February 04, 2005

Uncle Ted In Fallujah

Ted Nugent was on Bob & Tom yesterday (recall that I'm always a day behind on my B&T listening since I download the MP3s of the show at night and listen to them on the treadmill the following morning), and those of you who remember his previous appearances know that he's always a blast to listen to. Tom asked him to talk about his recent USO trip to Iraq with Toby Keith, and I've transcribed his response below (all the punctuation is my best guess and I couldn't for the life of me figure out where to put the periods). This interview alone justified the cost of my B&T VIP subscription. Now fasten your seat belts, 'cause here we go:

Well, it was a glorious celebration, particularly as life is good, bad, and ugly. It was the greatest of good, and it was the most gut-wrenching of bad and ugly, but the irrefutable conclusion is that good must hammer relentlessly - and good is hammering relentlessly - to eliminate the bad and the ugly, and the spirit, the soul, the attitude, the piss and vinegar, the fire, the passion, the American Dream firestorm of every man and woman of the Armed Forces, everybody in the Army, the Marines, the Air Force, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, the cavalry, everywhere we went, playing acoustic guitars in some hell zone of a tent outside of Fallujah, sharing C-130s and Chinook helicopters with flag-draped coffins, it was an intense - I believe - y'know, I'm a pretty intense guy anyhow, but I've never witnessed nor felt deep in my guts an intensity of confidence and certainty that was fortified there like never before in my life, that the whole world sucks but America sucks less, and the more America can get freedom and liberty and a hint of these glorious God-given rights that are guaranteed in our Constitution and our Declaration and our Bill of Rights - the more that we can bring that to people, the better chance they have of having a quality of life - most of them for the first time in their lives, so my spirit is soaring on eagle wings right now, and it'll never come down because of that experience.
Of course, once you get Ted going, he's hard to stop, and after a brief exchange with the guys, he continued:
...you haven't lived until you've seen Toby Keith performing 'Great White Buffalo' on an acoustic guitar with some little half-assed microphone supertaped to a folding chair in a tent in Fallujah with 100% of the audience toting machine guns. It was so beautiful, I cried tears of emotion. It was absolutely beyond anything I could have ever dreamed, getting my first guitar back in 1955, but it was, it was moving because, again, because of the buoyant intensity of the troops. I mean, here you've got men and women in just the most athletic, most attentive, most warrior atmosphere that you've ever been in. They're all in great shape, they're all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, cocked, locked, and ready to rock, both figuratively and literally, and you're playing a song like 'Great White Buffalo' with Toby Keith, and you're wearing kevlar, you just came in in the middle of the night in a clandestine operation where we weren't even allowed to know where we were going, it was like two in the morning and we land in this godawful desert where you can hardly breathe, and this giant caravan of Hummers and Bradley military vehicles, and I'm manning a big Ma Deuce Browning on top of a Hummer. I thought I was going to die, I mean die like in 'go to Heaven,' and it was BEAUTIFUL, and then I get a guitar and start whippin' out a 'Great White Buffalo' song with Toby Keith at my side. I'm tellin' ya, I've been to the mountaintop and I'm living there as we speak.
But wait! There's more!
...with the emotion of the USO tour for the troops - and I talked to you guys about it live from Iraq, I remember that - and it was very emotional, and it once again cannot be overemphasized that when you're bringing a big 'thank you' to the troops on the front lines of the War on Terror when our brave soldiers are dying every day, but then you take part in that sacred ceremony, saluting a flag-draped coffin entering the back of a C-130, and then you get in that 130 and you're sitting there with those flag-draped coffins, and you know their names - we made our last trip out of Baghdad with LT Erik McCrae, and he had died so we could have radio fun, they die so that we can have barbecues, they die so that we can have concerts, they die so that we can be the best that we can be and reap the rewards of our own work ethic, and I'm gonna tell you, that stays with you forever. So when I hear some numbnut tell me that war is not the answer, and I think back to Pearl Harbor, and I think back to Pol Pot and Adolph Hitler, that maybe some retarded person like Michael Moore could tell the Jews that got out of Auschwitz that war's not the answer, and it makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. So I salute the President, I salute the United States military, and I think we all should go to uso.org and help them in any way that we can so that the truth finds its way into policy making so that that support is tangible and efficient so that we can win this war against terror.
Phew! OK, I need a nap now.

Update: The interview sounds much better than it reads, so I'd like to thank Floyd of excelsiornews.com for hosting the audio. You can hear the parts I excerpted above or the whole damn thing.

Posted by Chris at February 4, 2005 12:35 PM

Category: General Weirdness
Comments

"If somebody else is willing to host it, I'll cut an MP3 and send it to you."

Drop me an email. I don't have a blog, but I am an admin at a small entertainment news website/message board. I'll make a space on my server for it. :)

Ted is the Man.

Posted by: Fuloydo at February 4, 2005 01:45 PM

I have a blog and can host for you. Email me.

Posted by: Hans Mast at February 4, 2005 03:05 PM

Hans, Floyd has it for now, but if he gets INDCalanched into oblivion, I may call on you to pick up the flag. Thanks.

Posted by: Chris of Dangerous Logic at February 4, 2005 05:22 PM

Thank you both, Chris and Floyd, for the post and the audio. It does sound better than it reads, and with so many entertainers on the other side it was great to find this.

Posted by: Retread at February 4, 2005 06:14 PM