[Vision2020] Rhyme or Crime?

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of the January 25, 2010 edition of the Army Times.

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Rhyme or Crime?

Soldier’s violent rap song threatened commanders, battalion mates, Army says
By Joe Gould, Army Timies Reporter

The Army says Spc. Marc Hall threatened to kill his superiors.

His lawyer says Hall wrote a song, a hip-hop “fantasy,” express­ing a
soldier’s anger at being stop­lossed.

Now Hall’s in jail.

Welcome to the Army, post-Fort Hood tragedy. Suddenly, the mes­sage is any
perceived threat — large or small — demands imme­diate attention.

“You have to take any threat seriously, especially in light of the tragedy
at Fort Hood, and if you make a threat, we take it serious­ly,” said Kevin
Larson, the spokesman at Fort Stewart, Ga., where Hall is posted.

“We owe that much to our sol­diers and their families.” Larson said that
Maj. Nidal Hasan’s deadly shooting spree at Fort Hood, which left 13
soldiers dead, influenced the commander’s decision to charge Hall, 34, who
has been held in the Liberty County, Ga., jail since his arrest.

Hall faces military charges after he lashed out at his superiors — and
stop-loss — with a violent, profanity-laced hip-hop track titled “Stop
Loss.” “Turn and I’ve got a [expletive] magazine with 30 rounds, on that
three round burst, ready to fire down,” Hall sings. “Still against the
wall, I grab my M4, spray, and watch all the bodies hit the floor.” “I bet
you never stop-loss nobody no more — in your next lifetime, of course. No
remorse,” he sings.

Rapping under the name Marc Watercus, Hall posted the song to
marcwatercus.com. The song tar­gets personnel “E-7 and above ... You think
you so much bigger than I am?” According to Army charges filed Dec. 18,
Hall, a mechanic threat­ened to “go on a rampage,” made threatening
statements to his bat­talion mates and distributed songs that referred to
“wrongfully threat­ening acts of violence.” “He made the threats via the
song, and also verbal threats, essentially that he would shoot peo­ple,
his commander, fellow sol­diers,” Larson said.

Hall was due to exit the Army in February, but he learned in October that
the Army planned to extend his service involuntarily, said Hall’s civilian
attorney, Jim Klimasky.

Although stop-loss deployments ended this month, Hall’s unit, the 3rd
Infantry Division’s 2nd Battal­ion, 7th Infantry Regiment, 1st Heavy
Brigade Combat Team, deployed in December 2009 and fell under stop-loss.

Klimasky said Hall’s comman­ders “overreacted” to an artistic expression
of Hall’s frustration.

“This isn’t really a threat, it’s an attack on stop-loss, and it’s
proba­bly a fantasy story about his want­ing to shoot people, but the
thing is, it’s obvious what it is; it’s a hip­hop song,” Klimasky said.

He said the song’s exaggerated violence is common to the genre.

“There’s a lot of songs like that; it doesn’t mean anybody’s going to do
anything,” Klimasky said. “Why would anybody tell the world he’s telling
everybody he’s threatening somebody in such a manner?” Jeff Paterson, of
Courage to Resist, a resister-support organi­zation collecting money for
Hall’s legal defense, said Hall recorded the track before Hasan’s attack.

“I don’t think he would have said these things in the same kind of way, in
hindsight of the Fort Hood shootings,” said Paterson.

Hall had reached out to the organization a week before his arrest to deal
with “questions of whether or not he was going to deploy with his unit,”
Paterson said. “To all our surprise, he was arrested before that question
even came up because of this song.” The 2004 war documentary “Gunner
Palace” showed scenes of soldiers in Iraq assembling to rap spontaneously,
or “freestyle,” to “get things out.” The sessions were approved by the
unit commander and were meant to help the sol­diers vent.

“In that confine, everyone was fair game; they would spit out rhymes about
the Army, about the company commander, but it was more in fun, almost
combative word games, the same way they would do anything competitive,”
director Michael Tucker said.

Sometimes the lyrics were “very harsh,” he said, about harming Iraqi
civilians or detainees, or ques­tioning the war. But it would have been
rare for a soldier to use a verse to attack his chain of command.

“Is that just them venting? I think that [Hall’s] lawyers may be right,
that that’s one of the things about rap, is it tends to talk about things
that are a fantasy,” Tucker said. “If you’re a kid and you write an essay
about killing your princi­pal, are you really going to do it? But if
there’s just been a school shooting, you might get called to the
principal’s office.” Rapper and former soldier Neal Saunders, whose CD
“Live From Iraq” was recorded in a makeshift studio in Baghdad, said he
dis­agreed with Hall’s opposition to stop-loss and his means of expressing
it.

“You could talk about freedom of speech, but with that comes
responsibility for the things that you’ve said,” said Saunders, 30, a
former sergeant with the 112th Cavalry. “You’re going to talk about
actually gunning down your company commander, causing all kinds of havoc
and rampaging, that’s going a little too far.” Saunders suggested that
Hall’s song could have been more power­ful if it were more authentic.

“He should have done a song about how scared he was, because that’s what
it was,” said Saunders. “It’s all about being scared, and he just needs to
come to terms with that.” Paterson, of Courage to Resist, said Hall’s
frustration stemmed from conflicted feelings between the expectation he
would put the war behind him and his new orders.

Among several videos Hall post­ed to YouTube before he was being
stop-lossed is one dedicated to his daughter. In it, he raps and dances,
he films an Iraqi civilian beat-boxing, and he makes small talk with a
civilian worker at what appears to be a laundry facility.

“This is the last time we’re going to be here,” Hall tells the man.

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Spc. Marc Hall, also known as hip-hop artist Marc Watercus, was arrested
and is being held for allegedly making threats to his command in one of
his songs, “Stop Loss.”

http://tinyurl.com/Spc-Marc-Hall

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Judge for yourself . . .

"Stop Loss" By Marc Watercus
(some profanity)

http://www.tomandrodna.com/Songs/Stop_Loss.mp3

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Thoughts, V-peeps?

Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Unknown