In the coming months, he crisscrossed the country: “Basra to Nasiriyah to Najaf, up to Baghdad.” And as he experienced war in real life, suddenly he was a lot less interested in seeing it on the screen. “The more you’re exposed to that, the more desensitized to it — and the more sick of it — you become.”
Cho points to a phenomenon in Marine culture, where the new guys (“boots”) are a lot more gung ho than the guys with service time. Whereas new recruits keep their hair high and tight and project a nail-tough persona, oftentimes “the saltier you are, the less you associate with the Marine identity.”
As he racked up service time, Cho found himself “yearning for regular movies. “When you become a corporal or an NCO, rather than a junior enlisted . . . you tend not to care about films that are ultra-violent,” he says. “When I was deployed to Iraq, I remembered we were watching Blackhawk Down. Nobody wanted to see that garbage.”
So Cho and his fellow Marines turned instead to flicks like the high-school-football feel-good tale Remember the Titans. “Really cheesy movies were more popular,” he says. “Things where nothing really happened. Just a slice of life.”
At other times, guys had to vent their aggression, says Cho. “You wanted to listen to that hard stuff, the heavy metal stuff, especially if you were really angry and stressed out. You wanted to have an avenue of letting it go.”
But now that he’s home, Drowning Pool is not on his iPod playlist. “Let’s just say I don’t go out and download it. I don’t seek it out. Now I have more discretion over what I listen to.”
Cho’s friend and fellow Marine Cornejo says that, at the end of the day, every man in his unit “went to sleep listening to something.” While he used Metallica and Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” to get the juices flowing by day, by night he depended on progressive trance turntablists such as DJ Txo and Christopher Lawrence to help his mind float away from the hot sand and toward the cool empyrean.
“We saw everything,” says Cornejo. “Saw the dead bodies on the ground. Saw the wounded children. It was pretty fucked up.” Trance, with its washes of hypnotic beats, helped clear his mind of those images. Even now, at home, he depends on it to calm him at night. “It puts my mind at ease. I don’t know if it’s something I’ll need to do forever. But I do it every night.”
In Iraq, most days are more of the same: long, boring stretches punctuated by dangerous missions. Troops looked to other diversions in the extensive downtime between bursts of frenzied activity.
Cornejo’s not sure whether it was the slim pickings, or a genuine sympathy for Carrie Bradshaw’s romantic entanglements, but he confesses that Sex and the City was popular. “You’d be surprised at the kind of stuff men start watching. We’d sit around a laptop and be like, ‘All right, time for the next episode.’ ”
“For some reason we used to get People magazine,” adds Cho. “I used to know all the gossip. It’s weird. You’re reading this magazine with these beautiful people, and they’re telling you how to dress in these Ferragamo shoes and really expensive clothing, and you’re sitting there in this camping chair in a dusty desert. There’s dust in your ears and your nose and there’s dust on the magazine. It’s opposite ends of the world.”
