Sometimes the music was live: soldiers strumming out Bob Dylan and Curtis Mayfield songs at base camps Filipino bands pounding out “Proud Mary” and “Soul Man” at enlisted-men’s clubs and Saigon bars touring acts from Bob Hope and Ann-Margret to Nancy Sinatra and James Brown granting momentary calm. Soldiers played it in their hooches on top-of-the-line tape decks they’d purchase cheap at the PX or via mail order from Japan they listened to it over headphones in helicopters and planes. With the crucial exception of combat, music was ubiquitous in Vietnam, reaching soldiers via albums, cassettes and tapes of radio shows sent from home on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network, featuring songs from stateside Top 40 stations and on the legendary, if short-lived, underground broadcasts of Radio First Termer, a pirate station operated out of Saigon. You could hear it in the difference between “ I Get Around” and “ Good Vibrations” between “ She Loves You” and “ Happiness Is a Warm Gun” between “ Please Please Please” and “ Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud” between the Shangri-Las and Grace Slick. It worked the other way, too - Vietnam and the dizzying changes accompanying it in America altered the music, the musicians and the messages. The hits were our hits: “ I Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” “ Fortunate Son” - and the song more than one Vietnam veteran has called “our national anthem,” the Animals’ “ We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” It was our lifeline, a link to our existence “back in the world,” connecting us with the things that enabled us, as the Impressions urged us, to “keep on pushing.” From the peaks of the Central Highlands and the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta to the “air-conditioned jungles” of Danang and Long Binh (where I served as an information specialist in 1970-71), soldiers used music to build community, stay connected to the home front and hold on to the humanity the war was trying to take away. Music was more than just background for us. For the men and women like me who served in Southeast Asia, music was what inexorably linked us to “my generation.” We sang along to the Beatles, Nancy Sinatra, Marty Robbins and the Temptations before we went to war, and we listened to them after we came back home. More than any other American war, Vietnam had a soundtrack, and you listened to it whether you were marching in the jungle or in the streets. If you weren’t there, it’s possible to imagine this as so much postproduction editing, imposing a relationship between the sounds and the experience of the war.
Battlefield vietnam song tv#
For those born after the last helicopters sank beneath the waves of the South China Sea, movies, documentaries and TV shows have repeatedly used music as a sonic background for depicting Vietnam as a tug of war between pro-war hawks and pro-peace doves. For those who watched the war unfold on the evening news, the music of Vietnam blurred with the sounds rising from the streets of America during a time of momentous challenge and change. “Vietnam.” The word comes camouflaged in music.