-scheduled two-month training tour in Egypt. And then they went back to California, where they spent another year gearing up, performing endlessly repetitive strategic-mobility exercises (“pack your stuff up, unpack it, and repack it”) and being impressed with “a false consciousness that you’re gonna leave tomorrow.”
What leisure time there was at this point was spent getting amped up, “watching really ultra-violent or intense thrillers. Full Metal Jacket was always a popular movie. You could kind of see yourself as the main character.”
It was a lot like that scene in Sam Mendes’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, where Marines gather in the flicker of a dark room to watch the “Ride of the Valkyries” scene from Apocalypse Now, Cho says. “A bunch of raucous Marines, shouting at the screen.” (In his first act of freedom after leaving Iraq and landing in Germany, Cho bought a paperback copy of Jarhead in the airport with the last 10 bucks in his wallet; he liked the book a lot better than the movie.)
Cho headed to Kuwait in early 2003, cooled his heels there during the build-up to war, and then was one of the first over the border with the Marine Expeditionary Force on March 20. “The guy that pulled down the statue was in the same unit as me,” he says. “We knew Al Sadr back when he was a little punk.”
