(Please support our efforts to raise awareness of and funds for veterans health care.)
Soldier Stories: A benefit show for veterans’ health care
8pm, Wednesday, May 27
Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, Berkeley
Lou Ponticas of San Francisco, who, along with Nell Robinson co-founded the Take the Stage band performance workshop, and is a musician and soldier currently serving in Iraq, has written us a letter about the role of music in his life there. This is the first Soldier Story:
Hello Friends and Neighbors!
I’m writing to you from Iraq, where I am serving as a platoon sergeant with a California Army National Guard unit. We’re a little better than halfway through our tour here. My home is in San Francisco.
This is my third deployment with the military. I first came over here in 1991 with the Marines in the first Gulf War. In 2003, long after leaving the Marines and a couple years past my 40th birthday, I felt compelled to serve again. Too old for the Marines, I joined the California Army National Guard. Much to my chagrin, while my unit shipped out to Iraq, I was sent to Bosnia. This time around, I’m here in charge of a platoon of 48 soldiers, conducting convoy security missions in northern Iraq.
Like most soldiers, I’ve always had some sort of music with me to help me unwind, relax and otherwise briefly escape from the Army and the stresses that accompany service in a combat zone. It’s funny to think about how that’s changed over time.
During Desert Shield/Desert Storm, I carried a Sony Walkman and one tape cassette with Willie Nelson on one side and Emmylou Harris on the other. I wore out that cassette tape so much that I could hear Willie singing backup on Emmylou’s songs sometimes.
By the time I got to Bosnia 13 years later, an old friend sent me an iPod. Unfortunately, I had no music to load onto my new iPod, but I did have access to the Internet. Not only did I order those same two Willie and Emmylou albums, but I also ordered a guitar and my first bluegrass album. I came home from that deployment determined to keep playing the guitar and bluegrass music.
Here in Iraq, I’ve got my guitar with me again. I also brought along a mandolin I’d bought on eBay, thinking I might have time to learn how to play it. (Soldiers continue to stop and ask what kind of instrument I’m playing.) Lucky for me, there’s a medic in my platoon who plays and sings, mostly country. He borrows my guitar and I plunk away on the mandolin whenever we have time…
My iPod from Bosnia finally gave up the ghost just before we shipped over here, so I had to get a new one. This time, I’ve got Willie, Emmylou, Laurie Lewis, Rhonda Vincent and hundreds of other bluegrass artists and songs to help me unwind and escape. While most soldiers have iPods or MP3 players these days, I haven’t found any that have bluegrass loaded on theirs like I have on mine. Occasionally when we’re out on mission, I plug my iPod into my vehicle’s intercom system and treat my crew to a little “bluegrass in Babylon.”
“Guitar Hero,” the interactive video game where you get to play rock star, is pretty popular here. There’s a setup at the base rec center for soldiers, and several of my guys go crazy with it on their own game consoles in our makeshift barracks. (There’s no “Mandolin Hero” out yet, but perhaps one day…)
When I bought that first bluegrass CD a few years ago, I was trying to reclaim a memory from my teen years in Baltimore. Back then, the only country music radio station in town would feature a bluegrass hour on Sunday nights. A single line from a single song remained stuck in my head for all the years since. It took a bit of surfing on the Net, but I was eventually able to find the song on a CD by Dry Branch Fire Squad.
In that song, “Atlanta is Burning,” a Confederate soldier lies dying on the battlefield, thinking of his home in Georgia, springtime, and his wife and infant son that he will never see again. It was a powerful song when I first heard it decades ago and it resonates ever more strongly with me now as I think of the wife, home, and friends that I have left behind.
I know that many folks in the Bay Area and across the US see the war in Iraq (or any war) as a big mistake, do not support it, and hope for its speedy conclusion. For me, the decision to join superseded my political views. There was a fire burning, fellow soldiers and Marines needed help putting it out, and I felt compelled to help. Once the fire is out, I reasoned, we can talk about who started it.
There is a long line of men and women, stretching back to the time of the Revolutionary War, who have left their families, farms, factories or offices to put on a uniform and serve their country in a time of need. With the need passed, the lucky ones have returned back home to start again. Whether we are talking about the Greatest Generation, Vietnam Vets, or the Minutemen, these people are my heroes and I am proud to stand in that long line with them.
Thank you for thinking of veterans past and present, and thank-you the musicians organizing the “Soldier Stories” benefit. I hope many of you can attend. Harmonizing voices, accompanied by acoustic instruments, is a wonderful antidote for the hustle and bustle that creates the noisy soundtrack of our busy lives. It’s even more powerful and essential medicine for dealing with life in a combat zone…while we’re here and long after we’ve come home.
I look forward to coming home and playing music with my friends again.
