Soldier's Song 

When Sgt. Christopher Tomlinson arrived at the scene, he thought it would be a routine operation. A truck had flipped and rolled into a ravine of waist-high water in the Iraqi desert, but that wasn't so strange.

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• Margeaux Bestard
• MCs featured on Voices from the Frontline (from left): CPL Yoshi, Mischelle, Q, Pyro, Miss Flame.

"They were driving at night, and that country will sneak up on you," says Tomlinson.

It wasn't until he and his team leader hooked up a chain to the wrecked Humvee that Tomlinson realized something was terribly wrong.

"I saw a boot," he says. "It hit me: Oh, my God, there's somebody in there."

His gunner, a bodybuilder from Detroit, climbed into the water and grabbed the front of the Humvee to rescue the trapped soldier. The rest of the team followed, finally pulling him from the wreckage and carrying him out of the water. Tomlinson and the others performed CPR to revive the soldier. In the minutes that followed, the war in Iraq became very real.

"For the first time the mortality of the whole thing hit me. We're not immortal. This is real. This is a real human that I'm trying to save," he says.

It was a losing effort, but Tomlinson kept administering CPR until the other soldiers pulled him away. A medic arrived and told him to "let it go."

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• Margeaux Bestard
• Platoon leader Cpl. Mike Watts, aka Pyro

It wasn't that easy.

"I feel that I failed because I didn't do what I was supposed to do. It doesn't matter what happened, whose fault it was. I was staring a man in the face that I knew had a family," says Tomlinson. "One of his teammates was standing there. He's just got this distraught look on his face, and he was telling me about how this guy, the corporal that passed away, had just talked to his wife and it was his son's birthday yesterday."

When it was over, Tomlinson and his team drove the 15 minutes back to FOB Kalsu in silence, knowing their lives would never be the same.

"That silence hits you, and you don't know what you're supposed to do with that," he says. "Not many 20-year-olds are faced with that. When I came back, the only thing that I knew how to do was rap. That's all I had. Throw in a beat, turn the Xbox on, hit play and let it go. It was me and Deacon. We just went at it for hours, hours, just letting it go.

"If I didn't have that there, that would still be on my conscience today," he adds.

Tomlinson, aka Prophet, discusses the events of that night on "Some Make It, Some Don't," a part-freestyle, part-spoken-word piece on the hip-hop CD Voices from the Frontline, a 24-track collection performed by US soldiers who served, or are currently serving, in Iraq. The CD, released in April, is a musical diary of the experiences and emotions of more than a dozen US soldiers, expressed through songs and spoken-word "skits." Alternately joyous and tear jerking, angry and introspective, Voices from the Frontline explores many aspects of a soldier's life while avoiding the traps of rhetoric and sloganeering.

Most impressive is that the disc sidesteps politics altogether: It's neither pro-war nor anti-war. It just is, giving listeners a chance to hear straight from the soldiers themselves without the pollution of partisan politics. The songs on Voices from the Frontline are about the daily lives and struggles of the men and women serving in Iraq.

As Tomlinson says on the disc's opening track: "This ain't for a paycheck. This ain't for us to be known. This is for somebody to understand a soldier's life."

While Tomlinson was stationed in Iraq, Joel Spielman, president of the independent punk label Crosscheck Records, was stateside, trying to find active-duty soldiers to record a musical combat diary of US soldiers in Iraq.

"I had this vision that I hadn't contextualized yet where someone is listening to the CD and it's like you're listening to a documentary," says Spielman. "You're listening to people report to you live from the battlefield."

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• Marshall Ice
• Sgt. Christopher Tomlinson, aka Prophet

Through his search he met Frankie Mayo of Operation AC, a nonprofit that provides soldiers with non-combat essentials, such as boots, socks, glove kits and, as the name implies, air conditioners. It just so happened that Mayo had a son in Iraq who was an established freestyle MC who had won numerous military talent shows and rap battles.

Her son was Sgt. Tomlinson, 3rd Platoon, 300th Military Police Co.

"I told [Joel] about as strictly as I could that soldiers are down to work," says Tomlinson of his early conversations with Spielman. "When we're doing something we believe in, we do it to the fullest. But if you screw us over we're your worst nightmare. I said I don't want to do something about how much money we can stack up for the label or how much money is gonna be in my pocket. Having money is everybody's dream in the world, but this is much bigger than that. This is the opportunity to speak for 140,000 of my friends, brothers and sisters that are over there fighting right now."

In April 2005, after communicating back and forth through e-mail, Spielman traveled to Fort Riley in Kansas to meet Tomlinson in person. The Voices from the Frontline project took off from there, but recording the soldiers, many of whom were about to be sent back to Iraq, proved to be a logistical challenge.

"The songs were all done in one take," says Spielman, "because we weren't afforded the opportunity for [the soldiers] to come back and work on it again."

Serving as the project's executive producer, Spielman decided not to interfere with the content of the MCs' raps, even though that could have potentially resulted in a collection of politically charged, and perhaps contradictory, statements. "I wasn't sure what direction it was going to go," Spielman says. "There could be divisions in the CD. I said, 'I'm just going to let it happen naturally.' No one ever got into that. I said, 'Just tell me your life story.'

"There was no coaching, and it ended up not becoming political," he adds. "Although some of the songs you can take into your own context. There's some tragedy."

Soldiers appearing on the disc with Tomlinson include MCs Deacon, Mischelle, Pyro, Q, Amp, Miss Flame, Truck and Machine, many of whom are currently deployed in Iraq. Roughly half of the MCs are in the Army, the others in the Marines, with Truck representing the US Navy. Together they spit rhymes about US soldiers' various overseas struggles and experiences, such as dealing with being apart from family, coping with the deaths of friends, coming to terms with taking others' lives and how it feels to come home after a year in the desert.

Even gender issues are addressed, as Miss Flame discusses the unique challenges of being a female soldier in Iraq in her frenetically paced "Girl at War": "Decision-makin' isn't easy for a girl at war/Shit, I could get shot too, just as well as a boy/And you're lookin' me up and down, 'cause you're thinkin' I'm weak/Till you see me in Iraq and I'm patrolling the streets."

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• Crosscheck Records label owner Joel Spielman (left) talks with Amp at a Burbank recording studio in between the soldier's deployments

Perhaps the most poignant track on the disc is "Condolence," by Amp, a rap based on a letter he wrote to the wife of an Iraqi soldier he killed.

"We said, 'Just do a song,'" says Spielman. "He goes, 'I've got these letters I wrote when I came back from my first deployment.' When he played it, I actually wept. He was just apologizing for the losses he's caused. It blew me away."

In the song's second verse, Amp asks for direction, but more than that he asks God to look after the widowed woman: "Whatever you could do to give her assurance/When she is weak could you give her endurance/If you could, clear her heart of discontent and hate/If she gets lost in this world could you show her the way ... If there's a spot for me in Heaven, could you give it to her?"

"The first time I listened to that song and he says, 'If there's a spot for me in Heaven, could you give it to her?' tears welled up in my eyes," says Tomlinson. "Damn, imagine how that feels to say that I'd give up what I have for a stranger because he felt guilty about what he did. That's something that will be with him for the rest of his life."

The song hits home for Tomlinson, whose wife, Kim, also stationed at FOB Kalsu, was almost killed in an ambush.

"A bullet went between four to six inches in front of her face," he says. "Four to six inches and my wife and my son wouldn't be here."

Tomlinson also explores his own mortality in the song "One Hour Before Daylight," which he wrote about a particularly dangerous mission he wasn't sure he would survive. Knowing they were headed into hostile territory, Tomlinson and his soldiers prepared for the mission by writing their blood types on their rib cages and boots. He says in the CD's liner notes: "We were loading up our vests with the grenades and ammo. It was time to go. I looked to my fiancée Kim for reassurance. All I saw was a face full of tears."

He made it back from that mission but almost didn't survive a surprise missile attack during some down time. He and some other soldiers were tossing a football when the missile hit. Tomlinson says he would have been killed if not for an errant pass from a medic. He ran to fetch the overthrown ball when the missile hit 10 feet from where he'd been standing. The event is chronicled in the freestyle rocker "Raiders in Najaf."

These are just a few of the stories that have made Voices from the Frontline a hit with hawks and doves alike in the weeks since its release. Based on the early success of the CD, Spielman has plans for a second volume. Meanwhile, he says he has received serious offers regarding movie, television and music videos for Voices from the Frontline.

For Spielman, though, the greatest satisfaction comes from the personal responses he's received since the disc's late-April release, "from soldiers telling us that this CD has given so many people in the military an outlet for their pain, literally."

The most touching letter, he says, came from a wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet in a VA hospital in Los Angeles. He said of listening to Voices from the Frontline: "Today I saw the first sunshine in a very dark world."

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• Marshall ice
• MCs (from left) Ripper, Anderson, Deacon, Prophet and Machine

Voices brings to life Joel Spielman's vision of a musical combat diary. For listeners, the songs offer a glimpse of a world most will never know. For the soldiers themselves, hip-hop served a more immediate function. Most of the raps, such as those on "Some Make It, Some Don't," "Rest 'n' Peace" and "Raiders in Najaf," originated as catharsis, a way for the soldiers to process what they were experiencing.

"Making an album was the furthest thing from my mind. I didn't think that was ever a possibility," says Tomlinson. "I couldn't write letters home because I didn't want to portray the wrong message. I didn't know what I was doing. It's hard for me to talk. However, you play a beat, I'll go for hours. That became my way to cope with what I dealt with."

Tomlinson says many of the soldiers got together in cyphers, bringing together superior officers with privates. In the cypher, everyone was equal, he says, giving soldiers of all rank a chance to escape the hierarchical structure of the military. It was a unique opportunity for the Army's rank-and-file to express themselves.

"In the Army we all have rank structures. To have a private come up and talk to a sergeant, it ain't gonna happen. You turn a beat on and let them talk to each other through music, it's not disrespectful. That's how it was," says Tomlinson. "My privates that were into rap could come out and rap with me and not have to worry about it. It actually helped them out because it allowed them to let their guard down and not have to worry about getting yelled at. It gave them a way to relax. We did it together. It brought us closer together as a team, unifying us.

"I don't look at it as being unprofessional because it wasn't a disrespectful conversation," he adds. "It didn't pertain to the Army. The words did, but the next day he wasn't calling me Chris in the truck. I'm still Sgt. Tomlinson; he knows that. But it gave him that 20 minutes to actually feel normal, and it gave me that time to feel normal, like I was back home talking to my friends. Everybody out there, regardless if they're a private or a master sergeant, we're all friends or else we wouldn't fight for each other so hard."

It's a release valve that, at least musically speaking, wasn't available to earlier generations of soldiers. However, Tomlinson sees examples of hip-hop in different forms in earlier wars.

"Their way out, their way to express it, was poetry," he says. "I look up everything on the Internet, from WWII to the Civil War, of poets just writing what they can write to put it out there. Well, half of hip-hop is poetry."

Spielman likens it to a scene in the Civil War film Glory.

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"There's a scene before they go into their final battle where most of them get killed, and they're just hymning. They're freestylin'," he says. "They were clapping hands and just going back and forth with each other. It goes back to those times ... They're just clapping and the chorus is, 'Oh my lord, lord, lord,' and each of them has their own part where they just make things up about what they've been through together. If that's not freestylin' I don't know what is."

Soldiers' letters have served as both inspiration and lyrics for songs in other musical genres as well. Last year, the punk band the Dropkick Murphys released "Last Letter Home," a song that incorporated excerpts of correspondence between Sgt. Andrew Farrar and his family prior to Farrar's death on the battlefield. Tomlinson references Seattle hard rock band Alice in Chains and its early-1990s hit "Rooster," the lyrics of which were taken from a letter lead singer Layne Staley's father wrote while serving in Vietnam.

As for hip-hop, Tomlinson says the influence of the genre extends beyond the younger soldiers who grew up with the musical style. High-ranking officers have acknowledged the significance of hip-hop and incorporated it into the lives of soldiers. Rap battles have become a regular part of military events, such as talent shows and holiday celebrations.

For Tomlinson, the assimilation of hip-hop culture in the military has even attracted an unlikely hip-hop fan.

"My 70-year-old grandmother listens to this CD, and loves every word of it," he says, then laughs. "Well, she has the clean version, so she loves every word."

In 2004, Tomlinson returned home from Iraq with two things he didn't have when he left: a smoking habit and a fiancée. Upon returning to the States, Tomlinson and his fiancée, Kim, were married. When we caught up with Tomlinson at his home in Delaware, just prior to the release of Voices from the Frontline, he was changing their son's diaper. Were it not for their son's birth, he says, Tomlinson would be back in Iraq.

"My reason for coming off active duty was that I lost a personal friend of mine that went back for a second tour of Iraq and had a 5-month-old daughter," he says. "At the funeral they played a video of him reading a book to his child, and I had just had my son, which completely changed my life. I decided that was something I couldn't do anymore.

"I love my service. I love my country. I love the Army. It's all I know -- I've been doing it since I was 18," he adds. "But the fact is, waking up every day and not being able to enjoy every minute with my son because I kept worrying about when I was going to leave -- I just couldn't deal with it no more."

But he also couldn't stay away. Tomlinson came off active duty in August 2005 and was out of the military for exactly 22 days.

Then he joined the National Guard.

"I joined with the National Guard because I honestly missed training soldiers, which is what I was good at," says Tomlinson. "Plus, the pay and benefits in the military is a lot better than it is anywhere else."

Now in his mid 20s, Tomlinson refers to himself as a "lifer," and as a recruiter he is able to stay connected to the service, even if he's not a part of the Army. And having a popular hip-hop CD on the charts certainly won't hurt his recruiting. But Tomlinson wants Voices from the Frontline to be taken at face value.

"I'm hoping the album is looked at in the way that we meant for it to be looked at," he says. "It was to speak on behalf of our brothers and sisters that are there. It was on behalf of what we've seen and gone through to give the American public somebody to identify with ... The beauty of being able to open my mind and say, 'OK, instead of speaking for myself, I have the opportunity to speak for everyone I know,' that's a blessing."

For more information on the album, visit www.voicesfromthefrontline.com.

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Spit on this: Sgt. Christopher Tomlinson on the war, the CD and sucka MCs
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