Pete Hegseth, the United States’ new secretary of defense, was still in elementary school when the Soviet Union crumbled. Unlike people born after 1991, he must have some memory of the Cold War and the demonization of Russians by the American government, especially our military. But when he graduated from Princeton University’s U.S. Army ROTC program and was commissioned in 2003, the Soviet Union was dead and Islamic extremists were America’s demons.
In 2003, Vladimir Putin was winding down his first term as president of post-USSR Russia. Putin did not seem to have left much of an impression on the American public at that time. In a 2003 Pew Research Center phone survey, 47 percent of the Americans polled expressed no confidence in Putin, while 41 percent expressed confidence and 12 percent apparently could not make up their minds or put a face to the name. Those are the poll numbers of indifference.
For these reasons, I have to think our new secretary of defense could never fathom the response of former American Cold Warriors to see the president of the United States cozy up to Vladimir Putin and mouth Putin’s perspective on Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Only Putin, his ally in the White House, and that ally’s new cabinet members could reverse the roles and characterize Ukraine as somehow provoking its own invasion, like blaming the victim of a home invasion for their own burglary.
When I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, in the Summer of 1984, the USSR was very much alive, kicking and demonized by the men who indoctrinated me into the U.S. Navy ROTC program at Boston University. Vladimir Putin was a somewhat horse-faced KGB operative in his early thirties. Pete Hegseth would have been four years old and just learning to spell words like USA, USSR, and KGB.
I did not, after all, become a Cold Warrior. I missed ship’s movement on the USS Saipan during my Summer 1985 deployment in the context of a chaotic Hezbollah skyjacking—Islamic extremists also were a thing back then—and forfeited my NROTC scholarship. I loved my country as much as the next guy but was deeply puzzled by what the Navy was teaching me about our foreign policy. I was taught that we were defending and extending democracy, but in practice our enemy was not fascism or autocracy, the opposite of democracy, but rather communism, the opposite of capitalism. We supported capitalist autocrats and attacked communist movements that enjoyed popular support. I was not a communist—a 19-year-old from a Midwestern steel town, I could hardly imagine what that would look like—but going to war for capitalism did not seem like what I had signed up for.
Five years later, which was a lifetime then, I was a graduate student in literature at Washington University in St. Louis and the singer in an increasingly popular local rock band. The husband of a fellow graduate student asked me to meet him for coffee, the first time I can remember doing that. Starbucks would not come to St. Louis for nearly a decade; my friends and I always met for beers. Over coffee, this man told me he had an unusual proposition.
He said he had a younger brother, closer to me in age (24, then), who, like me, was a musician and something of an impresario. This man, whose name I have forgotten, had observed that I was the show runner for our band’s gigs. That, in fact, was the only reason someone with my minimal musical skills could lead a rock band—unlike most musicians, I had the persistence and schmooze to get gigs and promote them. This man said he wondered if I could help out his little brother, whose name I also have forgotten.
He said his little brother, working through the U.S. State Department, somehow had managed to finagle a unique tour for a Soviet rock band from Moscow State University. The tour was to be called, with double alliteration, “Music Not Missiles: Rock Not Rockets.” Would I consider booking a tour stop in St. Louis with my band and these Soviet rockers, with a band name that hits a little different now: Gaza. Of course, I would! I would book a gig right there on campus at the Gargoyle!
What seemed like a cause for celebration instead drew my coffee companion into a strangely serious silence. First, he said, I had to know some things about his little brother.
He said his little brother was something of a genius with prodigious mental energy. He could talk Soviet Russia into sending a rock band into enemy capitalist country on a pacifist musical mission. He once wrote a concerto for ukulele and managed to get a symphony orchestra to premiere it. But he also was prone to fits of almost catatonic despair and collapse. For every ukulele concerto he brought to fruition on the concert stage there was an equally improbable and grandiose project that he got rolling and developed and then completely abandoned, disappointing and frustrating any number of people who had wasted a considerable amount of time and money on his project.
This man wanted me to understand that there could be no guarantee that Music Not Missiles: Rock Not Rockets would ever come to pass. Right now, his little brother was working furiously to make it happen against all odds, and there was no doubt that he had it in his power to pull it off. But he also was capable of disappearing completely at any moment before the tour launched or made it to St. Louis. I said I would take my chances. It would be a story either way.
Music Not Missiles: Rock Not Rockets did make it to St. Louis and the Gargoyle on April 24, 1990. (Vladimir Putin was spying on students and working on his doctoral dissertation at Leningrad State University at the time. Pete Hegseth was not quite 10 years old.) I still have a sloppy gig flyer—featuring Mikhail Gorbachev wearing headphones—and tour T-shirt to substantiate the fact of the gig. I should remember more about it than I do. My fellow bandmates, still my musical partners and buddies to this day, remember even less. I should remember my co-impresario, the concertizing ukulele composer and Cold War connector, but I do not. The only thing I remember about Gaza from Moscow State University is that they sounded more New Wave than Rock & Roll, like a lightweight U2 knock-off.
I later learned that the mastermind of Music Not Missiles: Rock Not Rockets did hit one of his dead zones after the tour left St. Louis. The guys in Gaza took advantage of that void by defecting to the United States, just a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union. That must have been a significant embarrassment for diplomatic relations between the two superpowers, but everyone had far worse headaches and it would not matter for much longer anyway.
The guys in Gaza must be nearing 60 like my bandmates and I. I wonder if they stayed in our country after they were free to return to theirs without booking a steady gig in a gulag. I wonder what they made of the dramatic rise of Vladimir Putin from spy to autocrat. I wonder what they make of Vladimir Putin having an ally in the White House or a short-timer like Pete Hegseth having oversight of the mightiest military on Earth. I wonder if they would like to put the two bands back together and book another tour. What do you say? Music Not Madness: Rock Not Ratbaggery?
