Concert News & Reviews @ CT2

This summer, Joe Nichols took his first trip to the Middle East to perform for American troops serving in the nation’s two wars, and the journey is captured on a GAC special, Joe Nichols: My Military Diary.

It’s a visit he’d thought about for some time. Joe has an affinity for the work U.S. soldiers do, and he’s convinced that had things gone in a different way earlier in his life, he might well have ended up an enlisted man.

“I always felt like that was the most honorable job there is,” Joe notes. “I don’t think it pays tremendously. I mean, you have to seriously love somethin’ bigger than yourself to do that job. Any time that happens, any time people have that kind of heart, to sacrifice for somethin’ bigger than yourself, it just grabs me.”

The most obvious sacrifices made in war surround the critical danger that a soldier faces every day, but there’s another toll that’s taken, too. Servicemen and women spend months away from their homes and their families, and that makes for plenty of loneliness and uncertainty. That sacrifice is one of the things that impresses Joe most.

“I don’t think people are as worried about gettin’ shot at as they are just losing control upstairs of their purpose in life,” he says. “In the part of the world that I visited in Iraq, they’re isolated. A lot of ‘em have gone through divorces because they’re over there so long, which baffles me that the situation must call for a divorce. When you divorce somebody that’s 7,000 miles away doin’ a very, very difficult job — that you’ll leave them at their most vulnerable moment, I mean it just baffles me [how difficult] the situation might be.”

Joe Nichols: My Military Diary debuts at 10 p.m. ET Sunday on GAC. His latest album, Old Things New, was released last week. And next year he’ll have the lead role in a Broadway remake of the George Strait picture Pure Country.

Click here to watch Joe’s video for “An Old Friend of Mine.”