Book Review: We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War – Doug Bradley and Craig Werne
Ford, G. (2016). We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War by Doug Bradley and Craig Werne, Asian Review of Books, 14 February.
This is a musical history of the world’s first “rock and roll” war. Authors Bradley and Werner see not one, but rather three consecutive Vietnam Wars from an American perspective: a professional war prior to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, then an increasingly conscript war, as casualties rose and enlistment fell, that stretched up to North Vietnam’s Tet offensive—and that proved at the same time a military defeat and psychological masterstroke—and finally one that segued into the long dying endgame as the troops on the ground fell into drugs and despair, mutiny and music and the racial, generational and political divisions created.
In the first of these Vietnam wars, the music was a reflection of back home: patriotism, sentimentality and pop standards as America’s professional soldiers advised the South’s failed state how to run its civil war with the North in the fight between communism and corruption. The sounds were Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon, “Moon River” and “Rock Around the Clock”.
August 1964 ratcheted the American war up a notch. The fallacious claim that two US warships, the USS Fort Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, had been fired on by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, gave President and Congress the excuse to declare war on the North and troop numbers spiralled. By 1968 there 500,000 soldiers and a million US boots on the ground.
Here musical taste diverged between back home and the firing line. The anthem for this phase of the war became “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”. Eric Burdon, the Animals lead singer, recorded it as a song of working class rebellion, but was happily surprised on his first visit to the States that a song that had limped to Number 16 in the US Top 100 was a GI hymn. As a card carrying member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Burdon said he was against all wars. Initially, the conscripts didn’t want to be there and then they didn’t understand why they were there.
The playlist extended to Dylan’s “Masters of War”, Buffy Sainte- Marie’s “Universal Soldier” and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”. Back home there was a different view with numerous radio stations banning McGuire’s song, claiming it was “an aid to the enemy in Vietnam.”
1968 saw 14,000 Americans killed and 150,000 wounded; Vietnamese casualties were ten times higher. This was the year of the Tet Offensive when the Vietcong launched major attacks on scores of provincial capitals, bases and Saigon itself where the US Embassy was captured and held for seven hours. These attacks were stubbornly repelled, but the conscripts knew winning the war was over. It took the US Government another five years to catch up.
Phase three saw the US military as a land army close to collapse. The war continued at a safe distance. The enemy suffered under the broadsides of the capital ships safely out of range of retaliation along the coast and the air force rained down bombs and deluged the countryside with napalm and “agent orange”, but on the ground, nobody wanted to be the last soldier to die in Vietnam. Troops refused orders,
soldiers disobeyed orders and soldiers fought back and each other. Fragging—the murder or attempted murder of officers by enlisted men—soared to more than one a day, there were black versus white riots and shootings and a mutiny of black sailors on USS Sumter.
The new anthem was Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die” that united black and white with the former encoring with James Brown’s “Say it Loud—I’m Black and Proud” and the latter Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son’ and coming together for the Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”, which—for the soldiers—resonated more with the color of smoke grenades guiding helicopters in than a particular powerful brand of LSD. Country Joe and Hendrix’s credentials were that they were both military “vets” themselves.
The film Good Morning, Vietnam would have us believe they had all of this music booming across the country via Armed Forces Vietnam Network (ATVN). Bradley and Werner don’t agree. AFVN, until the last gasps of the war when the troops were indulged with anything to keep them happy, was strictly “no sex, no drugs and no pacifism”. There were short-lived pirate radios like Radio First Termer and, of course, “Hanoi Hannah” broadcasting from the North with a better playlist and better local news, on occasion, than AFVN. But it was it was to taped music that the troops danced with the apocalypse.
We Gotta Get Out of this Place very evocatively gives the sounds and feel of a very narrow war. The US’s allies don’t get a look in. The 350,000 South Koreans who served get but a single mention in the army newspaper “Stars and Stripes” on an imaginary song list “Ring of Fire” by the ROK’s. As for the Vietnamese and the rest they figure barely at all. It’s either, at one extreme the US “Hoa Mein Toy” (Flowers of Our Land) operation where Vietnamese singers, sexy dancing girls and rock and roll bands attracted large audiences of Vietnamese adolescents where those fifteen and older were effectively press-ganged into South Vietnam’s military—or the nameless litter of “raunchy Korean girl bands”, naked girl dancers, brothels and prostitutes that spill across the pages.
This tells it all. Such solipsism was a guarantee that despite the US’s technological power and resources, it was doomed to lose: the only question was real question was exactly when.