Kirsten Harper
Writer Doug Bradley served in the Vietnam War as an information specialist but never saw combat. Cultural historian Craig Werner was an anti-war radical during that era, playing in a hippie rock band. Together, these two men teach an integrated liberal studies class at UW-Madison called “The U.S. in Vietnam: Music, Media and Mayhem.”
Now, after 10 years of research and writing, Bradley and Werner have published We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (University of Massachusetts Press). The book was released in October, and a second printing is already underway.
The book reads like a cultural history of the 1960s and early 1970s, examining the role music played in the lives of Americans serving in Vietnam. “We had music all the time,” says Bradley, now 68. “The Army said it was a way to keep the guys engaged and make them comfortable.”
Bradley and Werner, 63, a professor in UW’s Department of Afro-American Studies and author of multiple books about music and race, interviewed more than 200 veterans. (Many were from Wisconsin, and some have since died.)
“Vietnam was such a mess in so many different ways that it spawned a renaissance in writing,” Bradley says. “There are more than 30,000 books written about Vietnam: histories, memoirs, fiction, plays, poetry. Yet, this angle hasn’t been done. And when you think of what connected us as a generation, it was the music — whether you were in Vietnam or not.”
Isthmus talked to Werner and Bradley about their process for creating the book and some surprising discoveries they made along the way.
Why do you think the “soundtrack of the Vietnam War” hasn’t been given the attention it deserves?
Craig Werner: A good percentage of the books about Vietnam are driven by the desire to either demonize or redeem the war. We get to the human story of the war. We also cover a broader range of Vietnam experiences than any other book out there, and I think we had an angle that allowed us to get the stories we did. We didn’t come into the project with a set of preconceptions that shut people out.
Doug Bradley: The songs were a great way to get the majority of men and women to talk about their experiences. I was surprised by how much the music enabled [conversation with] my fellow vets, who hadn’t up to that point been able to come to grips with what they experienced in Vietnam.
What did you wind up taking away that surprised you?
C.W.: What I learned very quickly was that a lot of songs that were connected with Vietnam in my mind, because I was playing in a hippie band for the counterculture, were not of particular interest to vets. They didn’t need songs about Vietnam. They needed songs about their girlfriends back home.
D.B.: Radio was our Internet. So whether you participated or you protested, whether you served or you stayed, you listened to “My Girl,” “The Dock of the Bay,” “Light My Fire,” “Like a Rolling Stone.” I was stunned by how deeply that’s in our DNA. And that music has staying power. We teach our class to 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds, and they know the music.
In the acknowledgements, you write that you “owe much” to Country Joe McDonald. How did you connect with him, and what impact did he have on the project?
C.W.: One of my students wanted to do a project on the music of Vietnam, and he looked up Country Joe online, sent him an email, and Joe got back to him. The student came to me and said, “Joe seems to be approachable.” I emailed Joe and got back an answer within 15 minutes. He is a vet and has worked with vets forever, and he connected us with a lot of vets.
Some of those vets’ stories are pretty powerful. Is there one that particularly resonates with you?
C.W.: Art Flowers, a black cat from Memphis, talking about the impact of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” on him after he came back from the war. He said listening to that record shook him out of his stoned torpor at the time and made him a warrior for human freedom.
D.B.: I will choose Gerald McCarthy, who wrote a piece for the book about race. That’s one of the stories about Vietnam that people don’t get — how both connected and divisive race could be and how that played out in the soundtrack to the war.
You said you tried to keep your politics out of the book. What would you write if you had included your own politics?
D.B.: In many ways, the Vietnam War was America’s second Civil War. We never healed from it. Think of the lives we might have saved if we [as a country] would have listened, if we would have cared, if we would have said to the vets, “Hey, you know what? You might’ve had to shoulder the burden of fighting in the war, but that doesn’t mean you have to take on the moral burden of that war for the rest of your lives.” I think about Vietnam every day, and that’s never going to go away. But I don’t have the nightmares that many other guys still do.”
Bradley and Werner will read from We Gotta Get Out of This Place at A Room of One’s Own, 315 W. Gorham St., at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 10. For more information and a playlist from the era, visit wggootp.com.
