Contemporary Authors

• We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 2015

1. We gotta get out of this place : the soundtrack of the Vietnam War LCCN 2015024892 Type of material Book Personal name Bradley, Doug, 1947- Main title We gotta get out of this place : the soundtrack of the Vietnam War / Doug Bradley and Craig Werner. Published/Produced Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2015] Description xi, 256 pages ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781625341624 (pbk. ; alk. paper) 9781625341976 (hardcover ; alk. paper) CALL NUMBER ML3918.P67 B73 2015 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113) CALL NUMBER ML3918.P67 B73 2015 Copy 2 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113)

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: no2010204000

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Bradley, Doug, 1947-

  Found in: Next stop is Vietnam, p2010: p. 33 of text (Doug Bradley)
  OCLC, Dec. 13, 2010 (hdg.: Bradley, Doug; Bradley, Doug,
  1947- ; usage: Doug Bradley)
  Wisconsin Governor's Office media room, July 29, 2003,
  viewed online Dec. 13, 2010: Appointments to Board of
  Veterans Affairs (Doug Bradley, 56, served in Vietnam
  from 1970-1971, written on the Vietnam War and Vietnam
  Veterans; special assistant with the Univ. of Wis., and
  former director of public info. for the Univ. of
  Wis.-Extension; graduated Bethany College in W. Va. in
  1969, MA in English from Washington State Univ. in 1974)

  ================================================================================

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
  Library of Congress
  101 Independence Ave., SE
  Washington, DC 20540

  Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: no2010204000

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Bradley, Doug, 1947-

  Found in: Next stop is Vietnam, p2010: p. 33 of text (Doug Bradley)
  OCLC, Dec. 13, 2010 (hdg.: Bradley, Doug; Bradley, Doug,
  1947- ; usage: Doug Bradley)
  Wisconsin Governor's Office media room, July 29, 2003,
  viewed online Dec. 13, 2010: Appointments to Board of
  Veterans Affairs (Doug Bradley, 56, served in Vietnam
  from 1970-1971, written on the Vietnam War and Vietnam
  Veterans; special assistant with the Univ. of Wis., and
  former director of public info. for the Univ. of
  Wis.-Extension; graduated Bethany College in W. Va. in
  1969, MA in English from Washington State Univ. in 1974)

  ================================================================================

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
  Library of Congress
  101 Independence Ave., SE
  Washington, DC 20540

  Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

• We Gotta Get Out of This Place Web site - http://wggootp.com/

  Doug Bradley has written extensively about his Vietnam, and post-Vietnam, experiences. Drafted into the U. S. Army in March 1970, he served one year as an information specialist (journalist) at U. S. Army Republic of Vietnam (USARV) headquarters near Saigon. Following his discharge and tenure in graduate school, Doug relocated to Madison, WI where he helped establish Vets House, a storefront, community-based service center for Vietnam era veterans. In addition to writing a blog for Next Avenue.org, Doug is the author of DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle (Warriors Publishing Group, 2012).

• Doug Bradley Home Page - http://www.doug-bradley.com/about

  Doug Bradley is a Vietnam veteran from Madison, Wisconsin. Following his graduation from college in 1969, Doug was drafted into the U. S. Army in March 1970 and served as an information specialist (journalist) at the Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City, Missouri, and U. S. Army Republic of Vietnam (USARV) headquarters near Saigon.

  ​​

  Since his discharge from the military in late 1971, Doug has worked, written, taught, lectured, volunteered, blogged, and advocated on behalf of veteran issues. His collection of Vietnam-related short stories, DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle was published in 2012 by Warriors Publishing Group while We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music, Survival, Healing, and the Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (co-written with Dr. Craig Werner, Chair of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison) will be released in 2015. He and Werner also co-teach a course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison entitled “The Vietnam Era: Music, Media and Mayhem.”

  Doug is also a regular contributor to NextAvenue.org, the PBS website that offers news, information and perspective for adults.

  ​

• USA Today - http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/how-we-live/2016/01/24/monday-authors-doug-bradley-and-craig-werner/79177994/

  Monday with Authors: Doug Bradley and Craig Werner
  Tricia Vanderhoof, Correspondent 5:02 p.m. ET Jan. 24, 2016
  -Doug-Bradley-in-Nam-71-Attrib.-Courtesy-of-Author-.jpg

  (Photo: ~Courtesy Doug Bradley)
  Story Highlights

  We Gotta Get Out of This Place was named Rolling Stone's #1 Best Music Book of 2015
  Craig Werner is a Nominating Committee member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
  Doug Bradley served in 'Nam in 1970 and 1971, and the Vietnam infantryman's average age was 18-19
  Bruce Springsteen's The River concert on August 20, 1981, brought new attention to the challenges Vietnam veterans were facing

  28 CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE

  It's been almost 41 years since the fall of Saigon and, for many, one of the most powerful associations with Vietnam is the music of the period.

  So authors Doug Bradley and Craig Werner asked survivors a single, simple question: "What was your song?"

  Floodgates opened. The testimony they received is visceral – the hope, the horror, the fear, anger, disillusion, sorrow – still as immediate as mortar fire.

  Doug Bradley served in Vietnam as a combat correspondent in 1970 and 1971. He and Craig Werner, professor of Afro-American studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-teach "The Vietnam Era: Music, Media, and Mayhem." They have written "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War," just named Rolling Stone's number 1 Best Music Book of 2015.

  We spent an hour together on the phone; Bradley in Madison, and Werner on vacation in Hawaii.

  Mondays with Authors: Your book is meticulously researched; hundreds of interviews. The index alone is 17 pages. How did you tackle this wealth of material?

  Bradley: As Jay Maloney says in the final Solo (individual narrative), there is no such thing as one Vietnam, there were more than two and a half million of them. Every soldier lived a different experience and what emerged was the music. Music was the conduit.

  MwA: How did the book come about?

  Werner: In 2003, members of the Deadly Writers Patrol writing group who met at the Madison Vet Center gravitated to a conversation we were having about our love of music, sharing stories about songs they associated with their tours. It became apparent this was something much larger.

  MwA: In what way?

  Bradley: There were so many complexities. The length of the war, different phases, so many causes of tension, race particularly, not just there but back home as well. And music at its heart.

  MwA: Two phrases permeate the book: "In country" and "Back in the world." The gap between the two, the estrangement the boys felt, color every narrative. How did that translate?

  Bradley: Their average age was 19, 20 and for most of these young guys, it was their first time away from home. They were completely unprepared for the conditions. Songs were how they kept their spirits going, their connection to those they left back in the world while they were in-country, whether in combat or not.
  Doug Bradley is co-author of “We Gotta Get Out of This

  (Photo: ~Courtesy Doug Bradley)

  MwA: When radio was out, how did they cope?

  Both laugh: However they could. Someone always had a guitar, or improvised an instrument, or they sang, hummed. Bootleg cassettes or tapes on cheap decks from the PX.

  MwA: The cover is spot-on, white-on-red DYMO lettering over the photo. Who chose it?

  Bradley: Jack Harrison, design and production manager at UMass Press. We talked about different images. It's a copyrighted picture but we paid for it. It's iconic, that rear shot of a marine waiting for a flight out of Khe Sanh in the worst early days (February 25, 1968), his guitar and M16 slung across his back.

  MwA: It captures the ambivalence. What did you learn writing the book that you didn't know before?

  Werner: Longing for home, the breadth of the soundtrack our vets connect with their experience. (Doug murmurs agreement) The war lasted such a long time, the sheer range of songs that overlap their tours, that's the thing that struck us both. And they came from every area of the U.S. so you had every type of music.
  Craig Werner is co-author of “We Gotta Get Out of This

  (Photo: ~Photo by Leslee Nelson)

  MwA: Examples?

  Both: "Davy Crockett," "Yellow Rose of Texas," Kingston Trio's "MTA" ("The Man Who Never Returned") Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane," Temptations' "My Girl;" church music; "On Top of Old Smokey." Plus so many songs relating to women not just girlfriends: moms and sisters, other females in their lives as well.

  MwA: Why do you think the same tunes were mentioned again and again?

  Bradley: Because each song had a different meaning for each person. And even the meaning of the same song often changed as the person’s experience changed.

  Werner: Every tent was different, every hooch. What makes our book different – the real core – is that it acknowledges the differences, but with music as a source of connection.

  MwA: The mood of the war reflected the changing mood of the country. Ebony magazine called 1967 the summer of 'Retha, Rap and Revolt. How did that affect the soldiers?

  Bradley: There was so much racism between colors, class, and a predominantly high percentage of the casualties were lower-class minorities. Gerald McCarthy's Solo dealt with that. (McCarthy was 18 when he went overseas and barely 19 when he returned.)

  MwA: (In "Bad Moon Rising") McCarthy writes, "Crackers burned a cross in front of Doc Brown's tent," but then also wonders, "Does music make us whole again? Looking back, I think now music brought us together." It sounds as if music helped heal some of the in-country hate?

  Werner: It provided a connection, but also an escape.
  An Army band gets its groove on during the Vietnam

  (Photo: ~Courtesy Doug Bradley)

  MwA: Is there anything you're surprised someone hasn't asked you?

  Bradley: No one's asked whether I was pro- or anti-war, but it doesn't matter. With everyone we've interviewed, there's been both sides, and all ways in between. We just got out of the way and let them tell their stories. Music sustained these stories and it let them get them the hell home.

  Werner: No one's gonna read the book and come away with the idea that Vietnam was a good idea. People who were there all pretty much agree with that.

  MwA: Craig, I have a question for you. You're a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominating Committee. Bon Jovi's from New Jersey. He's eligible. Why hasn't he been voted in?

  Werner: We have no idea. No one knows who does the voting.

  MwA: Craig, the Garden State is counting on you.

  (Craig laughs)

  MwA: Moving on – another Garden State rocker. Your book talks about Springsteen's crucial The River concert on August 20, 1981 when he called Bobby Muller onto the stage, where he paid tribute to the vets and the problems they face, the burdens they carry.

  Mondays with Authors: Lisa Scottoline talks about her latest works

  Both: There's no way to overemphasize the importance of what Springsteen did in L.A. He listened to people. He acknowledged that this is real and it's buried more deeply than anyone realizes

  Listening is hard because we want to fix it. There's no way to fix it but the power of music is overwhelming. He provided that forum. He truly felt, 'There but for the grace of god go I, that's some other poor guy who just couldn't get out of it.' People got that.

  MwA: Due to the advances in medicine and technology, we had just 58,307 fatalities in two decades. But there were 303,644 wounded. That has led to unprecedented ongoing veterans' issues. What support is there?

  Bradley: What strikes us teaching our class, especially for the younger vets, men and women, is the tremendous strain and the distance between the rhetoric – the "Thank you for your service" clichés, appearances at airports or trotting out half-time at games – and what they're being forced to deal with. In the process of writing our book, we found that many who found it impossible to talk about their experiences could do it when we asked, "Do you have a song?" What was needed were places where people could tell their stories.
  “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of

  (Photo: Courtesy Bettmann/CORBIS)

  MwA: Are there any?

  Bradley: We stay connected with new organizations that continue to raise awareness. We're inspired by Dryhooch (military jargon for a hut or safe place to sleep during combat), a non-profit that provides peer and family support and counseling, by veterans, for veterans of all eras, in a café-like environment.

  MwA: Where did Dryhooch start?

  Werner: It was founded in Milwaukee in 2010 by Bob Curry, and more have branched out. Their Coffee Shop provides a gathering place to reconnect; it's free of alcohol, always a major problem for vets, and dedicated to helping warriors who survived the war, now survive the peace.

  MwA: What's most important?

  Both: To know that others share the same issues. That there are ways to make those connections, share those burdens.

  MwA: You mention the women. So many more serve now than ever before. The ones who served in Vietnam (almost 7500) were referred to as Donut Dollies. Those you interviewed didn't seem to object to the term, although today the term seems somewhat demeaning. Tell us about them.

  Mondays with Authors: Franklin Lakes' Steven Rigolosi

  Both: There were rigorous qualifications and most (over 83 percent) were nurses, Red Cross volunteers there as morale boosters for the troops. They were mostly older than most of the guys they befriended because of the college requirement.

  Bradley: Craig, have you never heard anyone complain about the term?

  Werner: No, it was not a term they objected to, it was the way it was. They were very independent, there to do the job; they wanted to see for themselves. They were lifesavers. Many of them were anti-war. They had a connection with life back it he world and it was great to have them there.

  Bradley: They were poised and smart and had enough camaraderie that they have their own reunions. Many had PTSD and trauma as well. Heather Stur wrote a great book, Beyond Combat, which very definitely makes that point.

  Werner: Jay Maloney's Solo makes the point as well. He was a medic and his friend Sharon, a nurse, was killed during a rocket attack on their hospital. Women were not safe. If you're getting mortared, you're in combat. Gender isn't relevant. Men and women experience same trauma and share a lot of the same problems.

  MwA: Young women also served as DJs and often found themselves walking a fine line between Division Command guidelines (censorship) and GI requests that might get the broadcasts pulled. Doug, you deal with that in your Solo "Chain of Fools." The brass hated what they called "subversive" music, especially a renegade DJ?

  Colin Quinn talks: Mondays with Authors

  Bradley: You mean Dave Rabbit (real name C. David DeLay Jr.). He was a pirate radio legend, played heavy metal, psychedelic tunes, drug anthems: "Peace out, brother."

  MwA: Details!

  Bradley: AFVN broadcast out of Saigon and he'd burst into their signal, "Change your radio to this frequency!" And we would! I was sure he'd get nailed. He fooled with the playlist and played the music we all wanted to hear.

  The women listened to his music as well and he'd have them go into the women's latrines and read what was written in the stalls. He'd tell us, "So-and-so is pushing bad H at ___; I was just there!" And you felt he was there the whole time. I don't know how he got away with it.

  MwA: He's a legend!

  Bradley: Yes!

  MwA: But he only broadcast for three weeks in January 1971!

  Bradley: (Laughs) Yes! But it was the longest three weeks in radio history!

  MwA: One final thing you discovered?

  Both: That although there is no definitive Vietnam soundtrack, many of the favorites for younger vets in Afghanistan and Kuwait and the Mideast are the same: Creedence and Bruce and Hendrix.

  "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War" was published by the University of Massachusetts. For information on how to get a playlist, go to www.umass.edu/umpress/title/we-gotta-get-out-place.

  Follow Tricia Vanderhoof on Twitter @triciavand

• Stripes - http://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/vietnam-at-50/1966/authors-explore-the-music-and-sound-of-the-vietnam-era-1.438292#.WLgbK3-hqJd

  QUOTED: "When we started out we thought we were going to organize it around a Vietnam vets’ Top Twenty—choose twenty songs and use those to tell the story. And then we started interviewing people and it became a Top 200 or a Top 2,000 or something like that very, very rapidly. Ten years later, we decided it was just time to finish writing the book, and part of that was way too many of the guys who we talked to were starting to die. We wanted to get it out while as many as possible were still with us." "I think the legacy of the book is that—maybe forty years too late—we found a way to have a dialogue with the men and women who fought in Vietnam, and that music was essential to enabling them to heal"

  Authors explore the music and sound of the Vietnam era
  Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, background, from left, with their book "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War" at the Stars and Stripes central office, Washington, D.C., on Aug. 26, 2016. The book, which explores how U.S. troops used music to cope with the complexities of the Vietnam War in country and up on their return to the States, was named the Best Music Book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine.
  Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes
  Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, background, from left, with their book "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War" at the Stars and Stripes central office, Washington, D.C., on Aug. 26, 2016. The book, which explores how U.S. troops used music to cope with the complexities of the Vietnam War in country and up on their return to the States, was named the Best Music Book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine.

  Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes
  View Photo Gallery »
  By Sean Moores
  Stars and Stripes
  Published: November 8, 2016

  Like many great conversations about music, it started at a party.

  Doug Bradley, a Vietnam veteran, and Craig Werner, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, met at a Christmas party at the Madison Vet Center in 2003. They struck up a conversation about ’60s music that soon took on a life of its own as several veterans joined in and shared their stories and experiences. As the Thunderclap Newman song says, there was something in the air.

  “It was really amazing to watch. And then, even though we had just met, we sort of said, ‘There’s something going on here,’ ” said Bradley, 69. “And a couple of months later we grabbed a beer on the terrace there at the university and sat out on the lake and said, ‘Let’s write a book.’”

  Their 2015 book, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,” explores the music of the era, how troops used music to cope with life in a war zone and how veterans turned to music as a means of survival and reintegration upon coming home.

  As they wrote, they found a niche.

  “This is telling part of the story that we didn’t hear (in) other places,” said Werner, 64. “When we started out we thought we were going to organize it around a Vietnam vets’ Top 20 — choose 20 songs and use those to tell the story. And then we started interviewing people and it became a Top 200 or a Top 2,000 or something like that very, very rapidly. Ten years later, we decided it was just time to finish writing the book, and part of that was way too many of the guys who we talked to were starting to die. We wanted to get it out while as many as possible were still with us.”

  Bradley and Werner also ended up co-teaching a class called “The Vietnam Era: Music, Media and Mayhem” at Wisconsin. They dug into the soundtrack of Vietnam for a decade, conducting hundreds of interviews that centered on a common question: What was your song?
  “I think, frankly, it was a way for some of these people to get back home from the war.”
  - Doug Bradley, Vietnam veteran

  “We learned very early on to start our interviews with, ‘Did you have a song that you connect with Vietnam?’,” Werner said. “Because, this is no secret, if you go to a Vietnam vet and say, ‘Hey, man, what was it like?’ Good damn luck. You’re not getting anywhere. But the music opened that up.”

  The authors had a good handle on the material. Bradley, a music lover from Philadelphia, was drafted into the Army in March 1970 and soaked up the soundtrack of Vietnam while serving as an information specialist at Long Binh from November ’70 to November ’71.

  Werner played organ in a band named Armageddon, gigging in front of GIs and hippies alike around Fort Carson, Colo., during the war. He’s written other music books and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s nominating committee. Despite their musical bona fides, Bradley and Werner still found themselves surprised at times.

  “I sort of expected a little more edgy things, maybe a little politics,” Bradley said. “Not the black and white politics we had in America at the time, but what stunned me was there’s ‘My Girl’ and (Otis Redding’s) ‘(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay’ and there’s (Peter, Paul and Mary’s) ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ and (The Beach Boys’) ‘Sloop John B’ — ‘Detroit City’ by Bobby Bare. So many songs about longing and wanting to be somewhere else and wanting to be home or missing the person you loved. And I didn’t expect that in those conversations.”

  They also found that songs held different meanings for different people. The track from which their book takes its title is a prime example. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” written by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, was pitched to the Righteous Brothers as the follow-up to their 1965 No. 1 hit “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

  “Cynthia Weil sent us the demo copy and, man, it would have been a No. 1 hit, without any question, by the Righteous Brothers,” Werner said. Instead, the get-out-of-the-ghetto song was recorded by the Animals, who were making a move from working-class Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to London.

  Released in July 1965 in the U.K. and September ’65 in the United States, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and its bubbling bass line rose to No. 2 and No. 13 on the charts in those countries, respectively. Meanwhile, the song took on a life of its own in Vietnam. It resonated more strongly as the war dragged on and fell out of public favor.

  Bradley recalls hearing the song for the first time after arriving in country. Two soldiers from his new office at Long Binh were preparing to leave Vietnam, which was cause for celebration.
  [Doug Bradley in Vietnam, 1971. Bradley, the co-author of 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,' was an Army information specialist at Long Binh in 1970 and '71. Courtesy of Doug Bradley]

  Doug Bradley in Vietnam, 1971. Bradley, the co-author of 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,' was an Army information specialist at Long Binh in 1970 and '71. Courtesy of Doug Bradley

  “We’re coming in, two guys are going out, so they had a DEROS (Date Eligible For Return From Overseas) party,” Bradley said. “And it was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to. I’m in country two weeks, and they played ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place.’ And we all joined arms and sang and we changed the words. When they go, ‘(girl there’s a) better life for you and me,’ we said, ‘in the U.S.A.’ That was our closing line.”

  “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” presents a thorough history of how technology — transistor radios, access to inexpensive reel-to-reel and cassette decks and the establishment of Armed Forces Vietnam Network radio — and cultural factors turned Vietnam into the so-called Rock and Roll War. There are USO shows, Filipino cover bands and minstrels in the hooch. You can read about the four most popular acts among troops (James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival).

  Bradley and Warner delve into the patriotism that pushed Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” to No. 1 in 1966 — and the parade of parodies that followed. They collected this chronology through conventional research, reporting and writing, but also by putting voices of the veterans front and center by letting them write about their experiences.

  These “solos,” by a diverse group that includes white, black, Hispanic and Native American veterans, provide the beating heart in the book’s narrative. The passages, and many of the behind-the-scenes interviews, served another important purpose.

  “I think, frankly, it was a way for some of these people to get back home from the war, Bradley said. “There were many, many moments, almost universal, when a person would start to tell us a story they’d never told before . . . Sometimes we’d go to sit down with them and they’d have their kids in the room and they’d talk — that was when they finally got home.”
  VIETNAM VETERAN'S TOP TEN SONGS

  1. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” The Animals

  2. “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Country Joe and the Fish

  3. “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” Peter, Paul and Mary

  4. “Fortunate Son,” Creedence Clearwater Revival

  5. “Purple Haze,” The Jimi Hendrix Experience

  6. “What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye

  7. “Detroit City,” Bobby Bare

  8. “Chain of Fools,” Aretha Franklin

  9. “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Nancy Sinatra

  10. “My Girl,” The Temptations

  Submitted by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, authors of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,” who interviewed about 300 veterans while writing the book.

  “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” was well received critically, earning praise from Rolling Stone as Best Music Book of 2015. Bradley and Werner hope that getting troops home, a return so many were denied, can be part of their book’s legacy.

  “I think the legacy of the book is that — maybe 40 years too late — we found a way to have a dialogue with the men and women who fought in Vietnam, and that music was essential to enabling them to heal,” said Bradley, who named “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” when asked for “his song” from Vietnam. “I think the book’s about healing. I want the legacy to be that two or three hundred people that we talked to were able to get back home and to heal.”

  Added Werner, who cited CCR’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” as the song he associates with Vietnam: “We usually close our class with it, and usually — the last few times I’ve listened to it, it really hit me. . . . I’m looking at our TAs (teaching assistants), these younger (Iraq and Afghanistan) vets, (and) I’m just thinking … let’s not do this again … can we please learn something?”

  moores.sean@stripes.com

• All Things Considered, NPR - http://www.npr.org/2010/11/11/131242902/-next-stop-is-vietnam-a-war-in-song

  < 'Next Stop Is Vietnam': A War In Song November 11, 20102:30 PM ET 8:20 Download Facebook Twitter Google+ Email ROBERT SIEGEL, host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. MELISSA BLOCK, host: And I'm Melissa Block. On this Veteran's Day, we're going to look back, listen back, really, to the war in Vietnam. Its history has been told countless times in books, movies and plays. Now a new CD collection explores the conflict and its impact through the music it inspired. From member station WCPN, David C. Barnett reports. DAVID C. BARNETT: In 1969, Gary Hall was an orthopedic technician in the 17th Field Hospital in An Khe, in Vietnam's Central Highlands.�He saw what seemed to be an endless stream of wounded and dead, and Hall says music took him away, at least temporarily. (Soundbite of music) Mr. GARY HALL (Former Orthopedic Technician): In An Khe, I think the popular song was "Love One Another," The Youngbloods. (Soundbite of song, "Love One Another") THE YOUNGBLOODS (Band): (Singing) Love is but a song we sing. And fear's the way we die. Mr. HALL: Come on people now, smile on each other, everybody get together, gonna love one another right now. (Soundbite of song, "Love One Another") THE YOUNGBLOODS: (Singing) Come on people now, smile on each other, everybody get together, try love one another right now. Mr. HALL: That's the one I remember really strongly. BARNETT: But if you ask a lot of veterans, the song that captures their feelings about Vietnam is a 1960s pop hit by The Animals, which was really about young people trapped in a British urban slum. (Soundbite of song, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place") THE ANIMALS (BAND): (Singing) We gotta get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do. We got to get out of this place. Girl, there's a better life for me and you. BARNETT: There are over 300 songs on the new 13 CD box set titled "Next Stop is Vietnam." They range from a folk ballad released just before U.S. troops landed, to a 2008 song about the aftereffects that veterans still suffer. Hugo Keesing put the collection together.�It's a project he's worked on since the early 1970s, when he taught psychology courses to U.S. troops a few hundred miles up the coast from Saigon. Mr. HUGO KEESING (Curator, "Next Stop is Vietnam") By, I want to say, about the mid-1980s, I had collected about 500 45s that dealt with the Vietnam War. BARNETT: The first Vietnam War protest song to become a commercial hit was a three-and-a half-minute rant. (Soundbite of song, "Eve of Destruction") Mr. BARRY MCGUIRE (Musician): (Singing) The eastern world, it is explodin', violence flarin', bullets loadin'. You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'. You don't believe in war, but what's the gun you're totin'? BARNETT: Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" was banned by many radio stations and the entire Armed Forces Network. Mr. KEESING: The perceived or assumed impact was such that within several weeks, there was already the first answer record, the "Dawn of Correction," where a very clean-cut group of young men, who included members of Danny and the Juniors, decided that it was important to refute, point-by-point, some of the concerns and claims made in "Eve of Destruction." (Soundbite of song, "Dawn of Correction") THE SPOKESMEN (Band): (Singing) The Western world has a common dedication to keep free people from Red domination. Maybe you can't vote, boy, but man your battle stations or there'll be no need for votin' in future generations. BARNETT: Perhaps the first song to explicitly�support the growing military effort in Vietnam was co-written by an Army soldier who recorded this demo version in a Saigon safe house in the mid-1960s. (Soundbite of song, "Ballad of the Green Berets") Staff Sergeant BARRY SADLER (U.S. Army, Special Forces Unit): (Singing) Silver wings upon their chest. These are men, America's best. BARNETT: Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler was a member of the Army's elite Special Forces unit, identified by their green berets, when his commercial recording of the song went to the top of the charts. (Soundbite of song, "Ballad of the Green Berets") Staff Sgt. SADLER: (Singing) Trained to live off nature's land. Trained in combat, hand to hand. Mr. ART MCKOY: We always admired those guys, because they went way up in the hills and in the valleys and did some hell of stuff. And, in our hearts, even though we weren't that courageous to be Green Berets, when we hear that song, we all want to be like Green Berets, you know. BARNETT: Art McKoy says the members of his platoon were impressed when they first heard the song. But when McKoy got back home to Cleveland, another Vietnam song caught his ear. It was by a local singer named Charles Hatcher, better known as Edwin Starr. (Soundbite of song, "War") Mr. EDWIN STARR (Musician): (Singing) War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Uh-huh. War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again, y'all. Mr. MCKOY: The fact of the matter is that we went with nothing, we lost our lives, and we came back, we really had nothing. If you ask me, that was one of the great battle cries. I think it's relevant right today. BARNETT: A number of soldiers recorded their own songs while serving in-country, and an entire disc on the new set is devoted to them, including this take on the daily news briefings conducted by the U.S. government press office in Saigon, recorded by - perhaps for good reason - an unidentified military staffer. (Soundbite of song, "Battle Hymn of the Republic of Vietnam") Unidentified Man: (Singing) Mine eyes have seen the story of the winning of the war. It is published every afternoon a little after 4. They put it in the briefing sheets and then they tell us more and the truth goes sliding by. BARNETT: One of the best known songs of the era is another darkly humorous ditty by Country Joe and the Fish about soldiers marching off to war. (Soundbite of song, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag") COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH (Band): (Singing) And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam. Mr. KEESING: By the early '70s, as troops were arriving in Vietnam,�they�were singing the "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." BARNETT: Hugo Keesing. Mr. KEESING: It was an indication of how divided not only the nation was, but there was almost a gallows humor in singing, whoopee, I'm going to die, as American troops are coming to Vietnam for the first time. (Soundbite of song, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag") COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH: (Singing) Well, there ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee, we're all gonna die. All right. BARNETT: Country Joe McDonald's performance at the�1969 Woodstock festival�made him famous, but in a 1996 talk at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Navy veteran expressed conflicted feelings about the legacy of his signature song. Mr. COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD (Musician): When I sing�"Fixin'-to-Die Rag" for Vietnam veterans, I know what they're feeling and they're thinking. But when I sing it to a regular audience, I don't know what the hell they're thinking. Mr. JOHN BEGALA (Former Ohio Legislator): Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, the next stop is Vietnam. (Soundbite of laughter) Mr. BEGALA: Great song. BARNETT: Former Ohio legislator John Begala was a sophomore at Kent State University in 1970, when four students were killed by National Guard troops called in to quell an anti-war protest.�One week later, a new song by�Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, came on the radio. (Soundbite of song, "Ohio") CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG (Band): (Singing) Tin soldiers and Nixon comin'. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drummin'. Four dead in Ohio. Mr. BEGALA: To this day, I listen to that song and I get pissed off. It tugs on your emotions and it tugs on your anger, tugs on your disappointment, and the rage.�My god, it takes you right back. BARNETT: For NPR News, I'm David C. Barnett in Cleveland. (Soundbite of song, "Ohio") CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG: (Singing) Gotta get down to it. Soldiers are gunning us down. Should have been done long ago.

QUOTED: "We Gotta Get Out of This Place is a fine introduction to the role of music during the Vietnam War,"

Bradley, Doug. We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War
R.D. Cohen
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1176.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about

Bradley, Doug. We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War, by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner. Massachusetts, 2015. 256p Index afp ISBN 9781625341976 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9781625341624 pbk, $26.95; ISBN 9781613763698 ebook, contact publisher for price

(cc) 53-3440

ML3918

2015-24892 CIP

Bradley (a Vietnam veteran) and Werner--who co-teach a course on war at the University of Wisconsin--have compiled a fascinating history of music connected with the Vietnam War. Drawing on a wide range of personal interviews and published autobiographies, the authors provide five roughly chronological chapters, each focusing on a particular song, plus detailed notes and a number of extensive quotations they label "SOLOs." "With the crucial exception of combat situations," the authors begin, "music was just about everywhere in Vietnam, reaching soldiers via albums, cassettes, and tapes of radio shows sent from home; on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN); and on the legendary underground broadcasts of Radio First Termer." The Animals's recording of "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" served as a sort of unofficial anthem, but it was joined by numerous other songs, patriotic as well as antiwar. By the late 1960s there was increasing disenchantment among the soldiers and growing racial strife. Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" became increasingly popular. Joining Michael Kramer's The Republic of Rock (CH, Nov'13, 51-1390), We Gotta GetoutofThis Place is a fine introduction to the role of music during the Vietnam War. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All readers.--R. D. Cohen, Indiana University Northwest
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cohen, R.D. "Bradley, Doug. We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1176. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661571&it=r&asid=ee7c7b6b8a06e364d691adbf3f1a3903. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661571

Cohen, R.D. "Bradley, Doug. We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1176. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA449661571&asid=ee7c7b6b8a06e364d691adbf3f1a3903. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

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  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/11/we-gotta-get-out-of-this-place-the-soundtrack-of-t.html
  Word count: 1696

  QUOTED: "No single book could capture that many Vietnams, or the multitude of voices needed to describe them, any more than you could squeeze that many singers onto a single 45 RPM record or write a song to evoke all of their experiences. But the remarkable achievement of Bradley and Werner’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place is how close they’ve come to making that many voices of Vietnam veterans heard."

  We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner
  By Steve Nathans-Kelly | November 9, 2015 | 2:59pm
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  We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner

  The cultural impact of influential Vietnam-themed films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July and Good Morning Vietnam is so pervasive that the soundtracks of those movies—all of which made ample use of music from the Vietnam era—have arguably entrenched themselves as the de facto soundtrack of the war.

  GetOutofThisPlaceProper.jpgWhen Francis Ford Coppola laid The Doors’ stark and spooky “The End” over rotor-whirring helicopters and Vietnamese jungles ablaze, he not only set the tone for his impressionistic film; he made the song and the war virtually inseparable in the minds of moviegoers whose strongest impressions of the war were formed as they absorbed Coppola’s film. Likewise, when Barry Levinson paired Louis Armstrong’s dreamy “What a Wonderful World” with a montage of police brutality and villages being bombed in Good Morning Vietnam, his choice was so effective that in addition to creating a perhaps permanent imagined connection between the song and the war, he virtually ensured that “What a Wonderful World” would be used just as contrapuntally in TV commercials for years to come.

  The Vietnam War looms so large in the collective imaginations of Americans of several generations that most of us tend to think of the music of the war as the music that evokes it for us. In their thoroughly researched, powerfully written and insightful new book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner frame the question of which songs defined the Vietnam era in much less voyeuristic terms. Weaving together the testimony and reminiscences of a broad range of veterans—drawing on both the authors’ extensive and probing interviews and a host of poignant memoirs—Bradley and Werner explore the music that made Vietnam “the rock ’n’ roll war” through the recollections of those who fought the war and survived it.

  Fascinatingly, Bradley and Werner investigate the mechanics of how music featured so prominently in the soldiers’ experience in Vietnam, and how music sometimes united and often exposed deep and contentious divisions between soldiers of different racial and regional backgrounds. Perhaps most fascinatingly of all, We Gotta Get Out of This Place demonstrates how the music that found its way into the lives of the men and women who fought the war changed as the war dragged on, reflecting the dramatic changes “back in the world.”

  Several years back, when Bradley and Werner took up the oral history project that became We Gotta Get Out of This Place, the authors envisioned that its centerpiece would be a “Vietnam Vets’ Top 20.” As they interviewed more and more veterans, it quickly became clear that no static set of 20 songs would accurately represent the story that was emerging—and that 200 or 2,000 songs might not, either. It wasn’t just the range of songs that were popping up in the vets’ recollections as the breadth of experience associated with those songs. And if a broad swath of vets couldn’t agree on a song such as the Animals’ defiant working-class anthem “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” Nancy Sinatra’s ever-popular “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s redoubtable “Fortunate Son,” Peter, Paul & Mary’s wrenching “Leaving on a Jet Plane” or even Country Joe & the Fish’s anti-authoritarian, pro-soldier “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” (with its unforgettable “It’s one-two-three, what are we fighting for?” chorus), those records couldn’t begin to represent the range of songs that mattered to soldiers fighting the war or the reasons they did.

  If Bradley and Werner had attempted to build their book around a 20-song list, they would have had a much harder time trying to capture how profoundly the music that made its way to Vietnam changed between the early years of America’s involvement in the war from the 1961-1964 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. It’s staggering to consider the cultural sea changes that separated the military advisors and volunteers of the early 1960s, whose musical tastes might have run from Pat Boone to Tony Bennett to Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” to the disillusioned draftees of the early 1970s, who arrived steeped in a youth culture defined by the escalating war at home and joined an increasingly aimless war in Vietnam.

  As Bradley and Werner point out, the military’s eventual surrender to the influence of popular music changed dramatically in that period, as reflected by the increasing rock-and-soul-friendliness of Armed Forces Radio Vietnam (which for years had restricted its programming to classical music and pop of the blandest sort, as depicted in Good Morning Vietnam). During the later years of the war, dissension in the ranks drove the military to initiate a policy of “hip militarism” to make army life more recreational and palatable as a way of warding off mutiny without addressing its root causes. A key part of “hip militarism” was opening the doors to rock and soul music, antiwar and Black Power sentiments and all.

  “Maybe the soldiers were benefitting from the new hip militarism,” Bradley and Werner write, “but they were still in Vietnam and there was still a war going on. Just as there were riots back home, there was racism in Vietnam; just as there were drugs back in the world, there were drugs in-country too. Amid all this mayhem, music could be a balm, an inspiration, and an ironic commentary, sometimes all three at once.”

  Naturally, the music that soldiers gravitated to in Vietnam didn’t simply reflect the war or their attitudes toward it, but who they were and where they came from. The sharply divergent musical tastes of soldiers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds is a key part of the story Bradley and Werner tell in We Gotta Get Out of This Place, and one way that using music to gain a deeper and richer understanding of the soldiers’ experience proves most effective. While it’s something of an oversimplification to say that the white guys favored country and western, the black guys preferred soul and pot-smoking Hendrix fans of both races met in the middle, much of the story involves such basic and unshakable differences in the black and white working-class cultures that clashed in Vietnam. But to suggest that the musical differences and resulting (often violent) conflicts were just a black-and-white thing ignores the voices of Latino and Native American soldiers who fought in the war—and who chime in with some of this oral history’s most compelling narrative “Solos.”

  Perhaps the most surprising musical connection in the book comes from Chicagoan marine Rick Berg. Mostly, Berg recalls getting stoned and listening to psychedelic albums like the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. But he also describes listening to a record by “soft hippie” folksinger Judy Collins, which included her rendition of “Poor People of Paris” from the 1963 Peter Weiss play Marat Sade. “A while later I recognized the irony to that,” Berg recalls. “I’m listening to French revolutionary songs. The Viet Cong gave me my first lesson in Marxism, and I had the soundtrack… I figured it out in a hole one day. The VC are fighting for poor people; the Vietnamese are poor; I’m poor; I’m on the wrong side.”

  Perhaps what’s most striking about Bradley and Werner’s book is its balance, and the feeling for nuance that comes through in their writing and the vets’ testimony they share. We Gotta Get Out of This Place is by no means an exclusively hawk or dove’s book. Ambivalence abounds in nearly every “Solo,” in individual soldiers’ experiences and the stranger-than-fiction adventures of Vietnam pirate radio legend Dave Rabbit, and the fascinating recollections of Filipino guitarist Edgar Acosta, whose career in music began with gigs on U.S. bases in Vietnam.

  We Gotta Get Out of This Place concludes, appropriately enough, with a revealing and often painful discussion of the travails of Vietnam vets in the 40 years since the war’s end. The last chapter’s testimony captures how difficult the journey back to the world proved for so many, as they returned to find the country they served distancing itself from them in the shamed and humiliated aftermath of the war. Naturally, the book homes on the role music has played in that uniquely brutal phase of the Vietnam experience, both for those who found that particular songs had become a lifeline of sorts, as well as those who transmuted that experience into original music of their own.

  In the concluding “Solo” of the book, Vietnam vet Jay Maloney begins, “There is no such thing as one Vietnam. There were more than two and a half million of them.” No single book could capture that many Vietnams, or the multitude of voices needed to describe them, any more than you could squeeze that many singers onto a single 45 RPM record or write a song to evoke all of their experiences. But the remarkable achievement of Bradley and Werner’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place is how close they’ve come to making that many voices of Vietnam veterans heard.

• Rolling Stone
  http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/10-best-music-books-of-2015-20151221/we-gotta-get-outta-this-place-the-soundtrack-of-the-vietnam-war-by-doug-bradley-and-craig-werner-20151220
  Word count: 174

  QUOTED: "nuanced and frequently moving."

  By Tobias Carroll, Joseph Hudak, Charles Aaron, Richard Gehr, Andy Greene
  December 21, 2015

  1. 'We Gotta Get Outta This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War' by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner

  Doug Bradley and Craig Werner's account of music's connection to the Vietnam War is intimate and deeply informative, with a scope that encompasses both the war itself and the way that music has helped raise awareness of veterans' issues long after its end. We Gotta Get Out of This Place gives the reader a good sense of how the popularity of different songs and styles waxed and waned over the years, as the mood of the war changed. It also gives plenty of space for extended first-person narratives (dubbed "Solos") offering a diverse array of viewpoints, including many from veterans who found themselves in anti-war camps, those who felt more conflicted about the anti-war movement, and musicians like Country Joe McDonald and James Brown. Nuanced and frequently moving. T.C.

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