Have you heard what country music superstar Garth Brooks said about U.S. Army veteran, Purple Heart recipient and singer Scotty Hasting?
“This guy can sing his ass off,” Brooks said on "Good Morning America" on March 7, 2024.
“That was an out-of-body experience,” Hasting told Connecting Vets. “I went out of my body for a second but came back.”
The story of how Hasting went from the battlefield to performing for Brooks and thousands of others is one of resilience, determination and hope.
When Hasting enlisted in the Army in 2010, he fully expected to make it his career.
“That was from the very beginning my idea,” he said. “I just wanted to be in the military and be a lifer. That was my whole career path. Apparently, someone, somewhere had other plans.”
Hasting said joining the military was something he was drawn to.
“It was almost like a calling, something in me pulling me toward it,” he said.
Hasting has an uncle who served in Vietnam and a great uncle who served in World War II.
By early 2011 Hasting was in Afghanistan. In April of that year, Hasting was patrol on when he was shot five times in the shoulder, four times in the hip and once in the thigh in April of 2011. The incident left him with bullet fragments all over his body. He was treated for his injuries at Walter Reed National Medical Center for about seven months.
Part of Hasting’s recovery included shooting archery with the U.S. Paralympic program.
“I traveled all over the world shooting,” he said. “Then, COVID hit and the world shut down. As someone who suffers from PTSD, depression and anxiety, I needed something to break up the quiet because that’s when the demons knock the loudest.”
Hasting said he had a guitar in the corner of his room but didn’t know how to play.
“I just looked at it one day and said, ‘you know what? I’m going to figure out how to play this.’”
Hasting did not allow nerve damage in his right hand stop him from learning to play.
“I was going to figure it out because I needed something to escape into, so I jumped on YouTube and started learning how to play guitar,” he explained.
Hasting said learning the guitar enabled him to get out of his head. He soon began learning to play all the songs he grew up listening to in the 1990s.
“It got to where I was like, ‘I have all these feelings and all these emotions, and I want to get them out,” he said.
YouTube assisted Hasting again, teaching him how to write music and songs.
Then, as COVID restrictions began to lift, he traveled to Cookville, Tennesse, where he performed Toby Keith’s ‘Should’ve Been A Cowboy’ at an open mic night.
“I started living for the moments where I could get on stage and be in the moment,” he said.
Hasting said at one point he was performing five nights a week on Broadway in Nashville for three or four hours at a stretch.
“I played every single freaking show I could play,” he said. “It taught me a lot and it gave me the ability to interact with people and feel at home on stage.”
Hasting’s first single, ‘How Do You Choose’ was the result of a conversation he had with his best friend’s mother.
“My best friend was killed when we were in Afghanistan and she came to a show and she stayed for all four hours,” he said. “At the end of the day, I just had this question of `why am I here?’ I was shot 10 times, my best friend was hurt less than me and he’s not here anymore? How does that happen?”
Hasting wrote the song, which was released on Veterans Day in 2023, in collaboration with CreatiVets. “It is the most personal and hardest song that I’ve ever written,” he said.
Hasting said the song bridges the gap between veterans and civilians because everyone at some point asks why did this person die or why am I here and this person no longer is.
Hasting released his first EP, “I’m America,” earlier this month. One of the songs, Runnin’ has a special meaning for him.
"I have nerve damage in my right hand, no feeling in it whatsoever, and very limited movement," he said. "Learning how to play the guitar with a pick velcroed to my thumb was hard enough. But with this song, I forced myself to learn how to finger-pick it until I could get it right. With 'Runnin'' I overcame an impossibility, so for me, this song symbolizes victory."
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.