Jason Everman was in Army basic training when he and his fellow recruits heard that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. But he was the only one who had actually played guitar for Nirvana. Everman was fired from the band before it blew up, and the same scenario soon played itself out again when he was cast from Soundgarden while it was on the cusp. Everman decided to pursue an alternative career, training to become a U.S. Army Special Forces member just as the whole world seemed to be blowing up. From Clay Tarver’s New York Times Magazine article about Everman’s amazing story:

“I don’t know how he got through the next year. Everman’s friend from home, Ben Shepherd, replaced him in Soundgarden. Their next album went double platinum. Of course, Nirvana — after replacing Jason’s friend Chad Channing on drums with Dave Grohl — became the biggest band in the world. That record he never got paid back for, Bleach, eventually sold 2.1 million copies. Nevermind sold nearly 30 million copies worldwide and changed the course of rock. Everman, meanwhile, was left behind with no idea what to do next.

For the first month, he just went fetal. ‘It was a huge blow,’ he admitted to me quietly. ‘I had no warning. The only good thing about it was it made me leave the Pacific Northwest. I would never have done that otherwise.’ He moved to New York and got a job working for a while in the Caroline Records warehouse, a long way from the tour bus.

Jason played with other bands, eventually joining one called Mindfunk. He actually had success with it, moving with the band to San Francisco, but something was still not right. Then in the midst of all the confusion in his life, he came to the realization that he had to make a change. He knew he didn’t just want to be a guy in his 15th band, the guy talking about his time in Nirvana and Soundgarden 20 years later. He wanted to do something, he said, something impossible. ‘I was in the cool bands,’ he told me in the cabin. ‘I was psyched to do the most uncool thing you could possibly do.’

So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered a fast track to becoming a Ranger and perhaps eventually to the Special Forces. He told me he always had an interest in it. His stepfather was in the Navy; both grandfathers were ex-military. Most of the people he grew up with scoffed at that world, which was part of the appeal to him. Novoselic remembered something Everman said way back in the Olympia days. ‘He was just pondering. He asked me, ‘Do you ever think about what it’d be like to be in the military and go through that experience?’ And I was just like . . . no.’

Everman started waking up early while his bandmates slept in; he went biking, swimming, got in shape. One day, with zero warning, he resigned. He put all of his stuff in storage. He took a flight to New York and went to an Army recruiting office in Manhattan. A couple of weeks later he was on a flight to Georgia. ‘Was I nervous?’ he asked. ‘I was a little nervous. But I knew.'”