Iraq and Roll

At base camp, there were forms to fill out. Medical and psych evaluations to endure. Did you see live combat? See dead bodies or anyone killed? They all had. The Third Armored Calvary Regimental Combat Team lost 43 men in its first deployment to Iraq. The last casualty came on the return convoy to Kuwait City, when a soldier was killed after the gun mounted on his Humvee swung around and hit him in the head.

The base sported a huge rec center, the Marble Palace, that felt like Vegas compared with the morale centers they'd had in Al Qa'im. It had pool tables, a pool -- and a music room stocked with guitars, a piano and a drum set. The guys seized the stuff. Lu and Dave grabbed the guitars; Geoff headed for the drums.

"Before, when we were messing around writing songs, Geoff had been like, 'You know, I play the drums. I've seen drums,'" Dave says. "And he sits down all nonchalant, doing some adjustments, getting situated. All of a sudden he starts getting into it. He played this crazy roll and threw his drum in the air. Then he goes and sits down at the piano and starts playing it. His thing had been to learn to play guitar in Iraq, but it turned out he could already play everything but the guitar."

They decided right then that when they finally got home from this godforsaken war, they were going to start playing for real.

When Lu and Dave got home from Iraq, they sprinkled their house with mementos of their time spent overseas. A huge portrait of Saddam Hussein -- confiscated from the home of some Mujahideen and then presented as a going-away present from Apache Troop -- went up in the garage. A photo of Dave holding an M-4 in a combat vest was hung over the fireplace. Lu's favorite souvenir from the war wound up over his bed: an American flag ringed with holes and covered with smudgy signatures from some of the guys in Dragon Company.

"That's the best thing I brought back from that country," Lu says, "aside from all my limbs."

Dave and Lu live off Woodmen Avenue in Colorado Springs, in a sprawling, split-level home painted roughly the same industrial cream color as a platoon tank. From the outside, the house looks like any other on the block, but a look inside betrays its inhabitants' Army background. It has the airtight gleam of a barracks. In the upstairs bedrooms, comforters are pulled taut and cornered over mattresses. Shiny fixtures line every sink. On a mat near the front door, pairs of heavy black Army boots sit in a neat line.

"Dave's a little bit more anal than I am, but we're both pretty bad," says Lu. "We can't really help it. It was just ingrained in us. This place is like Fort Knox."

The basement of the house is filled with amps and recording equipment, stuff the guys bought with money that accumulated while they were fighting overseas. After a year with nothing to buy, they went on a little shopping spree: They got a new Shure digital mixing board, four Bose speaker towers, a forest of shiny chrome microphone stands and a black lacquered Pearl drum set.

On a snowy Tuesday night, the guys crowd around, noodling with the gear. Dave replaces a string on a Gibson electric guitar. Roger, Chris's fawn-colored Boxer, drools on a leather couch near the window while Chris absentmindedly thumps a bass at the foot of the stairs. Geoff tunes up the snare drum in the center of the room.

"We got all this through the Baghdad Savings Plan," he jokes.

When Dave plugs in his electric guitar and cranks the volume, the Bose monitors hum with feedback.

"We're still figuring out how this stuff works," Lu says, dialing down on the mixing board. "When we first got it, we had to learn how to use it. We were like, 'Hmmm. This is a nice recorder. But how the hell does it work, and what the hell does it do?'"

"The good thing about our background is that we're all engineers by nature -- be it systems, civil, nuclear or mechanical -- so we just dove in," Dave says.

Dave, Lu, Chris and Geoff had been home from Iraq for about two months when they played their first gig -- in the bed of a truck on the Fourth of July. They coasted through downtown Vail on a parade float, trying to keep time as a crowd waved and cheered at the all-soldier lineup. It was a patriotic atmosphere -- yellow ribbons everywhere, people thanking them for their time overseas. When it was over, they went to a party and drank a fridge full of beer.

By then the band had acquired a name -- Lucid Dissent -- but the music was still rough. The songs were sloppy, the harmonies out of key. Chris was still learning to play the bass, and he dragged behind Geoff, throwing the melodies off. The guys vowed to get better. They approached the project strategically, as if it were a combat operation.