Rock ’n’ roll dropout a war hero
Until this week, Jason Everman was generally regarded as a curious footnote in rock music history: a guitarist who played for Nirvana but could not bear the heavy burden of being a rock and roll superstar.
Everman was expelled from Nirvana and then from the seminal grunge band Soundgarden months before either outfit achieved international fame and fortune. This unfortunate coincidence caused him to be known as the Pete Best of punk rock, after the drummer who was dismissed from the Beatles after a single session at Abbey Road Studios.
It now seems that Everman left rock and roll to find a more exciting day job. The guitarist that even Kurt Cobain regarded as too ‘‘moody’’ to work with instead became a decorated Special Forces soldier, riding on horseback through Afghanistan with the Pashtun, spilling from helicopters on midnight raids and advancing into Iraq aboard a Humvee flanked by helicopters, firing grenades at Iraqi tanks while behind him ‘‘the full might of the US forces’’ unspooled into the desert.
Everman recounted the story of his life after Nirvana to Clay Tarver, a musician he met while on tour with Soundgarden. As a troubled teenager, he had found punk rock therapeutic. ‘‘In punk there’s an extreme kind of conformity to all the nonconformity,’’ he said. ‘‘You realise in all this rebellion everyone’s doing the same thing.’’
He rebelled against all this rebellion in 1993, slipping out of a house in San Francisco that he shared with members of a band called Mindfunk to visit an army recruitment office. He cut his long hair, removed his nose ring, and was transported to Fort Benning in Georgia.
He was in basic training when Cobain committed suicide and photographs of Nirvana appeared on front pages around the world. ‘‘Is this you?’’ a drill sergeant asked him one day, holding up a photograph. There followed a lot of orders such as: ‘‘OK, rock star, give me 50.’’
He deployed to South America with the US Army Rangers, an elite infantry unit, where he found the thrill of carrying out covert operations in the drugs war was similar to that of being on stage.
‘‘The bond of locking shields with each other, working together to defeat a common enemy, it’s a heightened state,’’ he told Tarver, in an interview published by The New York Times. ‘‘You know – something cool is going on here.’’
In 2000 he re-enlisted with US Army Special Forces and deployed to Afghanistan and then to Iraq.
‘‘Iraqi tanks were exploding all around, turrets shooting off into the desert. I saw stuff I never thought I’d see. Buildings blew up in front of me, dude.’’
An anonymous comrade told Tarver that the former Nirvana guitarist ‘‘would get moody some- times, but it didn’t interfere with the task at hand. I would rather work with someone who is quiet than they suck [complain] constantly.’’
Everman’s sister was apparently approached once by two younger Special Forces soldiers who regarded him as a legend and said: ‘‘Dude, do you know what that guy’s done?’’ After he left the army and applied to study philosophy at Columbia University in New York, his application contained a letter of recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal. He graduated in May.
Yesterday a spokeswoman for the university described him as a ‘‘renaissance man’’ and said that besides being a Special Forces veteran, he had hiked the Himalayas, lived as a Buddhist monk in Nepal and had written two stories for anthologies published in 2009 and 2010.
He could not be reached for comment yesterday: the spokeswoman believed he was travelling in Europe.