Jason Everman, the man who got booted from both Nirvana and Soundgarden, two of the most iconic bands in music history, and then became a US Army Ranger and Green Beret.
Born on a remote Alaskan island and mostly raised in small-town Washington, Everman discovered the guitar in an unusual way. After he and a buddy got in trouble for blowing up a junior high toilet with a firecracker, therapy sessions led him to pick up the instrument. It clicked. By the late ’80s, he was living the rock and roll fantasy most people only dream about.
He joined Nirvana on guitar, personally funding the recording of their debut album Bleach, and later switched to bass for Soundgarden.
Yet somehow, he became the guy both bands ultimately let go, the very groups that would go on to shape an entire genre. As he later admitted, it crushed him.
Plenty of people would have milked that “I was in Nirvana and Soundgarden” story for the rest of their lives. Everman chose a completely different path. He traveled the Himalayas, spent time in a Buddhist monastery searching for answers, and when that didn’t provide them, he did something almost no one saw coming: in 1994, he enlisted in the US Army.
He earned a spot in the elite 2nd Ranger Battalion, left, then returned to tackle the notoriously brutal Special Forces Qualification Course. He ultimately became a Green Beret with 3rd Special Forces Group and deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. The former long haired rocker had transformed into a quiet, highly capable soldier.
Even that wasn’t the end of his reinventions.
After leaving the military, he earned a philosophy degree from Columbia University (with a recommendation letter from General Stanley McChrystal) and later returned to music as part of the all-veteran band Silence & Light.
Artist, soldier, philosopher, the three identities he always said he wanted to cultivate within himself. Few lives are as unlikely or as genuinely inspiring as Jason Everman’s. It’s powerful proof that with enough courage, a person can reinvent themselves as many times as it takes.
Kevin Keegan helped Liverpool win 3 First Division league titles, 2 UEFA Cups, 1 FA Cup, and the club’s very first European Cup. He is also the only english player to win 2x Ballon d'Or!
Rest well Kevin Keegan 🤍❤️🕊️
This is what the internet was invented for.
In 1996, a King Penguin called Lala became a local celebrity in Shibushi, Japan. After being rescued from a fishing net by the Nishimoto family, he refused to return to the wild.
He lived in an air-conditioned room in their home and was famous for walking alone to the fish market wearing a tiny backpack.
The fishmonger would feed him a fresh fish and place another in his bag for the trip home.
In 1945 the USS Indianapolis secretly delivered the parts for the atomic bomb that would hit Hiroshima.
Days later, mission done, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into her. She sank in 12 minutes.
Nearly 900 men made it off the ship alive and into the open ocean. Then it got worse.
No one knew they were missing. Three separate Navy stations picked up the distress signals and every one of them ignored it. One officer thought it was a Japanese trap. Another had ordered not to be disturbed.
So the men floated. For almost five days. No food, no fresh water, burning by day and freezing at night. Some drank seawater and went insane. And the whole time, the sharks were circling and feeding. It is considered the worst shark attack in human history.
When rescue finally came by accident, only 316 of the nearly 1,200 crew were still alive.
The Navy needed someone to blame for the disaster. They chose Captain Charles McVay, one of the men who survived it. He became the only U.S. captain in the entire war to be court-martialed for losing his ship to the enemy.
At his trial the Navy did something almost unheard of. They brought in the Japanese commander who sank the ship to testify against him. Instead, the enemy captain told the court that zigzagging would have made no difference and that McVay did nothing wrong.
They convicted him anyway.
For years afterward McVay got hate mail from the families of the dead. Some sent letters every Christmas telling him he murdered their sons. In 1968 he walked onto his front lawn and shot himself, holding a toy sailor he had kept since he was a boy.
Case closed. For fifty years.
Then in 1996 an 11-year-old named Hunter Scott watched Jaws with his dad and got hooked on the 30 second speech about the Indianapolis. He made it his sixth grade history project.
He tracked down and interviewed nearly 150 survivors. He dug through more than 800 documents. And buried in there he found what the Navy had left out, including that they knew enemy subs were operating right on the ship's route and never warned McVay.
A kid's school project turned into a national story. It reached Congress. In 2000 lawmakers passed a resolution clearing McVay's name and President Clinton signed it. The Navy officially cleared his record in 2001.
The captain the Navy spent decades blaming was finally exonerated by a sixth grader.
Hunter Scott grew up and became a naval flight officer.