As I watched the Dixie Chicks win their five Grammy Awards on Sunday night – for an album staggeringly inferior to its rivals in the same categories – I couldn’t help but think back to the same night four years earlier, when I was being taught how to apply a tourniquet to a gunshot wound, as part of my pre-Iraq journalists’ training. Back then, I’d never even heard of the all-female country music trio from Texas. That changed a few weeks later – the morning after Natalie Maines, the group’s lead singer, told an audience in London that she was ashamed to be from the same place as George W. Bush.

Overnight, Maines became a pariah: treated back home as a traitor on the scale of Mata Hari. By then, I’d relocated from an SAS training centre in Hereford to a military camp in Kuwait, where I was being taught how to use a gas mask. I was terrified. Within days of Maines apologising to President Bush (too late to stop the threats, the CD-crushings and the careers of DJs who played the Dixie Chicks’ records), the invasion had started and I was on my way to Baghdad, embedded with an artillery division of the United States Marines.

I mention all this because there’s something about the way the Dixie Chicks handled the Iraq war controversy (which included a naked appearance on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, a documentary called Shut up and Sing and the allegation that the Red Cross turned down a $1 million donation from the band, when in fact the donation was conditional on the Red Cross endorsing their tour) that makes me reluctant to cheer them too loudly. In fact, the band’s carping about the lack of freedom of speech in America always struck me as a bit dishonest.

What they really seemed upset about was the cost to their popularity. Certainly, the threats, the blacklists and the CD-crushings were appalling, but anyone who trades in opinion (columnists included) understand this as a necessary cost of doing business. The Dixie Chicks, on the other hand, seemed to believe that they should be able to say exactly what they want, no matter how divisive, and that the public should unquestioningly continue to contribute to their millionaires’ lifestyles.

Perhaps I’m biased: when you’re on the front lines of an invasion, the last thing you want to hear is a celebrity back home, miles from the bullets, telling you the conflict itself is wrong or pointless. I remember the morning of March 24, 2003, when I woke up in a trench in the Iraq marshlands, mortar shells flying overhead, listening to Michael Moore giving his infamous antiwar Oscars speech. He had every right to express his opinion. But the Marines I was with also had every right to be riled by it.

And that, to me, is what the Dixie Chicks utterly failed to grasp. In a democracy, speech may be free. But wherever you go in the world – Texas included – an opinion worth holding will always cost you something.

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