The Chords of War
CHRISTOPHER MEEKS
SAMUEL GONZALEZ, JR.
Inspired by a True Story of
Love, War, and Rock’n’Roll
Prologue
Music filled his mind. Specifically, seventeen-year-old Max Rivera dreamed of his last great gig with the Mad Suburbans. They played at a sleazy little bar in Orlando’s Milk District where dollar beers flowed, the lighting came from strings of white Christmas lights, and cigarette smoke filled the place as if a mosquito-fogger truck had plowed through. In fact, cigarettes dangled from the lips of all the band members, even though they hadn’t reached the legal age of eighteen, but, hey, they were into punk, which was fun. In the tightly packed lounge, men tried to hit on the women rather than focus on the band, their crazy hair, their ripped clothes, but Max nonetheless got people dancing with his song “Wanting What You Can’t Have.” Max eagerly played his guitar, yelling into his mike, laughing, feeling the electricity beneath his fingers travel all the way into his amp. The crowd blasted with a cheer. The dream was only ruined when his girlfriend Lynette in her dumpy Disneyland sweatshirt glared at him.
A hammering started. No, it was the phone. Phone? Everyone in the bar stopped to look at him.
Max struggled awake to find the phone ringing. Now he was deeply aware his head pounded. He rolled over in bed, and his hand and arm whacked around the nightstand. He finally touched the phone, an old-fashioned kind, one with a handset and a cord. Where was he?
“Hello?” he mumbled, and a happy up-and-down computer voice said, “Good morning, Mr. Rivera. This is your wake-up call. You wanted me to remind you, too, of the duck march at nine a.m.”
“Fuckin’ duck march?” he blurted and hung up the phone.
He jammed an extra pillow under his head and opened his eyes, trying to remember where he was. His head hurt. He seemed to be in a hotel room with a high view. Duck march?
Now he remembered. When he’d checked in, the young woman at the front desk had explained that every morning at nine, five mallard ducks came down a special elevator from the roof, and a duck master led them down the carpet to the fountain. People lined up on either side to watch.
“That’s what rich people call fun?” he had said.
“It’s a tradition. And, yeah, kind of fun,” replied the young woman, a clerk only a few years older than he.
“Sounds interesting,” he said about the ducks, but he had it meant it as “like needles in the eye.”
And now he remembered why he’d come. Florida was for dead people, and he’d decided to join them. He booked a room at the elegant Peabody Hotel, which was the second tallest building in Orlando. The tallest was an exclusive office building, but there was no way he could get in there.
His plan would have worked, too, if his friend Claire hadn’t called, having heard about his breakup with Lynette, and she weaseled out of him that he was at the Peabody. She assumed he was partying and asked if she could join him. Hot red-headed Claire. She’d told her parents she would be studying with a girlfriend, but she got naked with him instead.
He turned his head to his side. Claire wasn’t there. She had left the bed. “Claire?” he said as loudly as his weak voice would allow. No answer. He reached for what looked to be a note on her pillow.
He read, “Fuck you, Max. You said mean things.”
Mean things? They were just true things.
“We’re not losers—at least I’m not. You’re a doosh.”
He was a better speller than that. It was “douche.”
“P.S. I took your money for a cab.”
He held his poor, aching head. He saw all the empty mini-bottles and beer cans on the floor. He wondered if he’d be charged beyond the one-hundred-dollars he left as deposit.
The TV was on, but the sound was off. It showed a single tall building with smoke coming out of it. He vaguely remembered turning on the TV at night, but he didn’t remember watching it. He’d been too tired to do anything including killing himself. Maybe now he could do it.
He lumbered to the dresser to grab a cigarette. Maybe it’d stop the headache. He lit a match, which made him blink and water. Christ. The lit cigarette slipped from his fingers, and the cherry popped off and burrowed into the Berber. Smoke rose, and he hammered it out with his bare heel, then yelped at the pain. He was doing nothing right.
First his girlfriend, then the band, now Claire. Everything he touched turned to shit. He looked down again, thirty stories up. All he had to do was fly, and it’d be over. He needed to be brave and fly. He pounded his fist against the window, but it just boomed and didn’t break. How to get through? It was time to fly.
A voice on the TV said, “We have word in that perhaps a small plane had gone off course.” The sound was on, after all.
Max moved closer and could see it was a boxy skyscraper against a cobalt blue sky. There was no context, but clearly it wasn’t Florida. The building was on fire. Why?
A wide shot from another angle had the Empire State Building in close, and in the distance, the building on fire had a matching tower, both far taller than the many buildings nearby. Beyond that gleamed a bay. The screen went back to a closer view of just the one tower burning. Max rubbed his lightly tattooed arms, suddenly cold, and he just stared. The same smooth male voice said, “We’re told a number of firefighting companies have been called in. There are no ladders that can go that high. This is the north tower. We’re trying to get an FDNY spokesperson to tell us how this fire will be fought. Buildings like this, I understand, are designed with automatic sprinklers as well as fire hose couplings on every floor. All should be well.”
As Max stared, something came from the right side of the screen—a jet? It flew behind the tower on fire, and a huge orange smoky blast burst from either side of the building. “Oh, my God,” he said in chorus with a man and woman’s voice on TV. The announcer said, “I think a second plane has just hit the second tower.”
“I didn’t see a plane go in,” said another male voice. “The building just exploded.”
“We saw a plane come in from the side, from the right,” said the woman.
Max felt as if he were hallucinating. Did a jet just crash into a building? What about the people in the plane and building? Or was this just a strange movie? He turned the channel. The next channel, though, showed the same thing from a different angle where both towers were shown. Both were on fire. Max was about to shout for Claire, but he remembered she was gone. Maybe the front desk had answers. Maybe that woman at the front desk knew what’s going on now.
When the doors opened to the lobby, no one stood behind the long check-in counter. As he walked through the vast space, his black Chuck Taylors squeaked on the white marble floor and the occasional black inlay. Because of how quiet the place was, it was as if he were in church—or the depths of outer space. He looked for the staff past the modern art, the areas with cushy chairs, the impressive pillars and curvy white walls. He found them around the corner at the mirrored bar. At least twenty people, half of them wearing Peabody Hotel uniforms, quietly watched the TV above the bar. Max joined them, and as the TV gave a slow-motion replay of the plane going in and exploding, everyone there gasped at the fireball. “Definitely a large jetliner,” said a different announcer on the TV. “We may look back on this eleventh day in September as a turning point.”
“I think it’s terrorists,” an old man in tennis whites next to Max said. “It’s going to mean war.” Max didn’t think about who would fight it or where.
The TV showed the plane yet again, and Max’s headache reasserted itself. He really should get some aspirin or something for it. An older woman on his other side, silver-haired, a bit chunky in baggy beige shorts and a shirt as if she were lost on a safari, madly pressed numbers on the keyboard of her cell phone. Anxiety cut across her face. Apparently no one answered.
She looked at him, worried. “Do you know someone there?” she asked, touching his shoulder as if expecting a yes. He said nothing.
She frantically punched in another phone number. He realized he’d been ready to kill himself today, and now in these two buildings on TV, people who surely wanted to live had been crushed and incinerated. They had families, hopes, goals, but some terrorists decided to kill innocent people. Why had he been so easily ready to do himself in?
“My God,” the woman gasped, and her shoulders shook. She stood, isolated, apart from the others, and closed her small Ericsson cell phone, a model Max had thought about getting because it was so small and had something new called Blue Tooth. He didn’t know what to do for her.
“I take it you know someone there,” Max said.
“My son works high up in one of those buildings,” she said between sobs. “He won’t answer his phone. I think he’s dead.”
“Would you…” He paused. “…like to sit?” said Max. “Sit. I’ll sit with you.” He pointed to the chairs at one of the cocktail tables.
“Why would two planes crash into those buildings?” she asked him. “What does this get anyone?”
He shook his head. “It’s a strange world.”
She looked right in his eyes as if he might have more answers.
He said, “My girlfriend, the first girl I loved, slept with everyone in the band just to get back at me. The world doesn’t make sense.”
The woman shook her head, taking his hand. “You’re a good boy.”
“Not really. But maybe someday.”
Her phone rang. She looked hopeful. “Charles?” she said into her phone, and then she beamed and spoke quickly, stepping away.
Some ducks quacked. Max looked over to the red carpet. Apparently no one had told the duck master about the burning towers, and the red-jacketed man guided his five ducks down the empty red runway. The man looked around, confused, and then peered at Max as if Max had the answer to why everyone was at the bar instead of the duck march. No matter. The man guided his charges forward. Each duck faithfully followed the one in front. As if they now knew it was a solemn time, they did not quack. They just marched.
CHAPTER ONE
Iraq and Kuwait, 2006
As if someone had shoved me, I awoke startled on the plane to a falling sensation and a huge creaking sound. The plane leveled off, but my hand pressed against my chest. It was November, 2006. I and another hundred Army soldiers headed to Kuwait City in a C-17 military aircraft. We would be deployed to Iraq after extra training. The seats, most of them arranged lengthwise against the plane’s sidewalls with a few conventional rows in the middle, showed many around me were still asleep. I locked eyes with another soldier across the way as alarmed as I was. Others, oblivious to the turbulence, read or listened to their iPods as I had been doing earlier. I sighed. For a week now, all I could think about was how I was in the last of my safe days.
With its vast space and fluorescent lighting, the C-17 felt like a moving Greyhound bus station. Two car-sized containers lashed down in the middle, behind the seats in the middle, did not add any elegance. I stood, stretched, and moved to one of few windows on the plane. The clouds below me looked like the top of a brain, and the flashes of light going off in the ridges could be nerve endings sparking out electricity. Synapse. I remembered the term from high school bio. I’d never made it beyond a single semester of community college. I’d played in a few bands instead.
Soon, the plane started shaking slightly. We must have been entering a storm, which is what probably had awakened me. I focused on the beauty of those flashes. “Wow,” I blurted without thinking. A soldier near me seated on the sidewall stood to look out the same window, and then the captain sitting on the other side of the cavernous tube stepped over to see. Trying to make a good impression on the captain, I said, “Isn’t nature amazing?”
After looking at my name on my uniform, then staring out the window at the clouds several seconds, he said, “Yes, Private Rivera, but that’s not lightning. Those are bombs going off. We’re over Baghdad.”
The short soldier next to me gasped, and only then did I realize the soldier was a woman—stocky, sturdy, but a feminine face. After other young faces jammed into the window, my skinny friend Hitch pushed on his tiptoes to look and said, “Shit. We’re the mole in Whack-a-Mole.” Whispers and groans erupted as fast as lit gasoline. The plane shook harder, and while it was probably from simple turbulence, we all surely assumed anti-aircraft missiles. The fasten seatbelt sign blinked on. I sat and clutched my seat as if we were already careening in a ball of flame. All the motivational films we’d witnessed in recruitment centers and in training—the “Be All You Can Be” and “Army Strong” stuff—did not prepare us for this moment.
Forty-five minutes later, we landed safely in Kuwait City. When I stepped out the rear into the sauna air, the hot tarmac nonetheless felt wonderfully solid. Adrenaline rushed through me as the words of our LT came back: “Every minute in Iraq can be filled with danger—snipers, car bombs, suicide bombers, IEDs, or an ambush. You’ll have a lot of boredom, punctuated by terror. It’s okay to be afraid. We all need a healthy dose of fright.”
Heat waves made the green trees that edged the field and the brown mountains in the distance waver. This would be home for ten days. After desert training and acclimatization, we would drive into Iraq. Our superiors wanted to see that we could perform in the heat and hoped to boost our confidence in our skills and equipment. We drove different vehicles, were turned upside down during roll-over training, and were reminded again and again of the rules of engagement. Near the end, we practiced fighting in a training village of two-story buildings, abandoned cars, and dirt roads with real IEDs. The bombs weren’t powerful or filled with nails, but strong enough to show us what in a real situation could be deadly.
Our company, the 571st Military Police Company based out of Fort Lewis in Tacoma, had 15% women, 85% men. We were a crazy parfait of people, like Hoogerheide, a thin woman from backwoods Georgia with an acne face and fast feet, or Tracewski, a former lobsterman from Maine with fingers like thick ropes. None of us were particularly handsome, beautiful, or educated, and we came from poor families. If we had been to college, we could’ve been officers. We joined in a time of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I entered the Army for a few reasons: it was a job, it would give me discipline, and it would get me the hell out of fucking Florida.
We’d spent nearly a year getting ready for our deployment. As a soldier, I still felt as if I were faking it. This was a long way from being a black-haired punk rocker whose only talents were writing teen-angst lyrics in a half-torn journal and playing a killer guitar—none of which translated to the Army, a place where music was banned in boot camp except for the cadences we barked out as we marched.
(Chapter One continues, but I'm stopping here as I don't want you overwhelmed with too much text at this point.)
Music filled his mind. Specifically, seventeen-year-old Max Rivera dreamed of his last great gig with the Mad Suburbans. They played at a sleazy little bar in Orlando’s Milk District where dollar beers flowed, the lighting came from strings of white Christmas lights, and cigarette smoke filled the place as if a mosquito-fogger truck had plowed through. In fact, cigarettes dangled from the lips of all the band members, even though they hadn’t reached the legal age of eighteen, but, hey, they were into punk, which was fun. In the tightly packed lounge, men tried to hit on the women rather than focus on the band, their crazy hair, their ripped clothes, but Max nonetheless got people dancing with his song “Wanting What You Can’t Have.” Max eagerly played his guitar, yelling into his mike, laughing, feeling the electricity beneath his fingers travel all the way into his amp. The crowd blasted with a cheer. The dream was only ruined when his girlfriend Lynette in her dumpy Disneyland sweatshirt glared at him.
A hammering started. No, it was the phone. Phone? Everyone in the bar stopped to look at him.
Max struggled awake to find the phone ringing. Now he was deeply aware his head pounded. He rolled over in bed, and his hand and arm whacked around the nightstand. He finally touched the phone, an old-fashioned kind, one with a handset and a cord. Where was he?
“Hello?” he mumbled, and a happy up-and-down computer voice said, “Good morning, Mr. Rivera. This is your wake-up call. You wanted me to remind you, too, of the duck march at nine a.m.”
“Fuckin’ duck march?” he blurted and hung up the phone.
He jammed an extra pillow under his head and opened his eyes, trying to remember where he was. His head hurt. He seemed to be in a hotel room with a high view. Duck march?
Now he remembered. When he’d checked in, the young woman at the front desk had explained that every morning at nine, five mallard ducks came down a special elevator from the roof, and a duck master led them down the carpet to the fountain. People lined up on either side to watch.
“That’s what rich people call fun?” he had said.
“It’s a tradition. And, yeah, kind of fun,” replied the young woman, a clerk only a few years older than he.
“Sounds interesting,” he said about the ducks, but he had it meant it as “like needles in the eye.”
And now he remembered why he’d come. Florida was for dead people, and he’d decided to join them. He booked a room at the elegant Peabody Hotel, which was the second tallest building in Orlando. The tallest was an exclusive office building, but there was no way he could get in there.
His plan would have worked, too, if his friend Claire hadn’t called, having heard about his breakup with Lynette, and she weaseled out of him that he was at the Peabody. She assumed he was partying and asked if she could join him. Hot red-headed Claire. She’d told her parents she would be studying with a girlfriend, but she got naked with him instead.
He turned his head to his side. Claire wasn’t there. She had left the bed. “Claire?” he said as loudly as his weak voice would allow. No answer. He reached for what looked to be a note on her pillow.
He read, “Fuck you, Max. You said mean things.”
Mean things? They were just true things.
“We’re not losers—at least I’m not. You’re a doosh.”
He was a better speller than that. It was “douche.”
“P.S. I took your money for a cab.”
He held his poor, aching head. He saw all the empty mini-bottles and beer cans on the floor. He wondered if he’d be charged beyond the one-hundred-dollars he left as deposit.
The TV was on, but the sound was off. It showed a single tall building with smoke coming out of it. He vaguely remembered turning on the TV at night, but he didn’t remember watching it. He’d been too tired to do anything including killing himself. Maybe now he could do it.
He lumbered to the dresser to grab a cigarette. Maybe it’d stop the headache. He lit a match, which made him blink and water. Christ. The lit cigarette slipped from his fingers, and the cherry popped off and burrowed into the Berber. Smoke rose, and he hammered it out with his bare heel, then yelped at the pain. He was doing nothing right.
First his girlfriend, then the band, now Claire. Everything he touched turned to shit. He looked down again, thirty stories up. All he had to do was fly, and it’d be over. He needed to be brave and fly. He pounded his fist against the window, but it just boomed and didn’t break. How to get through? It was time to fly.
A voice on the TV said, “We have word in that perhaps a small plane had gone off course.” The sound was on, after all.
Max moved closer and could see it was a boxy skyscraper against a cobalt blue sky. There was no context, but clearly it wasn’t Florida. The building was on fire. Why?
A wide shot from another angle had the Empire State Building in close, and in the distance, the building on fire had a matching tower, both far taller than the many buildings nearby. Beyond that gleamed a bay. The screen went back to a closer view of just the one tower burning. Max rubbed his lightly tattooed arms, suddenly cold, and he just stared. The same smooth male voice said, “We’re told a number of firefighting companies have been called in. There are no ladders that can go that high. This is the north tower. We’re trying to get an FDNY spokesperson to tell us how this fire will be fought. Buildings like this, I understand, are designed with automatic sprinklers as well as fire hose couplings on every floor. All should be well.”
As Max stared, something came from the right side of the screen—a jet? It flew behind the tower on fire, and a huge orange smoky blast burst from either side of the building. “Oh, my God,” he said in chorus with a man and woman’s voice on TV. The announcer said, “I think a second plane has just hit the second tower.”
“I didn’t see a plane go in,” said another male voice. “The building just exploded.”
“We saw a plane come in from the side, from the right,” said the woman.
Max felt as if he were hallucinating. Did a jet just crash into a building? What about the people in the plane and building? Or was this just a strange movie? He turned the channel. The next channel, though, showed the same thing from a different angle where both towers were shown. Both were on fire. Max was about to shout for Claire, but he remembered she was gone. Maybe the front desk had answers. Maybe that woman at the front desk knew what’s going on now.
When the doors opened to the lobby, no one stood behind the long check-in counter. As he walked through the vast space, his black Chuck Taylors squeaked on the white marble floor and the occasional black inlay. Because of how quiet the place was, it was as if he were in church—or the depths of outer space. He looked for the staff past the modern art, the areas with cushy chairs, the impressive pillars and curvy white walls. He found them around the corner at the mirrored bar. At least twenty people, half of them wearing Peabody Hotel uniforms, quietly watched the TV above the bar. Max joined them, and as the TV gave a slow-motion replay of the plane going in and exploding, everyone there gasped at the fireball. “Definitely a large jetliner,” said a different announcer on the TV. “We may look back on this eleventh day in September as a turning point.”
“I think it’s terrorists,” an old man in tennis whites next to Max said. “It’s going to mean war.” Max didn’t think about who would fight it or where.
The TV showed the plane yet again, and Max’s headache reasserted itself. He really should get some aspirin or something for it. An older woman on his other side, silver-haired, a bit chunky in baggy beige shorts and a shirt as if she were lost on a safari, madly pressed numbers on the keyboard of her cell phone. Anxiety cut across her face. Apparently no one answered.
She looked at him, worried. “Do you know someone there?” she asked, touching his shoulder as if expecting a yes. He said nothing.
She frantically punched in another phone number. He realized he’d been ready to kill himself today, and now in these two buildings on TV, people who surely wanted to live had been crushed and incinerated. They had families, hopes, goals, but some terrorists decided to kill innocent people. Why had he been so easily ready to do himself in?
“My God,” the woman gasped, and her shoulders shook. She stood, isolated, apart from the others, and closed her small Ericsson cell phone, a model Max had thought about getting because it was so small and had something new called Blue Tooth. He didn’t know what to do for her.
“I take it you know someone there,” Max said.
“My son works high up in one of those buildings,” she said between sobs. “He won’t answer his phone. I think he’s dead.”
“Would you…” He paused. “…like to sit?” said Max. “Sit. I’ll sit with you.” He pointed to the chairs at one of the cocktail tables.
“Why would two planes crash into those buildings?” she asked him. “What does this get anyone?”
He shook his head. “It’s a strange world.”
She looked right in his eyes as if he might have more answers.
He said, “My girlfriend, the first girl I loved, slept with everyone in the band just to get back at me. The world doesn’t make sense.”
The woman shook her head, taking his hand. “You’re a good boy.”
“Not really. But maybe someday.”
Her phone rang. She looked hopeful. “Charles?” she said into her phone, and then she beamed and spoke quickly, stepping away.
Some ducks quacked. Max looked over to the red carpet. Apparently no one had told the duck master about the burning towers, and the red-jacketed man guided his five ducks down the empty red runway. The man looked around, confused, and then peered at Max as if Max had the answer to why everyone was at the bar instead of the duck march. No matter. The man guided his charges forward. Each duck faithfully followed the one in front. As if they now knew it was a solemn time, they did not quack. They just marched.
CHAPTER ONE
Iraq and Kuwait, 2006
As if someone had shoved me, I awoke startled on the plane to a falling sensation and a huge creaking sound. The plane leveled off, but my hand pressed against my chest. It was November, 2006. I and another hundred Army soldiers headed to Kuwait City in a C-17 military aircraft. We would be deployed to Iraq after extra training. The seats, most of them arranged lengthwise against the plane’s sidewalls with a few conventional rows in the middle, showed many around me were still asleep. I locked eyes with another soldier across the way as alarmed as I was. Others, oblivious to the turbulence, read or listened to their iPods as I had been doing earlier. I sighed. For a week now, all I could think about was how I was in the last of my safe days.
With its vast space and fluorescent lighting, the C-17 felt like a moving Greyhound bus station. Two car-sized containers lashed down in the middle, behind the seats in the middle, did not add any elegance. I stood, stretched, and moved to one of few windows on the plane. The clouds below me looked like the top of a brain, and the flashes of light going off in the ridges could be nerve endings sparking out electricity. Synapse. I remembered the term from high school bio. I’d never made it beyond a single semester of community college. I’d played in a few bands instead.
Soon, the plane started shaking slightly. We must have been entering a storm, which is what probably had awakened me. I focused on the beauty of those flashes. “Wow,” I blurted without thinking. A soldier near me seated on the sidewall stood to look out the same window, and then the captain sitting on the other side of the cavernous tube stepped over to see. Trying to make a good impression on the captain, I said, “Isn’t nature amazing?”
After looking at my name on my uniform, then staring out the window at the clouds several seconds, he said, “Yes, Private Rivera, but that’s not lightning. Those are bombs going off. We’re over Baghdad.”
The short soldier next to me gasped, and only then did I realize the soldier was a woman—stocky, sturdy, but a feminine face. After other young faces jammed into the window, my skinny friend Hitch pushed on his tiptoes to look and said, “Shit. We’re the mole in Whack-a-Mole.” Whispers and groans erupted as fast as lit gasoline. The plane shook harder, and while it was probably from simple turbulence, we all surely assumed anti-aircraft missiles. The fasten seatbelt sign blinked on. I sat and clutched my seat as if we were already careening in a ball of flame. All the motivational films we’d witnessed in recruitment centers and in training—the “Be All You Can Be” and “Army Strong” stuff—did not prepare us for this moment.
Forty-five minutes later, we landed safely in Kuwait City. When I stepped out the rear into the sauna air, the hot tarmac nonetheless felt wonderfully solid. Adrenaline rushed through me as the words of our LT came back: “Every minute in Iraq can be filled with danger—snipers, car bombs, suicide bombers, IEDs, or an ambush. You’ll have a lot of boredom, punctuated by terror. It’s okay to be afraid. We all need a healthy dose of fright.”
Heat waves made the green trees that edged the field and the brown mountains in the distance waver. This would be home for ten days. After desert training and acclimatization, we would drive into Iraq. Our superiors wanted to see that we could perform in the heat and hoped to boost our confidence in our skills and equipment. We drove different vehicles, were turned upside down during roll-over training, and were reminded again and again of the rules of engagement. Near the end, we practiced fighting in a training village of two-story buildings, abandoned cars, and dirt roads with real IEDs. The bombs weren’t powerful or filled with nails, but strong enough to show us what in a real situation could be deadly.
Our company, the 571st Military Police Company based out of Fort Lewis in Tacoma, had 15% women, 85% men. We were a crazy parfait of people, like Hoogerheide, a thin woman from backwoods Georgia with an acne face and fast feet, or Tracewski, a former lobsterman from Maine with fingers like thick ropes. None of us were particularly handsome, beautiful, or educated, and we came from poor families. If we had been to college, we could’ve been officers. We joined in a time of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I entered the Army for a few reasons: it was a job, it would give me discipline, and it would get me the hell out of fucking Florida.
We’d spent nearly a year getting ready for our deployment. As a soldier, I still felt as if I were faking it. This was a long way from being a black-haired punk rocker whose only talents were writing teen-angst lyrics in a half-torn journal and playing a killer guitar—none of which translated to the Army, a place where music was banned in boot camp except for the cadences we barked out as we marched.
(Chapter One continues, but I'm stopping here as I don't want you overwhelmed with too much text at this point.)
