The War, on Radio

BY Trevor Strunk

Take a moment and think back on the songs that you’d associate with the Vietnam War. For many, the list will read familiarly: “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix, and the unofficial Vietnam War veterans national anthem, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” by the Animals.

These and many others – “Flight of the Valkyries” anyone? – are some of the most notable songs of the era, and one could deeply delve into what makes them fit so well to determine the “ideal” Vietnam War song. But simply remembering those classics doesn’t tell the whole story.

Doug Bradley, who, with Craig Werner, co-wrote the book We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (https://vvaveteran.org/36-2/26-2_books.html), points out that, far from a Top 10 or 20, the list of top Vietnam War songs for veterans alone “would require something more like a Top 200 — or 2,000,” That’s a true testament to the individual needs and tastes of those who served during the war as well as the incredible depth of the music that came out in the 1960s and 70s.

So where does this leave us when thinking about the music of the Vietnam War? If nothing else, we are left with some universals, namely the songs that have become symbolic of the war and its complicated legacy. “We Gotta Get Out of the This Place,” for instance, operates as an anthem because it expresses a sentiment of the time so pointedly and directly, even if the song itself wasn’t meant to be about the Vietnam War.

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In a modern sense, it speaks to the need veterans have to make meaning and create something lasting that can make a change – “we gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do” is both a very specific desire (“I want to get out of Vietnam”) and a general ambition (“I need to get out of, or change, the world I see around me, even if it’s the last thing I ever do”). In this way the song balances the desires of the immediate and the way we grapple with experiences after the fact, and it is all the more poignant in the context of the Vietnam War.

Then there are the guitar riffs and melodic repetition that are common and beloved in many of the standards of the era. “Fortunate Son” for instance, has a scathing antiwar, anti-nepotism message, but is most fully remembered for its refrain, “it ain’t me / it ain’t me.”

Whether John Fogerty isn’t “a senator’s son” or “that fortunate one” doesn’t really matter so much as the refrain: The people who got out of the muck and trauma of the war aren’t part of the refrain or the song’s message. That simple, loud perspective backed with jangling treble-heavy guitars make this song feel more like muscle memory, something that had to have been comforting in the midst of an unfamiliar place and an unfamiliar set of feelings during conflict.

And while it’s tempting to say that “All Along the Watchtower” synthesizes what we’ve seen about these songs so far, that may be a simplification. Jimi Hendrix, a Black man in the midst of a largely white social revolution, represents the people who were erased by these assumptions. Because while the hippie movement and the protest rock of the era do represent a cultural understanding of the era writ large, the 1960s and 1970s had a lot more going on than just that.

Taking Bradley’s list as an example, “Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin and “Sittin (On the Dock of the Bay)” by Otis Redding should remind us that the rise of R&B and Soul corresponded with the war in Vietnam, and the soulful world-weariness in them may reflect more than just social conditions at home.

We also can see other songs that reflect country and folk traditions, proud as they are of protest and social commentary. Porter Wagoner’s heartbreaking “Green, Green Grass of Home” or “I Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die Rag” by Country Joe & The Fish, which wears its patriotism and sarcasm on its sleeve, show a more rural tone than even the deep-fried rock of CCR or the earthy blues and soul music that resonated with the troops in the field.

Then there’s jazz, with its rapid ascent and transformation through John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman and Charlie Parker, to name only a few. There’s no standard jazz song anyone I know relates to the Vietnam War, but it’s not hard to imagine someone putting on some Charles Mingus one humid afternoon or tense evening.

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Ultimately, what can be learned from combing over lists—both professional ones like Bradley’s, and amateur, anonymous lists you can find in YouTube collections and the like—is that the quintessential, definitive list of songs that represent or reflect the Vietnam War and the men and women who took part in it does not exist.

Even songs like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mama I’m Coming Home” – released in 1991, well after the war – find their ways onto these lists, and it’s hard to say that they simply don’t belong. The after-effects of a controversial war that was so deeply felt by the people who fought in the war and the people at home who watched the fighting on TV is that we are still grappling with it to this day. As a result, the music of the Vietnam War continues to shift and change with our understanding of the war itself.

It’s not exciting or satisfying to say that the music of the war was whatever got its troops through the day (and night), but that doesn’t make it any less true. And there isn’t a comprehensive list around that can ever encompass that entirely.

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