On September 8, 2012, Toby Keith was in the middle of a show in Houston, Texas, when a man in uniform walked out from the side of the stage with Toby’s red, white and blue guitar. To most of the crowd he looked like part of the crew. To the woman standing next to Toby, he was her husband, Major Pete Cruz, who had come home from Afghanistan earlier than expected. She had no idea he was back.
“Has anyone here tonight got a soldier?”
The moment grew out of a habit Toby Keith had at his shows. He would raise a nightly toast to military families, and that night he said he was drinking to the families of people proud to wear the country’s uniform. Then he put a question to the crowd.
“Has anyone here tonight got a soldier, a Marine overseas that you love and honor?”
Several hands went up. Toby brought one woman up on stage and asked her husband’s name. She told him it was Pete, and that he was a major. “Alright, let’s do this song for Maj. Pete Cruz tonight,” Toby said, and the band started into “American Soldier.”
According to The Blaze, which posted the video later that month, she spent the song fighting back tears and trying to sing along, singing to a man she believed was still overseas.
A guitar, a uniform and a turn of the head
Then the music shifted. Toby’s lead guitarist began playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on electric guitar, which seemed to puzzle her. Accounts differ a little on the exact timing, with The Blaze placing it after the first verse and Taste of Country placing it near the end of the song, but they agree on what came next.
A man in military uniform walked out carrying Toby’s flag guitar and handed it to him, the way a stagehand would. When the woman turned and saw who it was, the two of them came together in a tearful embrace while the anthem kept playing behind them. The Blaze put the crowd’s reaction simply: the place “went nuts.”
Toby knew all along
None of it was luck. Toby Keith told the crowd that his crew had let him know before the show that Major Cruz was coming home that night, and that his wife didn’t know. Toby had picked her out of the audience on purpose.
“She didn’t know he was coming in tonight,” he told the crowd. Then he turned to the soldier. “Welcome home, Major Cruz. Thank you for your service.”
Then came “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”
Toby didn’t send the couple off and move on. He kept them on stage beside him for “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” with other concertgoers joining in, and finished by telling the crowd never to apologize for being patriotic. When the major headed off, Toby sent him with “Thank you for your service, God speed.”
That song carried its own history. Toby Keith wrote it in late 2001, shaped by two losses that year: the death of his father, H.K. Covel, an Army veteran, in March 2001, and the September 11 attacks. It was released in May 2002 as the lead single from his album Unleashed and went to No. 1 on the country chart.
Why “American Soldier” fit that moment
“American Soldier,” which Toby Keith co-wrote with Chuck Cannon, was released in 2003 from Shock’n Y’all and spent four weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. Toby once said the song was written for all the times he got to meet troops on his USO tours.
Those tours started in 2002, the year after his father died. His father had begged him for years to go, and Toby had always been too busy. His first USO tour took him to Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, and by the USO’s count he went on to perform for more than 250,000 troops in 17 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and on several ships at sea. When the USO honored him in 2014, he explained why he kept going.
“I saw a need and a void the great Bob Hope left behind.”
Toby Keith died on February 5, 2024, at 62, after a fight with stomach cancer. The video from that Houston night still ends the way it did in 2012, with a soldier in uniform handing over a flag guitar and a country star saying, “Welcome home, Major Cruz.”