Joe Nichols recently visited troops on US military bases in Kuwait and Iraq. His trip was filmed for the GAC special, Joe Nichols: My Military Diary, premiering Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009 at 10 p.m. Eastern.

Joe Nichols spent a week this summer singing for American troops in the Middle East, and the good vibes from that trip are getting coverage on GAC, in the special Joe Nichols: My Military Diary.

Joe made some new friends on his overseas visit, and he was particularly impressed by the dedication the service men and women demonstrate on a daily basis. Their lives are on the line every hour, and they’re forced to be away from home for months at a time during their tour of duty.

Joe wishes a few more of his fellow entertainers would leave their homeland long enough to brighten things for the troops on assignment.

“I’m kind of embarrassed that a lot of very successful country music artists that don’t need the money right now, that are doing very well, haven’t even sniffed the possibility of goin’ to Iraq or Afghanistan,” he says. “Why not? It takes two weeks of your time, it doesn’t cost you a dime, what you get out of it is worlds of appreciation — and who doesn’t want that?”

Joe’s not disparaging their success — or country stars’ well-known dedication to doing charity work. He’d just like to see a little more of that be directed toward the people who make the biggest sacrifices to ensure the climate at home that allows country performers to tour and prosper.

“Be cool over here, have hit records and everything like that,” Joe continues. “But take two weeks, for cryin’ out loud… We talk about charities that are popular over here, and I think they’re convenient sometimes, but I can’t think of a better charity right now than going over and saving some thousands of troops from a little bit of misery.”

Joe Nichols: My Military Diary encores on GAC at 10 p.m. ET on Monday and 2 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

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Joe Nichols recently visited troops on US military bases in Kuwait and Iraq. His trip was filmed for the GAC special, Joe Nichols: My Military Diary, premiering Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009 at 10 p.m. Eastern.

This summer, Joe Nichols took his first trip to the Middle East to perform for American troops serving in the nation’s two wars, and the journey is captured on a GAC special, Joe Nichols: My Military Diary.

It’s a visit he’d thought about for some time. Joe has an affinity for the work U.S. soldiers do, and he’s convinced that had things gone in a different way earlier in his life, he might well have ended up an enlisted man.

“I always felt like that was the most honorable job there is,” Joe notes. “I don’t think it pays tremendously. I mean, you have to seriously love somethin’ bigger than yourself to do that job. Any time that happens, any time people have that kind of heart, to sacrifice for somethin’ bigger than yourself, it just grabs me.”

The most obvious sacrifices made in war surround the critical danger that a soldier faces every day, but there’s another toll that’s taken, too. Servicemen and women spend months away from their homes and their families, and that makes for plenty of loneliness and uncertainty. That sacrifice is one of the things that impresses Joe most.

“I don’t think people are as worried about gettin’ shot at as they are just losing control upstairs of their purpose in life,” he says. “In the part of the world that I visited in Iraq, they’re isolated. A lot of ‘em have gone through divorces because they’re over there so long, which baffles me that the situation must call for a divorce. When you divorce somebody that’s 7,000 miles away doin’ a very, very difficult job — that you’ll leave them at their most vulnerable moment, I mean it just baffles me [how difficult] the situation might be.”

Joe Nichols: My Military Diary debuts at 10 p.m. ET Sunday on GAC. His latest album, Old Things New, was released last week. And next year he’ll have the lead role in a Broadway remake of the George Strait picture Pure Country.

Click here to watch Joe’s video for “An Old Friend of Mine.”

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