Friday, December 26, 2008

So It Goes

I don’t know if art imitates life or life imitates art. Once exposed to an experience presented to you by an author or director that experience becomes of part of your consciousness. An image becomes a memory, a memory a series of images, clips that run on loop indefinitely sparked by a smell or a sound or another memory. I walk down a road, rifle slung over one shoulder, right hand on the grip as it swings by my leg. The sky is the sky, but browner. The pavement is the pavement but grittier. The mud is mud but it fucking sticks to everything. My eyes are mine but also they are cameras panning back and forth filming the first cut of my own little movie. And that’s how it feels. It’s your life, but it’s 2-D, a caricature exaggerated but familiar. But there’s always something missing. You left it in a box back home in a storage unit with your clothes and your pictures. You taped down the card board flaps and wrote do not open for one year.

You know it’s a defense mechanism and you find comfort in routines. Get up, work, eat, go to the gym, shower, eat, repeat. It’s a little like what you imagine prison to be. You watch a movie and see so many parallels between you and the inmates that it makes you a little angry. And it’s only the first three weeks. Weren’t you just here a year ago? Why does it smell exactly the same, like burning garbage and dust? It feels a like a waste of time because you aren’t privy to the big picture, the little piece on the big board. You hear gun shots in the distance, sometimes in the not too far distance, honking horns, engines, and you think of L.A.

You see signs of violence. And you hear the stories, the lob-bomb attacks back in March, the Green Beans coffee trailer burning down, the JDAM building. It’s huge. The biggest building on the FOB and it’s got a hole in the middle of it like God put his fist through the roof. It used to be the Defense Ministry building. Republican Guard central. They used to interrogate people and then toss them out the top floor windows. Now it’s a gutted sagging hulk, an early victim of the shock and awe. A few buildings over there is a small square jail with an open inner court yard. The windows of the guard towers at each corner have long since been broken and sections are cordoned off with C-wire because they are structurally unsound. They say there are Chinese characters written on the walls inside left there by slave laborers brought in to build the surrounding compound. Saddam threw a banquet for them when the buildings were completed and had them all executed. So the story goes.

It gets late and even though you’ve worked a full day you find it hard to sleep. It’s a bit cramped and the walls are paper thin. Literally they are made of cardboard in areas. Nothing you haven’t been through before. A sheet strung up for privacy and you’re set. Your own little section of the world built to ward off casual invasion. You still can’t sleep so you write. Send it off, maybe people read it. You know they do because they write you back and it feels good to know you’re being thought about. But you still wonder if you made the right choice sometimes.

Usually you come back around to the same conclusion you always do when you have too much time on your hands. You did this because you were getting lazy and complacent and you’ve never learned anything if it wasn’t the hardest way you could possibly subject yourself to. And what’s worse than making the wrong choice? Making no choice at all.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

London Sunday Times article about me and TTFR

From The Sunday Times
November 30, 2008

To The Fallen Records: band of brothers

A new American record label offers soldiers and veterans a launch pad for musical success

When the US army medic Stephen Covell deploys to a war-torn section of Baghdad later in December to begin his second 12-month tour of duty, along with all his medical gear he will be carrying his own life-saving equipment — a guitar.

“Playing it relieves the stress when I come back from a mission,” says Covell, who helped to save the lives of several American soldiers and Iraqis on his previous tour of duty when his unit was caught in a deadly ambush. “I’d go completely insane if I didn't have my guitar. I play it whenever I can, although there isn’t much privacy to write songs.”

Covell, 26, is an accomplished singer-songwriter who dreams of being the next James Blunt when he leaves the army in 2010. Since signing up 2½ years ago, he has had to concentrate more on his medical skills than his musical chops. Now, however, thanks to a record label set up to release CDs by serving or retired members of the American military, Covell is about to get his first big break.

To the Fallen Records was created in 2007 by a former army captain to give a voice to people fighting for their country who also happened to be talented musicians with the ambition — and ability — to be chart-toppers. The label has released three compilation CDs, with a fourth set for release later next month.

Covell, who is cut from the same cloth as Jack Johnson and John Mayer, is one of 17 serving soldiers on the latest album, Say Goodbye, which features an eclectic mix of hip-hop, country and rock music. “Soldiers are recognised for their courage and dedication, but rarely are they honoured for their creativity,” says the medic, who submitted No One Else, about leaving a girlfriend behind as he heads off to war, for inclusion on Say Goodbye. “To the Fallen showcases those who have more to offer than just their service to their country.”

While Covell is serving his country in Iraq over the next year, he will no doubt wonder, at times, what appearing on the album will do for his musical career.

“I guess I hope for what every musician hopes for: recognition, appreciation and opportunities to perform and share my talent,” he says. “I’ve heard it will be sold at the coffee shops on base over in Iraq, so it will be interesting to see if people put two and two together and figure out that the weird medic is the same guy singing on the CD.”

The records and the label dedicated to releasing them were the idea of Sean Gilfillan, a decorated soldier who was among the first Americans to reach Baghdad in 2003. “While I was in Iraq, I realised that there were tons and tons of really talented musicians serving with me, but that they couldn’t realise both passions,” says Gilfillan, 29, who lost seven close friends to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and sniper fire in the 15 months he was there. He noticed how many soldiers had guitars, or laptops loaded with professional recording and mixing software, and how they used music as a form of therapy to help them cope with the dangerous and stressful situations in which they found themselves. “So many soldiers seemed to be singing, rapping, recording and playing,” he says. “And a lot of them were really great.”

When Gilfillan returned to America and left the army, despite having no musical background, he decided to start a label to publish the soldiers’ songs. He named it in honour of his seven fallen friends.

Yet even as a combat veteran with what he believed to be a patriotic — and economically viable — idea, he found himself fighting a losing battle when he tried to raise the capital needed to get the company off the ground. “It was very, very difficult to start with,” he recalls. “We went to the banks with a business plan, but when we said we wanted to start a record label, they just looked at us like we were crazy. They all said no.”

Undeterred, and determined to succeed, Gilfillan and his wife remortgaged their house and borrowed money from family and friends. “We scraped together everything we could because we believed in the concept so much,” he says. “We believed it would be successful and that people would want to hear the music.”

Gilfillan started soliciting submissions from his military contacts and trawling through Facebook and MySpace pages to find singing soldiers. “A good portion are just starting out, and they don’t have the tools to make it to the level where they could be on a CD,” he says. “But there are some really professional musicians in the military, or who have retired from service, and we found them. The quality of the music is really important to us. If you don’t have ‘it’, you don't get on one of our CDs.”

Gilfillan estimates that 90% of those who contact him want to pursue music as a full-time career, and that 20% of those will make it: “We don’t really deal with those that just view it as a hobby.” He initially selected 14 soldiers from about 100 who had all submitted impressive debuts, and To the Fallen’s Hip-Hop Volume 1 was released in February 2007. “After that came out, we put up our own MySpace page and word just kinda spread ridiculously fast,” he says.

Country and rock compilations quickly followed, and the label now has a database of more than 1,600 artists. It receives more than 150 new songs each week, of which slightly more than a third are rock songs. “The songs seem to reflect the mood of the country,” Gilfillan says. “We’ve had a couple of tracks about Obama, a hip-hop track and a country track, and they both focused on how to move the country forward out of Iraq and into a new realm of diplomacy. They are both pretty good tracks, so they might make the next CD. But not that many tracks are that politically charged. A lot have to do with actual missions or storytelling rather than ‘Why are we here?’-type stuff.”

Whatever the subject matter, soldiers themselves seem to appreciate their comrades’ work. “The CDs sold out in less than a week at every forward operating base in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Gilfillan, who also reveals that global sales are strong enough to allow the label to sustain itself and donate a percentage of the profits to military charities. The company’s plan is to release a new compilation CD every two or three months, as well as occasional solo albums by some of the featured artists.

Several contributors to the first CDs are already seeing the benefits of inclusion, among them Keni Thomas, a retired ranger who was involved in the infamous Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993. He had a song on To the Fallen’s first country-music compilation and is a rising star in that genre, having released a successful solo album and performed at the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, no less.

Thomas and Joel Port, a former marine who was featured on the label’s first rock CD, have both been asked to take part in tours for the troops in Europe and the Middle East. Several others from the first three CDs are also touring and performing in America.

Sergeant John Freeman, an army instructor who records under the name Merq (a soubriquet given to him by British soldiers he helped in a firefight in Iraq), has recently been offered a record deal, as well as being asked to write songs for a number of other artists. “It has helped me,” he says of being featured on the first rock compilation. “I’ve been interviewed by Rolling Stone, doors have opened and I’ve attracted new fans.”

Freeman, 37, served two tours in Iraq and was wounded on his first when shrapnel from an IED tore into his legs. When his injuries healed, he went back to Iraq and wrote several songs about his experiences. Now preparing troops in America for deployment to the Middle East, he says that the support a label such as To the Fallen offers to all soldiers is invaluable.

“A lot of record labels don’t want to deal with you because you are a soldier,” he claims. “When you say to someone at a record company that you’re in the army, their mood changes. I’ve yet to have any A&R person that I’ve ever sat with stick their hand out and say, ‘Thanks for serving our country, tell me more.’ But they need to know that there is a lot of musical talent in the military.”

Say Goodbye, released by To the Fallen Records, will be available for digital download from December 16 through Amazon and iTunes. For more information, visit www.tothefallenrecords.com

Saturday, December 13, 2008

The Stephen Cometh... to Iraqeth

I turned the key and kicked the door to my room for the last time before I left the country. The key turned the lock and the kick offered the bolt a more direct path home that wasn’t available given it’s regular trajectory. The lowest bidder had left our beautiful brand new barracks with many permanent and disabling handicaps, one of which happened to be a slightly sagging door to room 416A. It was a routine that I’d repeated so many times it had become second nature, just another quirk of what I had come to consider home, the home that I was leaving behind yet again. The rucksack on my back creaked under the weight of the next year of my life, counter-balancing that on my front was a standard issue green Army duffle, an aid bag, and an assault bag, some 200 plus pounds in all. I imagine I looked like some sort of military trade caravan that had lost its pack mule, or passive aggressive tortoise. Upon reaching the end of the hall I found that I failed to account for the maximum width requirements to gain exit of the building, so I dropped some bags, rearranged, kicked some things, alluded to the lack of propriety of somebody’s mother and slowly inched my way out in to the cool North Carolina evening.

The squadron area was buzzing with activity, families spending their last moments with their sons and husbands, busses lining up, weapons being drawn. The wind came up occasionally and it must have been bitingly cold but when you have so much else on your mind you hardly notice. Time creeps or maybe it doesn’t, all I know is that I stood there in the midst of this clump of humanity and I felt almost nothing. Well I should say I felt nothing until everyone started crying.

It killed me to watch my buddy’s 8 year old daughter cry as he hugged her goodbye. People in emotional pain make me feel awkward like I’m watching a family eat dinner though the window from the outside. I think it’s that I want to be able to fix what hurts, but they don’t make bandages for that kind of wound. I hugged his wife and told her that I’d take care of him and she cried. Everybody was crying. I may have had I had some one to say goodbye to. But I’d rather my family fly out to see my when I get back. Hellos are much easier. I called my parents and said I was leaving soon and went back to feeling nothing, least of all my toes.

With our bags hucked onto a flat bed we shuffled onto the bus and one of the wives began to run along side the bus as we drove off. We laughed. Not so she could hear, but we laughed. Soldiers are cruel amongst each other; the humor keeps the hurt away. We all miss someone but why dwell on it? And it was kind of a ridiculously over the top display but I understand her motives. Love makes a fool of each of us.

Thus began the waiting. Leaving the country with the military is a long succession of moving things from one place to another and then waiting. I thought that I’d lost the ability to sleep on command but really I’d just lost the need to while I was back in the States. It’s so easy when you have nothing but time, why not spend it dreaming? I slept on concrete, on the plane, on a metal bench in the airport terminal in Ireland, on the second plane and when we got to Kuwait I slept some more. While we were there I sometimes slept 12 hours a day. Being sick helped, but mostly I just had nothing to be awake for. Three meals a day, a couple mandatory training sessions and a long morning on the range was all that kept me from laying on my cot and reading myself into yet another coma.

When I woke I realized I was thinking about being home and missing those I love and it was unbearable. I had to read or listen to music, anything to keep the faces out of my mind, all the things I’d miss over the next year, the friends I’d grow a little farther apart from. That’s the hardest part of this job. It isn’t the weight or the distance you walk or the blood or the danger. It’s lying awake in a room of sleeping soldiers feeling like your whole life it drifting away from you and that you’ll never get this time back. All these weapons, all these tools and minds, all this training and you’re completely helpless and weak. So really it isn’t that I feel nothing like I had the day I left. I just feel privately, listening to the symphony of snoring, farting men, in a dark tent in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert, I feel the most human I have in months.

My body was so out of whack I usually woke up around 0230 and stayed awake until first formation. On a few occasions I went for a walk out around the tent to clear my mind and freeze my balls off. In the desert at that time of morning the moon has a unique and beautiful way of glowing like a raw piece of amber as it nears the horizon. It’s a nice reprieve from the wind, grey skies, and talc like dust that permeates all of existence during the day.

I’m writing this from an airfield in Iraq somewhere west of Baghdad. We’re waiting (surprise) for our final flight to FOB Loyalty which is to be home for the next year or so. I was officially pinned Sergeant yesterday and so far have made a complete shamble of the NCO corps. I’ve not only managed to lose my aid bag (which I recovered) but I’ve also left my ID card with another soldier in Kuwait. I can’t tell you have embarrassing it is to have to tell the person who put you up for early promotion that you’ve done something so mindless and stupid. I can tell you however that it is more that possible to enter a war zone without proper identification.

On the upside our Squadron Chaplin among many others have said that it feels much more natural to call me Sergeant Covell than Specialist. Which is nice to hear and I appreciate their vote of confidence but I told them that the way things are going, they shouldn’t get too used to it. On a personal note, I do enjoy having the younger soldiers address me in a more formal manor… I guess I’m allowed one guilty pleasure. I thought maybe I might get to have two, the other in the form of some totally in regulation but totally not to 82nd Airborne standard hair length that I was sporting before a local barber, who boasted 23 years in the practice gave me a haircut that bordered on negligent homicide. Imagine if it were possible for a 5’6” white kid to look like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and you might have some idea of what this guy did to me. Now I’m bald. Bic Bald. And it looks terrible, which would be ok if it wasn’t winter. Everything sticks to my head like Velcro. I’m in the same ACU’s that I wore off Bragg. I haven’t showered in almost two days. War these days isn’t hell, it just smells like it. Who wants a date?

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

My Secret Public Journal

First off I want to apologize for the way my recent letters have failed to coincide with the spirit of the season. This is a time for everyone to reflect on the good within our hearts and to share that good with those we love. There's truly so much to be thankful for but I doubt a laundry list of my blessings is on any one's top 10 to read lists. Actually I'd be surprised if you had top 10 to read lists. That being said, I write what I feel and if my feelings come out somber then I can only give you what I have. I've never been able to sing a song I didn't care about and I doubt I'll ever to able to write something that doesn't ring true to what ever that voice is inside that direct my fingers over the keys. However my stories move you or fail to move you, I want to wish you all a happy new year and to thank you for continuing to share with me your thoughts and dreams and when the clock strikes midnight toast one extra glass for me and let's ring in a year of hope for a brighter tomorrow.

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There is a video game that I've spent an unhealthy amount of the last year playing named Call of Duty 4. It's a very well made first person shooter that takes place the modern battlefield in a dozen or so locations around the globe following the exploits of a British S.A.S. commando and a U.S. Marine private as they solve the worlds issues one thirty round magazine at a time. There is one particular level where you are the gunner on a Specter gunship which is a C-130 cargo plane outfitted with some seriously devastating firepower. You're task is to cover the friendly team on the ground by atomizing anything that moves around their position. Fun right?

Now the reason any of this is relevant is because I've spent the last two nights staring at a wall of wide screen television monitors relaying the images from our UAV drones as they circle over Baghdad. They use the exact same forward looking infra-red cameras that are simulated in the game so the images on the screen are remarkably similar to the one I used to play with. It gives you a feeling of complete control. Kind of like how I felt with the night vision goggles on missions last deployment but even more so because not only can you see in the dark but you are looking though eyes that are miles away from your target and you are miles away from those eyes. I found myself wanting to see the figures on the screen blown to pieces. It's just so disconnected, so impersonal. It's like a game.

And that's what humans have been trying to do since the first piece of obsidian was cracked into a crude blade and used to fell an enemy. We have continually pushed to create weapons that put us further away from the actual act of killing. From swords to spears to pikes to arrows to bullets to cruise missiles at each step we take a little bit more of the humanity out of the target and it becomes a little less difficult to flip the switch. Read an article about a man stabbing his girlfriend to death and you are appalled, read about the fire bombing of Dresden and all you think is "wow that's so many people; I wonder how hot it was in the center of the city." It's unfathomable by normal human empathy to understand the loss of 100,000 lives. Our ability to destroy has far outpaced our capacity to truly understand the consequence.

A first few days of starting a12 hour night shift is a little like fasting. Your body is so out of whack you begin to think in drastically different ways. Maybe you become a bit more introspective. I hatched a plan to sell my collection of hundreds of DVD's save a few very special films to help lighten my ties to "stuff". DVD's are on their way out anyway. Instant streaming video is the wave of the future; let those suckers pay for the beta-max equivalent of our generation. One less thing to carry home. I thought about the cost benefit relationship of owning property versus a more transient lifestyle. If I was to buy a home and had the choice of what size it was would I want a large home on a vast swath of land or would I be happier in a cottage atop a postage stamp. Where does the line between need and want blur, and is it possible that our desires are nothing more than the manufactured product of industry, a new coat of paint on a peeling exterior? Has anything you've ever bought made you a better person simply by owning it?

I'm going to try and see if I can make a list to narrow down my possessions to 100 items. Apparently it's a reductionist fad that's gaining popularity among those who feel that one of the greatest challenges our culture faces is the tyranny of choice. I've noticed that it's weighed heavily on my mind recently. This idea of ownership and guilt I feel because of the disproportionate amount of resources my lifestyle demands in comparison to much of the world's population. Probably also because when you're forced to actually carry you're life on your back you take note that it may weigh more than it needs to.

The baby boomers worried about Russia and war and Communism, my generation worries about water, global warming, and whether or not we'll ever actually see the money we continue to dump into social security. We worry about the tipping point of the planet and whether we've already done so much damage that it may not even be fair to bring child into the world. We worry because the burden that we will inherit won't affect those who are willing it to us and we fear they don't care enough to help us fix it. We worry because the human mind can't empathize the suffering of the estimated billion men, women, and children that won't have access to the resources they need to survive within the next 15 years. It's a terrible thought; it's as terrible as hoping the figure on the screen will explode when you know that figure is a man like you. It's terrible because you know that it's within your power to make the difference yet it's so easy not to.