War is hell, Gen. William T. Sherman remarked about the horrors of the American Civil War. But it can also be mind-numbingly tedious. In Iraq, troops work out and play on their Xboxes. Some have written blogs that became books. In Sinjar and later in Ramadi, Geoffrey Allison made violins. When he completed 13 months in Iraq (including a one-month extension), Allison summoned the nerve to show his work to Roger Hargrave, one of the world’s master violin makers. “He brought me four instruments with craftsmanship that sort of blew me away,” Hargrave said from his studio in Germany. “It was really quite astounding that this guy was making instruments under that kind of pressure.”

During six months at a forward operating base in Ramadi, Allison patrolled with soldiers and Marines and tended to the sick and wounded. He was the medic on duty last August when the words “Catastrophic kill on Cobra 7” came over the radio, a code that meant the team leader of a patrol had been killed in an IED attack. Allison learned later that the dead first sergeant (killed along with two other soldiers) was Aaron Jagger, one of his close friends on the base and an amateur musician. “He played guitar and he used to ask me if I could make one for him,” Allison says at his parents’ home outside Nashville. “But of course, it’s a whole different instrument.”

Allison only makes violins. The son of a concert violinist, he began carving wood in college after attending a lecture on famous violin makers—teaching himself from books he bought at a local shop. He has long fingers and what strikes people around him as a quiet tenacity. He says he can work on one small part of the instrument for hours to get it just right. When he enlisted 19 years ago, he hoped to be sent to Germany, where he could train with master craftsmen in his free time. Instead, he ended up in South Korea and had to rely on books to hone his skills. He’s lugged his wood and carving tools to almost every deployment since then, though he downplays the impact of the war zone on his craft. He admits only that the heat in Iraq posed a problem. To make sure the glue he uses didn’t melt, he had to transport his violins in the air-conditioned cabins of Humvees and other vehicles instead of in the trunk.

Like other modern craftsmen, Allison works from photos and diagrams of old masterpieces—violins and violas made mainly by Italian artisans in the 18th and 19th centuries. And he’s part of a small renaissance in the field. “There’s an extraordinary mystique to the old instruments which has made them too expensive for most violinists to own,” says historian David Schoenbaum, who is writing a social history of the violin. Old Stradivaris and Guarneris might auction for millions of dollars, he says. “And since many of the modern violins sound just as good, more and more musicians are buying them.”

When Hargrave, the renowned violin maker, heard from Allison in February he was skeptical. “I get calls from amateur makers all the time,” he says. “I usually turn them away.” But Allison’s story was irresistible. At his studio, Hargrave inspected Allison’s instruments and quizzed him on his technique. “I hardly met anyone who works as fast as Geoffrey, and I include myself,” he later wrote NEWSWEEK in ane-mail. “He has already achieved more than most makers could hope for.” Encouraged by the compliments, Allison intends to become a full-time violin maker when he retires from the military this year. “I’ll have a pension, so I can do this even if it means earning no money,” he says. With the growing demand for new violins, he may even turn a profit.