Because he lived not on a base in the desert but in a house in a Kurdish neighborhood, Rock got to know the people there well, and got direct exposure to their culture. “I have fond memories of being there,” he says. “I still keep in touch with my interpreter. That music, the specific songs that I’ve heard, they definitely bring back good memories for me.”
“I am a little bit more worldly in my tastes for music now than I was before,” adds Rock. “I listened to a wide range of music anyway, but I listen to a lot more international music now.”
And while he confesses that “Middle Eastern music is still not my cup of tea, exactly,” Rock says there’s definitely some Indian music he’s gotten into, thanks to those European channels, and that, slowly, he’s also gaining appreciation for Middle Eastern melodies through his exposure to Kurdish music.
Conversely, he says, “the Kurds love American culture. Definitely. More so than a lot of other Muslim people I met there. They watch re-runs of Friends on satellite. My interpreter learned the American dialect from TV.”
As a whole, his unit wasn’t much into shoot-’em-up war movies, Rock says. One war film that did hit home, though, was M*A*S*H. “We completely related to M*A*S*H,” says Rock. “It was more like [what] we were feeling as reservists. We were there. It felt like it was never gonna end. It was comic relief with some drama to it.”
Rock didn’t just have his tastes influenced by his foreign hosts. He learned from his fellow countrymen. There was a lot of cross-pollination among the soldiers in his unit, he says. “One guy was really into punk music. Another guy into metal. My first sergeant was completely into hip-hop. We ranged in age, too. [We had] an interpreter from the States who was 18 and we had a team sergeant who was 45 years old. It was this weird, eclectic mix of people.”
It was “like having roommates in college, six of us living in one house,” says Rock, who is now in college for real, entering his third year at Yale for his MFA in graphic design. Except different, of course. “We were trying to feel as much like American guys as we could. We did get one Israeli channel that broadcast Sunday Night Football games on Monday. It was close enough to being like home.”
Grear’s Army buddy, Northbridge poet Carlos Westergaard. |
The chronicles of Samarra
In Iraq, Worcester’s Denoh Grear, 26, would sometimes have to spend entire afternoons sitting in the sweltering heat on roadsides around Baghdad, Samarra, and Tikrit. Passing the time with his guys in the Army National Guard’s 1166th Transportation Company, they’d listen to songs like Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” on the truck’s tinny stereo. They’d also make music of their own, free-style rapping about the stresses of being in a war zone.“When we were in the Sunni Triangle, attacks increased,” Grear told me when I first met him in 2005. “We were getting bombed every night. And, basically, they didn’t provide any shelter for us. We had to provide our own shelter by digging ditches.” Meanwhile, by day, “The whole gun truck was just spittin’, flowin’.”
