For years, Hubert “H.K.” Covel asked his son to do one thing: go overseas with the USO and sing for American troops. His son, Toby Keith, kept saying not yet. In a 2017 interview with Air Force Times, Toby Keith remembered exactly how that conversation went.
“He kept asking me to go on a USO tour and I said, ‘Dad, I’m doing a 150 shows a year. I don’t have time to go all the way over there right now.’ And he said, ‘Find time.'”
In the same breath, Toby Keith told the rest of it. The year he agreed to go, his father was killed in a car wreck. “I went for him,” he said.
The Man Who Asked
H.K. Covel served in the Army as a private first class in the 1950s and lost his right eye. Toby Keith said it happened during the Korean War; family records and later accounts describe it as a jeep windshield accident during a training mission, not a battlefield wound. Either way, he came home with one good eye and spent 35 years working in the Oklahoma oilfields.
Toby Keith said his father flew a flag on the farm, welcomed veterans’ groups to the door, and taught his children to respect people who served. That is the man who kept bringing up the USO.
The Year He Said Yes
On March 24, 2001, H.K. Covel was killed in a crash on Interstate 35 in Oklahoma. He was 67. Toby Keith never said whether he had already told his father yes before the accident. He only said it was the same year.
Six months later came September 11. Toby Keith later wrote his father’s lost eye and his flag into “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” the song that made him a favorite with the military.
One Trip, He Thought
In 2002, Toby Keith made his first USO tour, performing in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia for more than 3,000 troops. According to AARP, he went in thinking it would be a one-time tribute to his late father.
It turned out to be the start. Toby Keith told Air Force Times that he came home seeing how little entertainment was reaching troops overseas. The next year, his agent joined the USO board, and the two of them started working out how to get more shows on the road. Toby Keith committed to roughly two weeks a year, and he kept that up for 11 years.
He did not just play the big bases. The USO reported that on some of his trips he spent two unpaid weeks hopping between forward operating bases, and some of those small outposts had never had entertainment before. In 2007, after his fifth tour, he told USO officials he would keep coming back “as long as troops are here.”
The Night in Kandahar
In April 2008, Toby Keith was playing “Weed With Willie” for about 2,500 troops at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan when mortar fire hit the base. He, his band, and the crowd ran about 100 yards to a concrete bunker and waited there for roughly an hour. He spent the time signing autographs and posing for pictures.
When the all-clear came, he went back on stage. His booking agent, Curt Motley, said he “went right to the verse he was in and finished his show.” It was not the first time. The year before, mortar fire had come in on another of his tours.
Counting It Up
The numbers vary depending on who is counting. When the USO gave Toby Keith its Spirit of the USO Award in April 2014, it said he had performed for more than 250,000 troops in 17 countries and on several ships at sea. The U.S. Army, after his death, counted 11 overseas USO tours; many tributes say 18. Toby Keith himself put it at somewhere between 220 and 240 shows.
Toby Keith died on February 5, 2024, after a fight with stomach cancer. In 2011, talking with AARP about the trips that followed that first tribute, he put it plainly.
“Being around people who put it on the line every day is amazing.”