PLEASE, DON'T SCREW UP THE FILM VERSION:

Everman was born on a remote Alaskan island. "My birth certificate says Kodiak, but I'm pretty sure it was Ouzinkie, where my parents lived in a two-room cabin with a pet ocelot named Kia." That odd precision is how he talks. He'll describe soldiers as "freemen, who, of their own volition," are willing to "lose everything" or carefully explain the "epistemological dilemma" in Dr. Seuss's "Horton Hears a Who!" And yet his thoughts still tend to be underlined with a distinctive "dude." His parents, Diane and Jerry, moved to Alaska to get back to nature, but the marriage didn't work out. Diane couldn't take the harsh life, and after a couple of years she left Jerry and started over. She took Jason to Washington and eventually married a former Navy man named Russ Sieber. They settled in the Poulsbo area, across Puget Sound from Seattle. Jason's mother never told him about the Alaska years. His half-sister, Mimi MacKay, with whom he grew up, said Jason didn't know his real father existed until he was 13 or so.

Poulsbo, back then, was right on the edge of suburban safety. Though Diane adored Jason, growing up in their house wasn't easy. "My mother was extremely depressed, an artistic genius who was also a pill-popping alcoholic," Mimi told me. "Jason and I learned to walk on eggshells and really learned to take care of ourselves." As a young boy, Jason went through a phase of stuttering. "My mom joked that this is how she cured Jason, by telling him, 'Either spit it out or shut up,' " Mimi said. "I became really adept at finishing his sentences for him."

Soon the silence evolved into acting out. He and a friend blew up a toilet with an M-80. What might have landed a kid in jail today only got him suspended for a week or two of junior high in the early '80s. Still, his grandmother Gigi was alarmed. Gigi Phillips was one of the people Jason was closest to. And she wasn't going to mess around with this kind of trouble. She got the best therapist she could find, who happened to be, Mimi was told, the sports psychiatrist to the Seattle SuperSonics.

In therapy, Everman just sat there. But the doctor happened to be a music freak and had a few vintage guitars around the office. Everman picked one up. The therapist started to strum with him, hoping this would open Jason up. "It was a big family joke that those were the most expensive guitar lessons ever," Mimi told me. That's when Everman first started playing guitar.

Music changed everything for him, especially after he discovered punk rock. "I'd have to say that was the first defining event in my life," he told me. "In punk there's an extreme kind of conformity to all the nonconformity. You realize in all this rebellion that everyone's doing the same thing. But in a weird way, that's what kind of lets you eventually forget the rules, and you can be yourself." During high school, Everman spent much of his free time playing in bands. In the summer after his junior year, he started visiting his biological father in Alaska, where he spent several seasons working on his fishing boat. He graduated a semester early, and soon he had earned $20,000 and a reputation for being self-sufficient.

It was then that he got the kind of break you read about in paperback rock biographies. Jason's childhood friend Chad Channing happened to meet a guitarist and a bassist from Olympia looking for a drummer. They were Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, and they called their band Nirvana. Channing played drums for many of their ramshackle early shows. When Cobain considered getting another guitar player, Channing piped up. "I was like: 'I know this guy. This friend of mine, Jason.' "

At first, Everman seemed to be the perfect fit. These were irreverent guys who had all set off bombs in their own way. Nirvana's gloominess is such a part of the band's mythology now, but Cobain was also wickedly funny. As Novoselic put it to me, "We were fun-loving dudes." Onstage, Nirvana had entered a heavy phase, perfectly suited to Everman's rock vibes. Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of Sub Pop Records, the label that signed Nirvana, told me that Cobain introduced Everman as his "surprise" before a sound check in San Francisco. Poneman loved the new guy.

Everman also helped the band in another way. Nirvana owed money to the producer of their first album, "Bleach," which they'd already recorded. "Jason was very generous," Novoselic said. "And he'd had a job. . . . So he had, like, bucks, O.K.? You know how it said it was recorded for like six hundred and something bucks on the back of the record? Jason paid for that." It was $606.17, which came out of Everman's fishing money. Sub Pop thought so much of him that it printed a limited-edition live poster of Jason rocking out.

But it was when the band hit the road -- piling into a cruddy van, as we all did -- that it came undone for Everman and Nirvana. A tour is tough for anyone to handle, especially the first one. The days are 23 hours of stultifying boredom -- all so you can have one hour onstage, one hour of visceral release that makes it worthwhile. Between the hangovers, the stink, the beaten-to-death inside jokes, touring can make anybody crazy. The key is to keep the van fun. The guy next to you may love you when you start, only to hate the way you keep asking him to turn the Stooges down 100 miles later. "We had some great shows with Jason," Novoselic said. "But then things went south really fast." Somewhere along the way, a cloud formed over Jason, an impenetrable inwardness that just hung there. They say he wouldn't talk to anyone, completely removing himself from the circle.

By the time they made it to New York, "the fun stopped," Novoselic remembered. "The fun stopped fast." Channing was confused by it, too, and he was one of Everman's oldest friends. "He doesn't talk freely when things are bothering him," Channing said. It just seemed as if he didn't want to be there. Cobain and Novoselic wanted Everman out but didn't know how to do it. That's the inherent contradiction of punk-rock rules: you were supposed to hate careerism yet still have a career. And 20-year-old kids aren't particularly good at sorting that out. So Nirvana didn't actually fire Everman; the band canceled the rest of the tour and drove straight from New York to Washington State, 50 hours in silence. Hardly a word was spoken.

Even with more than 20 years of perspective, Everman still doesn't have a clear answer for what went wrong. "To be honest, I never had any expectations about the gig," he told me. "It just ended." In "Come as You Are," the definitive book on Nirvana, by Michael Azerrad, Cobain dismissed Everman as a "moody metalhead." Even worse, he boasted about not paying Everman back for "Bleach," claiming it was payment for "mental damages." In Nirvana -- a band with a lead singer so famously tortured that he would commit suicide -- Jason Everman was kicked out for being a head case.

The timing for what happened next was baffling. After years of playing every lousy gig they could, Soundgarden had A&M Records behind them, a tour bus waiting, a full slate of tour dates booked. But Soundgarden's bass player, Hiro Yamamoto, didn't want anything to do with it. Their road manager, Eric Johnson, told me: "He really was just truly punk rock. There were meetings with A.&R. guys, and it was no longer dudes in a van. He was all like: 'Oh, no, no, no. This isn't for me.' " In 1989, just as their first major-label album, "Louder Than Love," was released, Yamamoto abruptly quit the band.

Everman had always liked Nirvana, but he loved Soundgarden. Playing bass for them -- on the verge of stardom as they were -- was the most-coveted gig in Seattle -- even one of Everman's old friends, Ben Shepherd, auditioned. Soundgarden, meanwhile, had called Jason right away. "We knew things ended with Nirvana on less-than-ideal terms," Kim Thayil, their guitarist, told me. "He didn't fit with Nirvana? Big deal. That's them. We're Soundgarden. We're a different animal." In the first audition, he impressed them all. "Jason was the guy," Soundgarden's drummer, Matt Cameron, remembered. "Jason came prepared." After the disaster with Nirvana, now Everman was playing bass for his favorite Seattle band. He couldn't believe his luck. As he put it to me, "What were the chances of all that happening?"

The next year was a blur of touring throughout the United States and Europe. Only 22, Everman still felt behind. Everybody in the band was several years older than he was. "I was drinking water from a fire hose," he said. "But I thought this was it. This was going to be my identity." So did I. After that show in Chicago, Bullet LaVolta opened for Soundgarden for a month. And if I was initially judgmental about their ambitions, I realized it was more complicated after seeing it up close. There's pressure when you're supposed to be the next big thing. People believed it was going to work, too. In town after town, I watched bands fawn over Soundgarden, Everman included. He was who they all wanted to be.

When Soundgarden returned home, they called a band meeting. Jason showed up on Cameron's porch thinking it was about the next record. Thayil told me, "I thought I would be diplomatic . . . and wasn't getting to the point." He said Chris Cornell, Soundgarden's singer, finally cut to the chase: It wasn't working out, Cornell said. Thayil remembers thinking: We're not behaving like a band. I'm not happy. No one here is happy. No one's talking to each other. Just like that, Everman was fired again.

When I heard the news, it made me worry for him. He'd been kicked out of a band with a bright future for a second time. There had to be a reason. Cameron kept wanting to say: "Hey, why so moody? You're in a good band." Johnson, the road manager, couldn't figure it out: "He was funny and witty, and then a cloud would come over him. He would sit in the bus and be really mad with his headphones on all the time. I felt bad for the guy, and I feel even worse now, thinking about somehow he was suffering and nobody really knew how to address that."

I don't know how he got through the next year. Everman's friend from home, Ben Shepherd, replaced him in Soundgarden. Their next album went double platinum. Of course, Nirvana -- after replacing Jason's friend Chad Channing on drums with Dave Grohl -- became the biggest band in the world. That record he never got paid back for, "Bleach," eventually sold 2.1 million copies. "Nevermind" sold nearly 30 million copies worldwide and changed the course of rock. Everman, meanwhile, was left behind with no idea what to do next.

For the first month, he just went fetal. "It was a huge blow," he admitted to me quietly. "I had no warning. The only good thing about it was it made me leave the Pacific Northwest. I would never have done that otherwise." He moved to New York and got a job working for a while in the Caroline Records warehouse, a long way from the tour bus.

Jason played with other bands, eventually joining one called Mindfunk. He actually had success with it, moving with the band to San Francisco, but something was still not right. Then in the midst of all the confusion in his life, he came to the realization that he had to make a change. He knew he didn't just want to be a guy in his 15th band, the guy talking about his time in Nirvana and Soundgarden 20 years later. He wanted to do something, he said, something impossible. "I was in the cool bands," he told me in the cabin. "I was psyched to do the most uncool thing you could possibly do."

So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered a fast track to becoming a Ranger and perhaps eventually to the Special Forces. He told me he always had an interest in it. His stepfather was in the Navy; both grandfathers were ex-military. Most of the people he grew up with scoffed at that world, which was part of the appeal to him. Novoselic remembered something Everman said way back in the Olympia days. "He was just pondering. He asked me, 'Do you ever think about what it'd be like to be in the military and go through that experience?' And I was just like . . . no."

Everman started waking up early while his bandmates slept in; he went biking, swimming, got in shape. One day, with zero warning, he resigned. He put all of his stuff in storage. He took a flight to New York and went to an Army recruiting office in Manhattan. A couple of weeks later he was on a flight to Georgia. "Was I nervous?" he asked. "I was a little nervous. But I knew."

Follow @brothersjudd