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	Related links A-Records The official site. Learn all about Pritty Boy, Nynewest, Top Gun, and Pharaoh Jean. Get music clips, video, and tour dates. Some day soon, look for video clips from VP Denoh Grear’s stint in Iraq.

He also learned pretty quickly that — despite the American flag on his desk lauding him as a "Citizen-Soldier-Hero" — guardsmen in Iraq are second-class citizens. "We were basically shitted on. [The Army] put us on the most dangerous missions. They were trying to keep their own troops safe, so the National Guard did all the work," Grear alleges. "We were put in for the most dangerous situations." So Grear and his buddies in the gun truck — the interior temperature of which sometimes inched above 145 degrees — made a pact. "Basically, I formed a squad of five or six of my best friends, and we said, ‘You know what? We’re here to keep each other safe. Because we’re expendable.’ "

In the truck, Grear and his buddies laughed, rhymed, made music. "The whole gun truck was just spittin’, flowin.’ I loved everybody I was over there with," he says. They saw some shit, though. In Grear’s home videos, he talks about the heart-racing fear he felt when his camp came under mortar attack one night ("All I was doin’ was prayin’ "). At one point in his video, he’s seen in a lookout tower as his binoculars glimpse an Iraqi man duck behind some brush in the distance. "That guy just disappeared," he says. "He’s probably digging up some weapons to attack us tonight."

Once, Grear saw an Iraqi child run over by a truck.

He dealt with all these things as best he knew how. Even when they were "boiling to death, having to burn our own shit in the desert three or four times a day," he and his brothers-in-arms laughed to keep from crying. "People were like, ‘How come these guys are always laughing? Always joking? Always singing, always rapping?’ " he says. "You had nightmares. But you’d just laugh. We were too young to be stressed out, so we just laughed." In his videos, except for a rare occasion where frustration flashes through, Grear is smiling, joking, making friends with Iraqis. "Yeeeeeup!" he narrates for the viewer at home. "That’s my tent right there! Yeee-uh. That’s my tent right there, bay-bee!"

All the while, A-Records was never far from his mind. Lincoln Bloh says Grear used to call from Iraq, always asking about the label, offering suggestions, critiquing new songs. "It felt like it was keeping him alive," Bloh says. "Every time he’d call, it was like that excitement on the phone. ‘Oh yeah, I’m happy. I can’t wait to get home so we can put that extra push!’ Some people might think it’s strange that someone’s in a war and the only thing they care about is what’s going on with a record company. But I think that was it: ‘I need to stay alive, because when I go home, there’s something better there for me to do.’ "

HE’S HOME NOW. And he’s gotten right to it. On top of his work for A-Records, Grear works 40 hours a week at Alternatives Unlimited, in Worcester, counseling people with developmental and psychiatric disabilities (Appiah works there, too). He’s back at Worcester State — he earned straight A’s last semester — and is slated to graduate in December. He still sacrifices one weekend a month and two weeks a year to the National Guard; he says there’s a 50 percent chance he might have to go back to Iraq before his commitment ends in November.

Grear is a rapper, too, and his experiences in Iraq have led him to write sheets of lyrics he aims to record some day. "When I was in Iraq, I changed my whole style of writing," he says. "Me writing music, it was a way for me to release my anger, release my pain, for me to put down what I was feeling. It gave me happiness. What a lot of people want in life is to hear music that they can relate to, that they can hear themselves in. Gain some experience from it, some insight." Eventually, Grear envisions serving that need by releasing a multimedia concept album, with DVD footage from his handheld camera, his still photos, his rhymes. "A lot of people are sheltered. They’re not even allowing you to see the caskets on TV! It makes me mad. Makes me upset. I want to show the truth from the eyes of true soldiers."

He’s writing a script, too, called The Gun Truck, based on the lessons he learned over 11 months piloting a sweltering vehicle across the desert sands. "Basically, it was me and two other guys. We love hip-hop, we love girls. It’s just the conversations in the gun truck, how we laughed, how we joked, how we passed time, driving the truck in enemy territory."

But despite the joking and camaraderie, don’t think Grear doesn’t harbor some resentments. "I am angry," he says. "I’m angry that when you come back from war, you gotta go back to a civilian job, go back to the school that they pulled you out of. All this is burning on your mind. I could have graduated from school by now!" But anger isn’t productive, and Grear has work to do. "A lot of soldiers are depressed. A lot of these vets come home, smoking, doing drugs. You know why? Because it’s painful. It’s painful. That’s why I try to stay motivated. This right here keeps me focused. It keeps me going. We went and did our time for our country. Now we’ve come back. And we’re just trying to let people know that there are better ways out there."

Grear’s not afraid to think big. He’s been toying with the idea of somehow bringing the A-Records squad abroad, putting on some shows for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. How would he deal with the emotions of going back? Grear pauses to think. "I’ll be happy," he says. "I’ll be happy. Because I’ll know the reason I’m there for.

"I love this country so much," he adds. "I just want to try to make it better."

A-Records is at www.arecordsmusic.com. Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com