It takes me months to track down Jason Everman. At first, it feels strangely appropriate that it’s so difficult – he’s a master of military subterfuge, after all. I tried to contact journalists to whom he’d given interviews previously. One of them followed me back on Twitter, but completely ignored both a direct message and an email. A second also never responded, and a third sent me a friendly reply telling me that ‘Jason keeps a super low profile online, so the best way to get in touch with him is probably through his band, Silence and Light.’
This I duly tried, initially to no avail. I’d vaguely hoped to see Everman in person and do something interesting. Something that might scare me a little and entertain you, the reader. I’d had visions of the far-flung Pacific Northwest, perhaps climbing Mount Rainier, fearing for my life while asking Everman about his. Coming away with the rich, fresh ore of experience from which good writing can be mined.
But, as the months wore on, I gave up hope and slumped into despondency. I was clearly never going to get in touch with Everman.
Then, suddenly, Silence & Light gave me his email address.
We speak by Zoom, early in the morning my time on Christmas Eve. Jason had offered me a window that seemed to include Christmas Day itself. Perhaps he doesn’t take Christmas very seriously, my sister and I speculated. While I’m drinking a coffee and waiting to start, the windows beyond my desk still black, I see that he’s entered the call early, so I do too. He doesn’t switch the camera on, though I think this is more to do with his unfamiliarity with Zoom than a reluctance to do so. Having had his privacy emphasised, I decide not to ask him to. I know that he’s somewhere distant – UTC +13, he told me by email.
‘Are you in the Far East?’ I ask, after a couple of pleasantries. ‘Right now I’m on Tinian Island,’ he replies. I admit that I don’t know where this is. ‘I guess the best reference point – it’s east of Guam, a couple hundred miles.’ ‘For something you’re working on?’ ‘I’m helping a friend move a sailboat,’ he says. ‘So, it’s been a good trip so far.’ He speaks in the clear, precise, polite way I associate with US military types, though with a slight hesitancy – ahs, ums and y’knows – that makes him sound thoughtful. I get the sense his answers will be to the point.
First things first, the music.
‘Do your spells in bands feel a really small part of your life now, or do they feel like big, important moments?’
‘No, they feel really small, and the older I get the more insignificant they are in a way. I mean months go by where I don’t even think about that part of my life, for whatever reason.’
‘They were quite brief periods, I suppose?’
‘Yeah, when you look back on it. I think about this stuff all the time, not just music stuff. I was on Peleliu Island recently – I’m a big military history buff – and I was thinking about World War II. Both my grandfathers fought in it. And World War II, at least the US involvement, was four years.’ He chuckles. ‘It’s so shockingly short, looking back on it now. This huge, huge event. It boggles my mind, at least.’
‘And World War I, too,’ I suggest. ‘Only four years for all involved, but it changed absolutely everything.’
‘Yeah, I think – and this is a tangent, so I’ll make it quick – but you look at WWI, WWII and the interstitial wars that were fought in the twenties and thirties. I look at it like how the Peloponnesian War is considered one conflict, but it was really three conflicts with periods of peace built in between. I think in maybe a hundred years or more we’ll look at WWI, WWII and everything in between as an ongoing conflict with hot and cold periods.’
This talk of history reminds me of a story I’d read about Everman making a model plane from a famous Special Forces battle.
‘Yeah, I made a model of one of the C-130s from the Entebbe Raid.’
‘I hadn’t heard of the battle until I read that interview with you. Was Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother involved in it?’
‘Yes, Yoni was killed in that operation; he was the only Israeli casualty.’
I want to dig deeper into a statement Everman made to the New York Times: that the bonds he formed in the military, and in the rarefied, heightened world of the Special Forces, were stronger than in any band.
‘The personal bonds that have been created in my life are definitely with dudes I served with overseas, y’know. I’m sure there are bands out there where it’s not such a superficial relationship or there’s a sense of brotherhood with the people you’re playing with. I unfortunately never experienced that. That being said, there are still people from those days that I’m very close friends with and I love as brothers for sure. So, it’s not entirely superficial, I guess is what I’m trying to say.’
I’m getting the sense that Everman will be more loquacious on matters military, and since we’re on the subject, I take the plunge and ask him if there’s an operation he was involved in that he can tell me about.
‘Like, battles?’ he asks, surprised. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Um . . . I mean . . . No. I guess?’ There’s a pause. Yikes, I think – for a moment I worry I’ve made a faux pas. ‘I guess that’s kind of indicative of the GWAT4 in general – there really have been no set-piece battles. Like the Second World War or Korea or even probably Vietnam. Like my experience, and it’s more of a function of just being in smaller units I guess, is there’s been some intense firefights for sure, some crazy stuff, definitely moments where I was like “OK, we might not get out of this one.” But I don’t have any, y’know, motion- picture-style battles or anything like that. Maybe the Iraq invasion, watching the conventional military kind of do their thing was really impressive and awesome.’
‘The scale and power of it?’
Essentially watching a true combined arms assault in action. That was cinematic for sure.’
‘I assume you’re following what’s happening in Ukraine. Are you impressed by what they’re managing to achieve?’
‘Yeah. They’re getting a lot of outside support, which is definitely a factor. But I guess what’s been most stunning to me is how bad the Russian military is. I mean they’re shockingly bad. The troops and the equipment. I honestly was expecting a lot more from them. The best quote I heard, from someone I know who was fighting over there, was the Russians were “worse than ISIS”.’
‘You’ve got friends out there working privately?’
‘Yeah, I know a couple of guys who joined the Ukrainian – it’s not called the foreign legion but it’s something similar.’
‘They must be brave and motivated.’
‘Yeah, I understand the allure. Even now, post GWAT, there’s this romantic notion of fighting the good fight or whatever. I can definitely understand the whole missing the action kind of stuff.’
‘Did you do any private military work yourself?’
‘I’ve taken some security consulting jobs here and there, but I think at this point my military days are probably behind me. Which is fine because I’ve got other stuff on the horizon that I’m interested in.’
I want to hear more about the way Everman has perceived and planned his life in archetypes; poet, warrior. Does he still look at things that way?
‘Oh, absolutely, it’s a work in progress, that I’m sure I’ll die before it’s even close to completion. Just being active in the endeavour, to me, I think is key in human flourishing. I’ve always been interested in historical figures who were these well-rounded human beings. So, you were talking about the SAS earlier – I just started watching the BBC mini-series, have you seen it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Super good. Obviously I’m sure a lot of it’s amplified for dramatic effect. But dudes like David Stirling and Paddy Mayne – these larger-than-life characters – are so necessary, at least in the evolution of special operations. They were all cut from that cloth, and I think that’s really intriguing.’
To this day it makes me sad that both Kurt and Chris killed themselves,
There are a few controversies around Mayne, one of which is detailed in SAS: Rogue Heroes, the Ben Macintyre book on which the series is based. In one of the shock, desert night raids the SAS pioneered, Mayne machine-gunned uniformed but off-duty combatants.
‘That’s a tough one,’ Everman says. ‘The GWAT rule of engagement was that if they didn’t have a weapon, you didn’t engage, and so that was the whole thing. I, thankfully, was personally never involved in a situation where there were CIVCAS, or someone who didn’t have a gun was shot. So I think that’s an interesting ethical question – if it is still uniformed combatants armed or not. I’m not sure what the Geneva Convention says about that.’
I refer to the story that stuck with me from an SAS documentary, when a soldier describes a colleague in a photo, deep behind enemy lines, as being ‘happy to be there’. I wonder when Everman realised he was capable of this.
‘I wouldn’t call myself fearless, because if you’re not afraid in situations like that there’s something wrong with you. But you manage it, and that’s the key. Since I was a child, I was always a risk taker. A lot of stupid stuff really. I kind of had a free-range childhood in that, from a very early age I was pretty much left to my own devices, so that meant just going out in the woods and getting on my bike or whatever . . . Let’s see – stupid stuff I did as a child. There were the train tracks that ran behind our house, one place we lived – and by house, I mean trailer. I would go up to the train tracks, and there was this corner where the train had to slow down to negotiate the corner, so I would jump on the train and just ride it for a few miles and then jump off and walk home.
‘There were these high-tension power lines – like the big steel towers – I would climb those. Six or seven years old, so stupid. Climbing to the top, no safety gear, no idea of what electricity was capable of doing. Just dumb stuff, but it was high adventure.’
‘Did other kids seem different, and impressed?’
‘I mean, at the time it was just normal. And my parents – my mother especially – encouraged an adventurous childhood. We’d be camping on the Washington coast somewhere, on one of the big rivers that come down from the Olympic Mountains. And I had this twenty-dollar, piece of shit, K-Mart inflatable raft – something meant to be a swimming-pool toy. And my mum would drive me ten miles up the river, drop me off with my little raft, and I’d raft by myself down to the camp- site, ten miles down the river. And it would take a few hours to get down, but it was high adventure,6 it was so fun. I look at it now, and my mum would probably go to jail for doing that now.’
I want to get to the question that’s most burning for me. The leaders of both the bands that Everman played with ended up killing themselves: Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. Listening back to the grunge era, the music and lyrics are very dark – think Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, Pearl Jam – as well as Nirvana and Soundgarden. What was it about this generation of musicians? Why were all of these characters so apparently damaged?
‘Someone asked me a very similar question recently, and this person posited that it was this gloomy Pacific Northwest, like a physical thing – geography and weather and things like that. And I was like, ahh, I don’t think that’s it. Conversely, the Pacific Northwest is beautiful. I’ve lived there basically my entire life, with a few exceptions, and I’m still struck by the natural beauty of Cascadia. I’ll stop – I’ll see the Olympic Mountains on a clear day, and I’ll have to stop and take it in, it’s like “Wow, that’s amazing.”
‘I think maybe it’s more – and this is my kind of counter- hypothesis I guess – is it’s a Gen X thing. We’re all the kids of baby boomers, and so many of those marriages were unhappy and ended in divorce – that was definitely true of my childhood. And most of my peers, it’s a similar story, y’know. So I definitely had, at least when I got to my adolescence, a less than happy childhood. I still have my demons, and it’s a full-time job grappling with them and keeping them in check. I think in the cases you’re talking about, the demons won.’
And did Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell get trapped in a romantic melancholy?
‘This is supposition on my part, but yeah, I think that clicheÌ of the tortured artist, there’s an element of that I think. Maybe some people feel they need that in order to be creative, and so if it’s not occurring naturally it becomes self-inflicted. And does it work or not? I don’t know, I mean, I’m sure there’s instances where it does.
‘But to this day it makes me sad that both Kurt and Chris killed themselves, you know. Because if there’s ever been people in a position to do whatever they wanted, they were. But everybody’s fighting their own battle . . .’
And with that, I leave Everman on Christmas Eve in the tropics to ‘try and find a place in town that’s serving some kind of Christmas dinner, maybe’.
‘I’m sorry it was kind of a convoluted process,’ he says. ‘Things have been kind of busy.’
I end the call feeling quite inspired. Who knows, perhaps life has high adventure in store for us all yet.
