Three years after the death of her son, a Texas Army National Guard soldier who served in Iraq, Paula Brown-Nichols received a phone call late last week.
“You don’t know me,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “But I’m a musician in Austin. One of the guys in the band wrote a song about your son, and we’d like you to hear us play it.”
“We were so inspired as musicians, we wanted to do something,” Lisa Maher, who made the call, would say later. “We thought, ‘What can we do to help?’ We wanted to show we are thinking about them, that they didn’t come home to be forgotten about.”
So on Sunday morning, butterflies in her stomach, excited but unsure what to expect, Brown-Nichols and her husband made the drive down Interstate 35 from Waxahachie, Texas, to Kyle, where AmVets Post 115 was hosting an afternoon of Veterans Day-related events.
Twenty months earlier, the members of Lohman’s Crossing Band had read the story of 22-year-old Cory Brown, who killed himself after coming home from Iraq a changed man. The story was part of an American-Statesman investigation into premature deaths and suicides among young Texas veterans, which the paper found outpaced suicides among civilians by a wide margin.
After he returned home in 2009, his mother tried to get him into a residential treatment program for post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse at the VA, but no beds were available. She tried to enlist the help of his National Guard superiors, also to no avail. In the autumn of 2011, with his wife seven months pregnant, Cory Brown shot himself. A National Guard investigation found there was no mechanism in his unit to track soldiers showing signs of mental health issues.
“That just tore us open,” said Bill Aydam, a guitarist with the Austin band. “We decided to start volunteering for the veterans and doing what we could to try and ease the pain and get word out there that this was going on.”
The band began playing for VA patients in Killeen, Temple and Austin. Aydam decided to write a song about Cory Brown.
“It came really quickly,” he said. “Many famous songwriters, Willie (Nelson) and (Bob) Dylan, say you’re just a vessel, waiting for that song to come. And that’s how I felt about this song.”
But Aydam was apprehensive about contacting Cory Brown’s mother. He put it off for months: The song was so personal, the wounds so fresh. In the end, Maher made the call Friday morning without telling him.
By Sunday afternoon, nerves and emotions were high for the band and the mother. The band took the stage at the Hays school district’s performing arts center, with Brown-Nichols seated in the second row.
“We really can prepare our kids to go off to war and train them to fight, but we don’t do a very good job of bringing them back home,” Aydam said from the stage. Then, in a halting voice, the words catching in his throat, he said, “I’m very honored … to debut this song today and have his mother here.”
With that, the band played “Cory Brown”:
“A baby on the way his wife didn’t know what to say/ His momma tried to help, she’d faithfully pray/ Said he couldn’t cope, so they gave him more dope/ Nothing’s more tragic when a young father loses hope/ Cory Brown, Cory Brown a mama cries tears for her boy in the ground.”
When the song ended, his mother ascended the stage and embraced the three members of the band, the auditorium still save for the rustle of veterans and family members dabbing at their eyes.
Brown-Nichols took the microphone. “All I wanted was somebody to hear me from the mother’s perspective,” she told the crowd.
Most important, though, she said, was what the song would mean to the 3-year-old boy who was born two months after his father died.
“The legacy will be for my grandson to see that it wasn’t just that my son was sick, that he killed himself,” she said. Gesturing to the band, she continued, “But people like this … can explain that it wasn’t his choice, that he got caught in the middle of chasing a demon that chased him.”
Afterward, Aydam was happy for the chance to play the song in front of Brown-Nichols. “I got choked up because she was there; we had just met her,” he said. “It’s a very tragic story and especially so because I have two young sons. My oldest would be the same age as Cory Brown. So there was a lot of emotion wrapped up in it.”
And in the end, Aydam’s apprehensions turned out to be unfounded. “The song was just so true to form,” Brown-Nichols said. “They got it. They just covered the whole thing.”
Today, Brown-Nichols has become a peer mentor with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, which helps families after the death of a military member. Soon she will be helping other mothers dealing with their grief. She also plans to continue to tell her son’s story in hopes of reaching other veterans.
“I have a mission, and I’m not done,” she said. “I’ll give it all to keep another mom from going through the suicide of their child.”
Packing up their equipment, the members of Lohman’s Crossing Band left the auditorium changed by the experience.
“It was an honor to sing it for her, to see the look on her face,” Maher said. “She knows her son is not going to be forgotten. Through songs like this … he will be remembered. And his son can know him through that.”
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