DISPATCH FROM DOWN UNDER

Nick Moncrief, left, with a sample of his rap lyrics, and Specialist Terry Taylor.


By MONICA DAVEY

N one more steaming day in Baghdad, word filtered out to the artillery regiment that some of the younger guys were not going to get to fly home for their promised rest-and-relaxation break. Soldiers fumed. They'd spent months of long hours in this crazy place, knowing that at any moment a homemade bomb might explode, a rocket-propelled grenade might land or an Iraqi child might spit at them.

But though they were armed to the teeth, they chose to respond with a different kind of weapon. They stepped outside and, of all things, began to rap.

"I started doing some of the most outlandish freestyle you can imagine," Javorn Drummond, an Army specialist from Wade, N.C., recalled the other day. "We were just going off about how we do all the work, but we can't go home. We didn't care who could hear. We didn't have to care. I'll tell you, it felt good. At that time, they were killing us. We were working so hard we weren't getting sleep."

Moments like those, when service members turn to rap to express, and perhaps relieve, fear, aggression, resentment and exhaustion, have become a common part of life during nearly two years of war in Iraq. "Rap is the one place," Specialist Drummond said, "where you can get out your aggravation - your anger at the people who outrank you, your frustration at the Iraqi people who just didn't understand what we were doing. You could get out everything."

If rock 'n' roll, the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Creedence Clearwater Revival, was the music of American service members in Vietnam, rap may become the defining pulse for the war in Iraq. It has emerged as a rare realm where soldiers and marines, hardly known for talking about their feelings, are voicing the full range of their emotions and reactions to war. They rap about their resentment of the military hierarchy. But they also rap about their pride, their invincibility, their fallen brothers, their disdain for the enemy and their determination to succeed.

Plenty of soldiers still listen to the twang of country music or the scream of heavy metal. Many, in fact, said that metal - and albums like Slayer's "Reign in Blood" - helped psyche them up for combat as they roared across the desert in the very first days of conflict. But a great many say it was 50 Cent, Pastor Troy or Mystikal (himself, a Gulf war veteran) that kept them chugging along in trucks and Humvees - in one case, manning the Humvee machine gun - miniheadphone lines tucked away under Kevlar vests. They listened to get stirred up on the way to house raids, before tense guard duty assignments or simply when they awoke to another tedious day under that enormous sun.

The more than 1,450 American service members killed in Iraq have also left behind traces of hip-hop scattered in the memories. Sgt. Jack Bryant Jr., of Dale City, Va., who died last Nov. 20 when a makeshift bomb blew up near his convoy in Iraq, had written rap, his father remembered the other day. And Pfc. Curtis L. Wooten, of Spanaway, Wash., who was killed on Jan. 4 when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Balad, had planned to go to school when he got home, his brother said, to become a producer in the hip-hop world.

As for the many soldiers who are writing and performing their own raps, their lyrics sample the lexicon of the war - the Sandbox, I.E.D.'s (improvised explosive devices), I.C.D.C. (the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps) and Haji (the word many soldiers use derogatorily for the enemy) - and the wide scope of their feelings about it. "There is a great potential for ambivalence in their words," said Jeff Chang, author of a new book, "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation" (St. Martin's Press). "That's part of the ambivalence hip-hop has often carried. You hear two ideas in what they are saying here: An implicit critique of 'what am I doing here?' but at the same time, the idea of loyalty to your street soldiers, loyalty to your troops, loyalty to the guys you ride with."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/arts/music/20dave.html?ex=1109739600&en=6090fbb611aae24a&ei=5070

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


A sample of the work of Specialist Richmond Shaw.

FIRST RIP

Sometimes I just stay in the zone
Contemplating and praying to God that I get a chance to come home
Did you ever get to lay in the prone
Receiving enemy fire while slugs barely missing your dome
I noticed that my face is aging
so quickly
Cuz I've seen more than your average man in his fifties
I'm 24 now
Got two kids and a wife
Having visions of them picturing
me up out of they life
This is real life homey
And it just so deep
It's so deep when you go through long weeks with no sleep
I.E.D.'s be going off while we out
on patrol
Scrap metal be ripping through your [expletive] skin and your bones
Got a soldier now and he's trying to put up a fight
But you really knowing he's taken
the last breaths of his life.

A sample of the work of Specialist Terry Taylor.


SECOND RIP

I speak that real flow often ringing alarms
This country needs us way more than when we
needed Saddam
We start out our day by readjusting our sights
and checking out the damage that happened from
mortars last night.
Yeah, I think the I.C.D.C. starting to snitch
Telling what goes where and which places to hit
If they prove me otherwise, no intent to be shady
I blame it on this war that made me paranoid and crazy.
But, this ain't fact only theory and my statements
About the struggle stress and pain every day we facing
Trials and tribulations daily we do
And not always life's pains wash away in our pool
When we take a dip, we try to stick to the script
But when those guns start blazing and our friends get hit
Thats when our hearts start racing and our stomach
get whoozy.
Cuz for y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/arts/music/20SOLDIER-RAP.html?ex=1109739600&en=d4e82aea421970d8&ei=5070


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx