Steven Cuevas
March 20, 2007
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Since the war in Iraq began four years ago, the Marine Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms has sent thousands of young leathernecks into battle. One of them is telling his stories with a guitar and a mic.
Steven Cuevas: Even out of uniform, Chad Van Rys is 100% Marine. He's over six feet tall, stands ramrod straight, his hair is buzzed high and tight. He speaks directly and to the point.
Chad Van Rys: With me, it's "Don't mess with my family, don't mess my friends, don't mess with my money, and don't mess with my spare time."
[Song "Don't Cross Me" plays, with lyrics "'Cause I might kill you."]
Cuevas: Van Rys is 22. He writes and performs all his own material, a raw, countrified kind of folk-rock. The young corporal's music is direct, just like he is.
["Don't Cross Me" continues to play, with lyrics "Yeah, the whiskey runs in my blood, the whiskey runs in my blood, and I'm on fire."]
Cuevas: Many of these songs were written while he served in Iraq. He's recorded about 12 of them on a demo tape. He's done three tours in all. Van Rys is an aircraft rescue firefighter. His crew spent most of its time cleaning up the carnage wrought by improvised explosive devices.
Chad Van Rys's home away from home is the Beatnik Cafe, a few miles off-base in Joshua Tree. It's where he works out a lot of his new material at a weekly open mic.
Van Rys: This is the morning after a pretty rough night out in Ramadi. We lost 3 friends that night. [Begins to play song]
Cuevas: Those friends were Army specialists Shane Woods and Ignacio Ramirez, and Sergeant Aaron Jagger, killed by a roadside bomb outside Ramadi last August. Van Rys met Jagger the month before. Jagger also played guitar.
Van Rys: We were gonna get together and jam. I ran into him two times after that, and then the next time I ran into him, it was on the street when I had to recover him and his two, his driver and his gunner.
[Van Rys singing: "Let them know that the bugle's voice means we all die today."]
Van Rys: I found his hat, and I asked one of the other soldiers, I was like "This wasn't 1st Sergeant Jagger, was it?" And they said, "Yup." I gave him the hat and I gave him 1st Sergeant Jagger's holster, and he gave us a body bag.
Cuevas: Chad Van Rys grew up in California's Central Valley on his family's almond farm. When he was young, he started singing Christian hymns in church with his parents, his brother, and his sister.
Parishioners called them the five C's; all their first names begin with C. But coming home on leave wasn't always so easy.
Van Rys: The first question out of anybody's mouth when you got home is "Have you killed anybody? Was it cool to kill somebody?" I haven't killed anyone. And I don't think it would be cool to kill anyone.
[Van Rys singing "Veterans"]
Van Rys: I was talking to my friend from the infantry, and he's like, "I hate it when people try to get in my head. They try to ask me what it's like to take someone's life. I tell 'em the story, I tell them exactly what happened, and they don't like it." You know. And that's exactly where that line came from, "Don't try to look behind their eyes, 'cause half the time, you're not going to like what you see."
Cuevas: Some of his songs could be interpreted as anti-war, but Van Rys is a staunch defender of the military. Still, his wartime experiences have mellowed him.
Van Rys: I'm not trying to race through life anymore. After my first tour, I was like, "I need to slow down."
Cuevas: Mopping up after roadside bomb explosions – it can change you.
Van Rys: Even if I know 'em, or even if I don't know 'em, it's still hard for me. It's still another man. Someone's father, someone's uncle, someone's brother. Last year, we had to pull a female off of a medevac who was literally blown in two, and that's somebody's sister. I have a sister! I didn't see anybody else. I saw myself pulling my sister off of a bird to take her to a morgue. I don't know, maybe I'm too emotionally weak, too emotionally soft for the military, to go back to Iraq again. That was hard for me. I didn't even know who she was, but the only person I saw was my sister. Yeah, things like that made it hard to stay in.
Cuevas: Corporal Chad Van Rys just got his discharge papers. He and his wife are resettling in Nashville. He's enrolled in college. He's playing a few open mics and hopes to land a record deal. If something comes of it, fine. If not, he says he's just as happy to relish the simple pleasures of civilian life.
