Hello and welcome to the new randallgoodgame.com!

Feel free to browse around – there’s little bits to see here and more to come. For now, let me tell you about this past weekend. I took a band to play for well over 1000 soldiers in Basic Training at Ft. Jackson in Columbia South Carolina. First of all, I took a band. That’s something that I haven’t done in a while, and it was amazing. Two good friends from Caedmon’s Call came along for the ride (Andy Osenga and Garett Buell) and the indomitable Jeff Irwin brought the big brown bass, if you know what I mean… and I think you do.

Secondly, the soldiers all seemed very 17, and the M16s they were all carrying were very real. Young men and women with weapons tip down filled the gym as we scrambled to assemble the makeshift PA we dragged from Nashville. The Catholic Mass had concluded moments earlier, and we had thirty minutes to set up for the o-ten-hundred hour protestant evangelical chapel service. Why the rush? Well… since showing is usually better than telling, click here.

The first soldier to greet us on the base was Specialist Mickey, a petite woman of Asian descent with a blankly Midwestern accent. I think she was from Oklahoma. She has been on the base for one year, having enlisted days after our concert last summer. In my mind, I try to compare my last 12 months to hers. I can imagine the routine and the camaraderie she has experienced, but Mickey gave up her personal freedom and submitted herself to the authority and care of the U.S. Army. That is hard for me to imagine.

Specialist Mickey waited 6 hours for us on Saturday and we did not arrive till 7:00 Sunday morning. She didn’t seem excited about that, but she was helpful and even somewhat friendly once we got to talking. In fact, I was generally impressed with the congeniality of everyone I met on the base. It is not a light-hearted place, but the place has heart.

The actual concert was profoundly affecting – as it had been for the previous two years. It is an extremely enthusiastic crowd – and LOUD. The guys are on the right, the girls on the left, and they are so happy to have a rest from their training. Soldiers begin clapping within the first few measures of the first song. Between songs they respond with a gym-shaking “Hooah!” to most everything I say, and I mean, I could feel the hooah in my chest. Incidentally, Wikipedia describes “hooah” as “referring to or meaning anything and everything except no. I want something like that in my vocabulary at home. It seems very convenient.

Here’s the setlist from the concert…

Hands of the Potter
Share The Well
Susan Coats Pants
She’s Gone Forever
Heaven Waits
Bluebird
Reverie
Peanuts Part 1
Jubilee
Army of Angels

I’m hesitant to even write about the gratitude that seems inevitable during and after a trip like this. I have no confidence that I’ll find the right words to adequately express the range of emotions that I went through. “Good Morning Vietnam” takes over two hours, and it is brilliant – though predictably one-sided. I can say though, that being there and celebrating life and Jesus and music and the U.S.A with them made me very, very proud. Not proud to be an American exactly, just proud to be human and in the association of people who have assembled to serve something higher than themselves. Thankfully, they’ve already invited me back for next year… hooah!