"You can't call home and tell your mom your door got blown off by an IED," First Cavalry Sergeant Neal Saunders tells Newsweek in the current issue. "No one talks about what we're going through. Sure, there are generals on the TV, but they're not speaking for us. We're venting for everybody."

Saunders had a keyboard, digital mixer, cable, microphones and headphones shipped to an overseas military address and then built a plywood shack, with cheap mattress pads for soundproofing.

He then invited other Task Force 112 members to join him in his studio; they call themselves 4th25 - pronounced fourth quarter, like the final do-or-die minutes of a game. This week an open-mike competition in Baghdad is expected to draw many of the front-line military's top performers, report Baghdad Bureau Chief Scott Johnson and Correspondent Eve Conant in the June 13 issue of Newsweek.

The GI rappers are giving listeners back home an uncensored glimpse of life in Iraq, straight from the troops – troops like Johnny (Snap) Batista and Richard (Ten Gram) Bachellor, who patrol Baghdad with a unit of the Marine Antiterrorism Battalion.

In their off-duty hours they place a boombox on the pavement in the Green Zone and improvise rhymes about how it feels to be shot at or to lose a friend to an IED. One of their most popular numbers starts in a hushed tone, almost a whisper:

"There's a place in this world you've never seen before / A place called streets and a place called war /Most of you wanksters ain't never seen the fleet / You talk about war and you've only seen the street."

Rap gave six members of the First Armored Division a way to hold themselves together, Newsweek reports. They call their group "Corner Pocket."

Based at Baghdad's airport last year, they were pounded by daily mortar and rocket attacks. Finally they put the whole mess into rhyme and set out to tape it as a music video on location at the airport. "Every time we'd go out to record our music, there'd be an attack and we'd have to stop," says Spc. Joseph Holmes, who laid down the music tracks for "Stay in Step."

It's about the cost of survival: "Soldiers are dying every day, that's why we ain't smiling. I'm the one you see on TV / Army infantry, one arm holding my sleeve from a previous injury / Bloody desert combat fatigues, dusty and ammoless M-16 with a shredded sling / ... Hit in the head and shoulder but still taking deep breaths /'Cause I'm in Kevlar and sappy plates in my flak vest."

[PR Newswire]

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