A glass eye resting on a dresser in Moore, Oklahoma, taught Toby Keith early on what military service actually cost.
Before Keith ever stepped onto a stage in Iraq or Afghanistan, his understanding of the uniform came from his father, Hubert K. “H.K.” Covel Jr. In the 1950s, while serving as an Army soldier stationed at Fort Sill in southwestern Oklahoma, Covel lost his right eye during a training accident. He wore a prosthetic eye for the rest of his life, working in the oil fields and later owning a supper club in Fort Smith, Arkansas, without treating his injury as a story that needed sympathy.
Keith grew up watching how his father handled that loss, noticing that Covel never complained about the sight he had given up or questioned the value of his service. That outlook stayed with the future country star long after he left Oklahoma’s oil patch to pursue songwriting in Nashville.
In March 2001, Covel died in a car crash at age 65, just six months before the September 11 attacks reshaped American life and country radio. Because of that timing, Covel never heard the patriotic recordings that came to define his son’s catalog, nor did he see Keith board a military transport plane for the first time.
When Keith sat down with co-writer Chuck Cannon to write “American Soldier” in 2003, he drew directly from his father’s matter-of-fact attitude toward duty. Rather than focusing on political speeches or battlefield slogans, the song centered on an ordinary working man who puts on a uniform, leaves his family behind, and does a difficult job without asking for special treatment.
Released in late 2003 from the album *Shock’n Y’all*, “American Soldier” climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in early 2004 and stayed there for four weeks. Keith later told interviewers that spending time around deployed troops helped him finish the recording, though the character at the center of the track had been shaped decades earlier in his father’s house.
Studio recordings were only half of how Keith answered his father’s example. In 2002, when Keith initially hesitated about squeezing an overseas USO run into a commercial touring schedule of roughly 150 dates a year, he thought back to the blunt advice his father had always given him about making room for obligations that mattered.
Between 2002 and 2019, Keith completed 11 USO tours across 18 countries, performing nearly 300 shows for more than 250,000 service members. Unlike entertainers who limited their stops to large, fortified bases in Kuwait or Baghdad, Keith insisted on taking his Easy Money Band into remote forward operating bases across Iraq and Afghanistan.
Traveling to those outposts meant flying low and fast in Black Hawk helicopters, wearing heavy body armor and a Kevlar helmet over his hat, and playing on makeshift stages built from plywood and shipping containers. In April 2008, incoming mortar fire at Kandahar Airfield forced Keith and 2,500 troops into concrete bunkers for nearly an hour before he walked back under the lights to finish his set.
When band members, tour staff, or relatives raised concerns about the danger of flying into active combat zones, Keith pointed straight back to Fort Sill in the 1950s. His father had lost an eye while serving in the Army, he reasoned, so putting up with desert dust, mortar alarms, and rough helicopter rides to play music for deployed troops was a small price to pay.
Standing onstage in front of dusty soldiers in their late teens and early twenties, Keith often noted that they looked like the exact age his father had been when he put on the uniform. After the amplifiers were shut down each night, the six-foot-four singer routinely stayed behind for hours, shaking hands, signing autographs, and listening to young men and women talk about their hometowns.
Over the next two decades, Keith paired those overseas trips with stateside support for military families, eventually founding the Toby Keith Foundation and supporting programs for wounded veterans and their relatives. In 2014, the USO recognized his overseas record with the Spirit of the USO Award, and in January 2021, he received the National Medal of Arts.
By the time Keith passed away in February 2024 at age 62 following a battle with stomach cancer, his work with the military had become inseparable from his music. Every flight into a forward outpost and every chorus of “American Soldier” traced back to an Oklahoma veteran who lost an eye at Fort Sill and never once asked for credit.