If you’ve ever seen that piece of shit Fahrenheit 9/11, you probably remember the scene where a group of artillery guys loved listening to shit like the Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water Burn” while annihilating Fallujah. I hated that movie but I liked that part.
Music is a big deal here and it’s what we each use to stay sane. Although, as soon as I took my headphones off, the collective shitty tastes of my platoon almost drove me nuts. I had a lot of southerners in my unit so I was subjected to a lot of country music, Three 6 Mafia, and Lil Wayne. Most of the country music I was forced to listen to sucked ass except for Hank Williams and Johnny Rebel, who made the most KKK cartoon shit on the planet. I tried to get Marines into Crass and Skrewdriver but no one really warmed up to it. Everyone’s more in the the music than the message. You’d be surprised what’s popular amongst Marines though. Fucking Rage Against the Machine is huge.
Technically, it’s illegal for us to have our ears occupied while on missions. You can’t blow people away to P.O.D. You can’t even listen to it while on a convoy. Thankfully, these laws are almost never enforced. I don’t condone disobeying military orders, but it is pretty convenient how the grenade pouch on my flak jacket fits an iPod perfectly. If you want, you can do a big write up on your blog about how that’s the updated version of hippies putting flowers in gun barrels.
Convoys last anywhere from half an hour to all day. Missions can be made up of endless convoys and last for days with Marines convoying from base to base to base to base to base. I’ve seen most of the barren countryside of Iraq all the way from Ramadi, Baghdad, TQ, Fallujah, Al Asad to the Jordanian border (Trebil). I felt like a Brinks security rent-a-cop going from camp to camp instead of bank to bank. Except we drove in AMREPs and Humvees armed with a machine gun turrets instead of those small armored trucks. Listening to music on the road saved me because I could turn the whole thing into a fucked up music video. It changes the whole war. When you’re doing a house raid in Diyala blasting Rage Against the Machine’s “Know Your Enemy”, and singing “We don’t need the key, we’ll break in” you feel like a fucking rockstar.
For the rest of my life, whenever I hear these songs now I will picture the piss stops we would take in the middle of nowhere and how satisfying it was to turn my aching bladder into a dark stain in the middle of the road. Most guys just pissed in bottles en route because stopping was rare – unless we were providing security for Iraqis who insisted on stopping regularly for their daily prayers.
Sometimes, during night convoys, I listen to Interpol’s first “untitled” track off of Turn On the Bright Lights and pretend I’m an astronaut. I move all slow and shit because I’m wearing kevlar on my head and a 60 pound flak and I imagine it’s because of the zero gravity up in space. Air and Spiritualized are also good to listen to in orbit, the moon, and beyond.
We don’t really exchange playlists or gay shit like that. All we do here is play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare so the way we listen to music is via the mp3 playback feature on PS3 and Xbox 360.
I made a playlist for you here, though. If you want to pretend you’re in the desert, worrying if you’re going to blow up, or just kicking down front doors with a gun in your hand, listen to this. I must have listened to it a hundred times. Oh wait, iTunes records that. I DID listen to it a hundred times. Holy shit.
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you are gay
08.15.08 at 1:57 pm
hey look… its gavin mcinnes in iraq…yawn…
08.15.08 at 2:11 pm
This is the kind of thing the New York Times would do a front page feature on: “The Sounds of Iraq.” Then they’d wax poetic about the soldiers there and the soundtrack of the war and how the kids today have turned the whole thing into a video game / iTunes playlist. The iPod in the grenade holder would be a full page picture.
08.15.08 at 3:27 pm
Where’s the techno… fucking shitty list. No wonder you’re a soldier.
08.15.08 at 3:32 pm
frank:
he’s a marine not a soldier..
and you are gay too
08.15.08 at 4:01 pm
I don’t know bout no Iraq war, but I DO KNOW THIS!!!!!!!!!!!====>
http://streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/blog/friday-80s-hardcore-body-count/
08.15.08 at 4:24 pm
yeah, listening to crass in Iraq! it’s so ironic and so edgy. I love it: punk goes to war!
08.15.08 at 4:37 pm
life is a joke.
08.15.08 at 4:49 pm
I don’t see Crass on that list but I do see a Skrewdriver song from their Neo Nazi era. Seems about right to me for a bored jarheaded fucknut with no political spine. Come on soldier, stick a fucking flag in it already and lets see which way your colours run.
08.15.08 at 5:25 pm
I’m pretty sure with a last name like Kim, he’s probably German.
08.15.08 at 5:34 pm
I mean, pfft- journalism, right? Going somewhere, experiencing something, doing anything and then writing about it for fucking plebes.
08.15.08 at 5:53 pm
Behold in wonderment as an anonymous keyboard warrior accuses an actual soldier who risks getting his dome blasted every day of cowardice. Brave, brave, brave.
Very, very risky to take a stand against Nazis, too. Society, en masse, will condemn and eternally ostracize you for expressing such a controversial opinion. The five or six Nazis left in the world will give you a hard time down at the Nazi Knights of Columbus Club, too. You might even find it hard to reserve a pool table down there during the Friday Night Nazi Pizza Feed and National Socialist Potluck Dinner.
And could someone explain what a “Neo-Nazi” is? Aren’t there any O. G. Nazis left? No Orthodox Nazis? No Reform Nazis? Are they all Neo?
The evil, unforgivable, reprehensible, extremely naughty Skrewdriver song in question has nothing to do with the Jews or blacks you patronizing petunias, very few of whom ever turn out to be Jewish or black, always feel the need to defend. It’s pro-British and anti-Irish.
As someone of mixed British and Irish ancestry, I’m not sure how to feel about that song. The French part of me, as is the Gallic tradition, runs away and cries.
08.15.08 at 7:25 pm
Military personal are assholes. And this guy is no exception.
08.15.08 at 7:32 pm
can you imagine trying to have a conversation with this guy? reading this blog was like listening to my niece prattle on about listening to Jonas Brothers and the Hannah Montana soundtrack on her way to Disneyland.
08.15.08 at 7:35 pm
…except he is serving his (your?) country and you all can say he is boring and gay and complain about the Jonas Brothers. brill!
08.15.08 at 8:49 pm
JIM GOADS PART ENGLISH, no wonder he such a dumb fuck
08.15.08 at 11:42 pm
i suppose in some odd way he is serving my country. well, good for him. does that make him some sort of superhuman exempt from criticism? and who the fuck uses ‘bril’???
08.15.08 at 11:51 pm
Can you imagine witnissing this blog, it’s like listening to Marshall talk about how he saw his sisters watching the Jonas Brothers on T.V. with Hannah Montana in the background. Yes, it would be interesting to hear his reasons for being in the Marines. But come on, the dude is listenlng to FEAR, and posts on this site – if he wasn’t saying something you’d get Dan Rathers talking about mudslides in Malibu.
08.16.08 at 5:05 am
Hey, “hey”:
You missed an apostrophe in “Goad’s,” and you missed both the apostrophe and the possessive “s” in “he’s.” Two glaring mistakes in an eleven-word sentence (without a period), and then you call me a “dumb fuck.”
To recap: We’re going to need to radically redefine the word “dumb” to include people who’ve scored in the top percentile of every standardized test they’ve ever taken if you want that word to apply to me, you brain-damaged, bottle-sucking infant.
For “marshall”:
No one said Taeil was exempt from criticism. It appears as if “reruns suck” was saying the criticisms so far have been weak and superficial ones. And my points were that someone hiding behind a screen name oozed hypocrisy by implying that someone who’s been engaged in a literal war is a coward…and that Koreans who listen to anti-Irish songs aren’t exactly Nazis…and that calling someone a Nazi isn’t a risky or courageous thing to do these days.
Are you all taking anti-logic pills? Eating retard sandwiches and sipping Down syndrome soup?
No argument on “bril,” though.
08.16.08 at 5:40 am
oh yay! I was just trolling and I caught a bonafide 5 paragraph Jim Goad. That one’s going above the mantel piece for sure. Btw I bought your Answer Me’s! when you were selling them on ebay for $40 a pop, and you were nice enough to sign my copy which means you are obviously a very sweet individual who had been badly hurt by this old world of ours. Mr Goad I feel your pain.
But I digress, In my comment I did not call him a coward; he may or may not be as the situation over there changes. But I could stand by apolitical, bored, jarheaded-fucknut though. I think the inane tone of the article brought that out, even though I thought it was interesting. Does exposure to prolonged episodes of apathy, violence and paranoia make for a happy neighbour when back home in civvies? As for implying he’s a nazi, I don’t really care if he is or he isn’t. I just wanted to score points with a comment mentioning that skrewdriver was slightly to the right of Joseph Goebbels. So lets all call the man a Nazi and you can be one also Goad, you fucking crypto-fascist! (apart from rainy season who I agree with for some reason.)
08.16.08 at 6:30 am
Only $40?
Saying someone has “no political spine” and implying his “colours” might “run” seems equivalent to calling them a coward, but that’s only an Englishman-Irishman-Frenchman-born-in-Philly’s opinion.
And I love and admire Jews too much to be a Nazi. As I said in “The Redneck Manifesto”:
“I’m no fan of white supremacy—everyone knows the Jews and Chinks are superior.”
I’m a grammar fascist and I think nature often tends to be fascistic, but accusing me of harboring fascist sentiments, either overt or “crypto,” is way, way off the mark. I’m far more in favor of unfettered free speech and opposed to governmental intervention in individuals’ lives than 99% of the university professors who glibly toss the word “fascist” around. But many people seem to miss that because they’ve been trained to view reputed bigots in two-dimensionally stereotypical terms.
And most importantly, “left” and “right” are social constructs. They’re good as navigational tools for getting around the city, but they don’t exist in any real sense. It’s yet another divide-and-conquer scheme. The “race is a social construct” clones apparently have never considered that “left-wing,’ “right-wing,” “culture,” and “equality” are, unlike genetic differences, impossible to quantify.
(Sorry for all the paragraphs. I realize that many of you young’uns had your brains scorched on Ritalin and can’t process anything over 25 words that doesn’t have a link to a video.)
08.16.08 at 7:37 am
Smash the IRA isn’t an “anti-irish” song. The IRA isn’t Ireland. The song is about Northern Ireland and the fact a faction claiming to be the IRA wouldnt respect the 1973 plebiscite and were using terorrism and propaganda to further their cause.
But the point still stands — listening to bands whos members support far-right politics doesnt make you’re a far-right supporter, and listening to someone sing about certain views doesn’t necessarily mean you support their stance.
Does listening to Michael Jackson mean I like to share my bed with prepubsecent boys? Same logic.
That said however, he says this:
“I tried to get Marines into Crass and Skrewdriver but no one really warmed up to it. Everyone’s more in the the music than the message.”
Is he trying to say that people should be into Screwdriver because of the message? If so, then yeah, it’s fair to assume this guy is sympathic of the far-right politics which I don’t agree with.
08.16.08 at 9:25 am
hey pinheads,
skrewdriver is a white power band. taeil kim is a chink. he obviously gets that and likes the band for the same reason we all do: they rock and they make people cry.
08.16.08 at 9:30 am
Yea, only $40. I think you were selling them cheap about 7 years ago. In fact I paid more for the rape issue through a bookstore than I did buying the first three from you directly.
But I’ll be quick cos I’ve a train to catch – Cheers for the lecture about left and right, I’ll remember that the next time I don’t bother to vote (I’m sure I said something about criticising apathy earlier but my ritaling-ding-ding only allows me to focus on one ranty issue at a time). I quite like glibly tossing the word fascist around actually, I enjoy its hiss – altogether now- ‘fasshhissstt swine!’. Try it next time your in court or asking your gf for a cava enema.
Oh and Jim, do you know who else came from English-Irish stock? William F. Buckley Jr.
And I know he might not have had the French bit, but we could play that ancestry game where you put 2 parents to the power of 20 generations back and come up with over a million different ancestors (allowing for incest of course). And then pick one whose nationality, ethnicity and cultural baggage you like the look of, but I think you might have already covered this in your previous post, so I’ll gracefully piss off at this point. Taxi!
08.16.08 at 10:02 am
Oh la la, transgression!
You sad old fucks, go stick one in Ole Charlton Heston’s cold dead arse
08.16.08 at 10:30 am
To show such heightened concern for grammatical correctness in a rough and tumble forum such as this one, Mr Goad, seems to me to be the dumbest fuckery of all.
08.16.08 at 10:43 am
If you had one-quarter of a nut, “Street boners are gay for Nazis” and “Ahem, grammar?,” you’d post under your real name instead of two fake screen names in a row.
I’ve said it before, but here we go again: I get a sadistic thrill out of correcting the lousy grammar of people who call me dumb. If someone wants to call me stupid, it seems only fair to note their rudimentary grasp of the language.
And if you were capable of paying attention, you’d concede that I also meticulously poke through every deficiency in their reasoning. It’s about far more than grammar.
I also get my kicks calling bullshit on keyboard-warrior fags who post under multiple screen names from the same IP address in what seems like an attempt to create the appearance of a consensus.
I’m also the same age as Barack Obama and, like I’ve said before, I could still box the ears off of 95% of you.
08.16.08 at 11:39 am
You seem a little old to be at war, or a little young to listen to this sort of music.
08.16.08 at 2:33 pm
Hey I think it’s awesome the soldiers use music to fight or use it to escape. I know that we all have different tastes but I like a few of your choices. Music helps me in everything I do and I can honestly say that with out music life would be meaningless.
btw: download Killingjoke’s Invocation (Of The Bitch Whore Goddess Of Babylon), I think you’d like it especially in a dessert setting.
08.16.08 at 10:01 pm
Dear Mr. Kim,
Please use less words in your posts. I don`t have the time slash patience slash whatever to read all of that crap. I love you. Keep it short
-Kimberly
08.16.08 at 11:01 pm
fergetit: That’s like telling Mozart to use less notes.
08.17.08 at 12:00 am
Maybe Taeil used the words, “They were more in the music than the message” for the apolitical taste among the Marines. For instance, he clearly stated Rage Against the Machine were extremely popular in his platoon along with Johnny Rebel and his “KKK cartoon shit” country music. So him listening to punk rock is just an extension of that “ironic” juxtaposition, of how it is out there in Iraq. Did you even notice some of those songs he posted were virulently anti-war when looking at the lyrics itself?
If you also, consider the beliefs of ACTUAL Neo Nazis and white supremacists they are quite against the Iraq war for being another “puppet ploy for world domination” by the Jews in Israel.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s an even deeper irony when guys like Taeil are listening to Skrewdriver in Iraq because it’s a espousing a belief citizen that is un-American as any other bleeding heart liberal anarchist punk.
08.17.08 at 2:39 am
this part of Moore’s “documentary” was taken from a film ‘Soundtrack to War’ by Australian war artist George Gittoes. Footage that Moore used out of context, and without correct permission, I might add.
Check out ‘Soundtrack to War’ and the follow-up ‘Rampage’ where Gittoes follows up a claim by a soldier that where his neighbourhood in the US is a lot scarier place to be than Iraq
08.17.08 at 3:29 am
Puppett with literary ambition.
08.17.08 at 2:45 pm
Well they blasted “What is love?” when the Blue Angels performed at the Chicago Air and Water Show yesterday and it really just wasn’t the same
08.17.08 at 4:44 pm
ew god. when jim goad starts posting comments its like your embarrassing drunk uncle popping up at christmas and ranting some argumentative nonsense that makes no sense whatsoever at your older sister and you before your aunt takes him away, gives him his meds and puts him to sleep. only a few more years of this and we’ll be rid of the old bugger.
08.17.08 at 9:37 pm
does this mean goad is ‘grammar police’
rings of conspiracy were it true
08.17.08 at 10:32 pm
Oh, Oh Goad! Lots of people seem to be against you! Better post another shot of your abs, that’ll learn ‘em! You frat boy douchebag!
08.18.08 at 10:11 am
[...] með nastí ummælum, götutískugagnrýni og svona almennt blogg um áhugaverða hluti. Í einni af nýrri bloggfærslunum segir hermaður í sjóher Bandaríkjanna sem staddur er í Írak frá því hvernig tónlist hann [...]
08.18.08 at 2:13 pm
sucks for the national guardsmen who signed up to fight floods, but fuck all those other guys over there… not as much as the guys who sent them, but still.
yeah f911 is a piece of shit, compared too… lame ass bands getting blared while civilians are shot and bombed?
09.02.08 at 2:07 pm
LiL\’Wayne The Best Rockstar Alive
03.05.09 at 10:00 pm
Please, can you PM me and tell me few more thinks about this, I am really fan of your blog…gets solved properly asap.
03.11.09 at 5:46 pm
I enjoy reading these, they remind me of my time in the sand. Good times, bad times, funny times, sad times, BORING times. Whether or not I agree with the topic, I still enjoy the read. Don’t let those who don’t understand what it’s like to do what we do bring you down.
To those of you who protest our existence entirely; I gave up trying to read most of the comments you’ve left. They seem so selfish and ignorant. François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) once said “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Even if you do not support the war, you should ALWAYS support those who volunteer to fight it. Without us, where would you, me, our country be? You have to remember that peace just doesn’t happen, you have to fight for it. Ironic isn’t it? But that’s just how it is. Did you ever notice after a violent storm everything is so calm? Sometimes it takes a violent storm to calm things. We are that storm.
Let me break it down “Barney Style” for you. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
To those that proudly fly my American flag, thank you.
Capt. Stone, USMC
7563, UH-1 Pilot
1st Marine Airwing
Okinawa Japan
06.19.09 at 11:04 pm