Iraq and Roll

"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.

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.