The Phoenix Network:
About | Advertise
 
Comic Strips  |  Lifestyle Features

Pop goes to war

Music and movies are vital coping mechanisms for US servicepeople in Iraq. And often, say four local troops, after they get home.
By MIKE MILIARD  |  July 25, 2007

070727_war_main

Next time you put on the new Spoon single to make that subway ride go by a little faster, or turn up Gnarls Barkley on your iPod to drown out the background noise at the office, consider what musical escapism means to troops in Iraq.

Think of them blasting whatever CDs they can find from a shitty disc player (whose life expectancy in that desert sand is just a couple months). Think of the soldier from Worcester nursing his ration of two Budweisers, drowning in the sound of 50 Cent and Beyoncé as strobe lights flash in some Spartan military mess hall.

Think of the scenes in Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s documentary Gunner Palace, which, for showing how life is lived in this war, should be mandatory viewing. Think of gonzo Specialist Stuart Wilf — wild-eyed, lanky in an Exhumed T-shirt, leaping around with guttural death-grind screams, strumming a tinny guitar, purposefully oblivious to the RPG making impact in the distance.

Think of Specialist Richmond Shaw, using freestyle verse to exorcise the demons of those dusty Baghdad blocks, describing the theater of war as “a place where the street lights never come on/And every time you step outside it’s like hearing a sad song.” Reminding the audience at home of one inescapable truth: “For y’all it’s just a show. But we live in this movie.”

From MRES to MTV
American military personnel use music as a way to dispel stress, to steel their nerves for dangerous missions, to give voice to their fears and frustrations. They also find themselves filling the longueurs of endless, deadening downtime with awful TV, cheesy music videos from Europe and the Mideast, and whatever movies — good or bad — they can get their hands on. (One soldier I spoke with says he “watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? about 27,000 times.”)

As fascinating as it is to speak to US military personnel about the ways pop culture manifests itself in Mesopotamia, it’s doubly interesting to examine how veterans’ tastes have changed upon their return to the States. So many stories about veterans are told from political angles, or focus on financial questions, or health care. Few examine how mass media are used as coping mechanisms over there, and back here. But that’s exactly what happens.

Enlisted men and women ship off to fight and return home utterly changed. They are witness to unspeakable acts abroad that we can only barely comprehend. It can’t be easy to transition back from the land of IEDs and MREs to the land of iTunes and MTV. What does it feel like to depose a dictator then return to a country where Britney and Lindsay rule the news?

Not good, says Marine Randy Cornejo, 26. “It’s crap. When you got little things making big news, when Paris Hilton’s getting as much coverage as when the towers went down, something’s wrong.”

Some troops have become hardened back home. The music they listen to seems devoid of substance, the clubs they haunt soulless. While some use certain songs or movies to remember their wartime experiences, others are just trying to forget, and need music to calm their nerves, to fall asleep. Still others are using music and images and words to relay the essential existential experience of soldiers in Iraq — and to work through their own conflicted feelings as they do.

070727_warpop_main2
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.”

1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |   next >
Related:
  • Cinema of Shadows
    We’re five years into the Iraq crisis, and Hollywood hasn't made a film about the war. Or is  every film is about the war?
  • Criminalizing the war
    A young soldier goes to military court and puts the Iraq war on trial
  • A night in Guantánamo
    Staying in a replica cell, with no waterboarding included
  • More more >
  Topics: Lifestyle Features , Iraq War , Cho Seung-Hui , pop culture ,  More more >
  • Share:
  • RSS feed Rss
  • Email this article to a friend Email
  • Print this article Print
Comments
Pop goes to war
Thanks for the article and for sharing these soldiers voices with us. Somehow, knowing about the music they listen to and movies and tv they watched both in the theater and returning home hits a chord deep within, and helps me to understand and empathize that much more. We need more stories like this, so that we can know these men, these women, these kids, these soldiers that much better...and truly support them. Thanks again.
By AFroNaut on 07/26/2007 at 11:20:33
Pop goes to war
I wonder what pop culture the people of Iraq are enjoying. Now that you have told us about the perpetrators, how about their victims?
By abuelo on 07/29/2007 at 8:13:52
Pop goes to war
A sore point for any American as this war is waged by our troops on our behalf. Therefore the victims of this war are not the troops victims so much as they are OUR victims. Though I identify with abuelo's remark as a child of war refugees myself, it misses one of the points the article makes: that by virtue of the duties we've asked of them, our soldiers too are victims of this war, left to deal with its internal and external aftermath as best they can. And if you doubt that soldiers too are the victims, stop by your local VA hospitals and clinics. A general who was a former member of The Hague's war crimes tribunal stated that the most egregious war crime was the act of making war itself. Considering that 10s of millions of people around the world took to the streets at this war's inception, I wonder what we, the American people, who are supposed to control our free and democratic government are doing still sitting comfortably at home.
By AFroNaut on 07/30/2007 at 4:40:55
Pop goes to war
“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.” wow
By Ian Sands on 08/04/2007 at 10:56:21

Today's Event Picks
ARTICLES BY MIKE MILIARD
Share this entry with Delicious

 See all articles by: MIKE MILIARD

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 



Featured Articles in Museum And Gallery:
Saturday, November 22, 2008  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2008 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group