The Soundtrack to Vietnam War History Isn’t Quite Historically Accurate

Today, more than any other American conflict, the military action popularly known as “Vietnam” (though it eventually involved Cambodia and Laos as well) has a soundtrack in the popular imagination. Thanks to Hollywood and documentarians like Ken Burns, we think we know the characteristic sounds of that war and what they meant for how it was fought. Cue up the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Jimi Hendrix, with Grace Slick’s shimmering vocals catapulting us into the underground in “White Rabbit,” Jim Morrison’s baritone intoning the epic psychodrama of “The End,” and Hendrix’s wailing Stratocaster reinventing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as cri de coeur. In the exposition sequence of Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen) grouses about young soldiers he characterizes as “kids, rock and rollers with one foot in their graves.” That film, like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, and others, features music so prominently that the significance of music for American war-making in the 1960s now seems well understood and self-evident—if not a cliché. The defining, iconic music of the era — with its jangly guitars, deep reverb, and howling feedback — is heard as voicing the psychic lives of both American soldiers and the nation at large. In a 1977 review of Michael Herr’s landmark book Dispatches, critic John Leonard called Vietnam “our first rock-and-roll war,” and since then, many have come to see it that way.

While not entirely wrong, the Hollywood version is too loud. It drowns out a history that was more complicated — and more important — than Hollywood and Ken Burns have led us to believe. Whatever music meant for the counterculture and the anti-war movement, it did not mean the same thing in Vietnam. There, music was part of the machinery of waging war. Rock and roll did not disrupt how the war was prosecuted as much as it stood in for actual dissent, the opportunities for which were quite limited within the constraints of the military. If anything, from the military’s point of view, it was soul music — not rock — that threatened the status quo. Paradoxically, an account of the war attuned to rock as a revolutionary force may unwittingly serve the interests of the war machine, for such a narrative diverts attention away from what music was actually made to do in Vietnam, obscuring the ways music affirmatively kept the war going. 

For personnel assigned to combat duties, music was relatively scarce. Soldiers in the jungle needed to be all ears for signs of enemy belligerents, and they avoided extraneous sounds which could betray their own positions. On patrol, listening and being quiet could be matters of life or death. “I don’t know where or why the Vietnam War got the nickname ‘the rock ’n’ roll war,’” wrote W.D. Ehrhart, who served thirteen months in Vietnam in 1967–68. “That certainly wasn’t my experience.” He then detailed a few musical experiences he did have during his tour but noted such occasions “are so memorable precisely because they are so rare.”

But many more soldiers served in positions away from the front lines. Disdained by combat troops as “rear-echelon motherfuckers,” or REMFs, noncombat personnel greatly outnumbered combat troops (estimated ratios range from two to one to eleven to one), probably far more so than in any previous war. That is, most G.I.s spent most of the war on military bases near Saigon or elsewhere, living in relative security and comfort, not in the chaos of combat. 

The American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN), an affiliate of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, broadcast throughout South Vietnam on both the AM and FM bands, twenty-four hours a day. Accessible to G.I.s every day, all over the country, AFVN made up a much bigger part of soldiers’ musical world than USO spectacles did. “Almost everyone listened [to AFVN],” wrote Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley and historian Craig Werner in their book about music in the Vietnam War. Biding their time in a listening area with few other English-language options on the radio, G.I.s tuned in — a lot — regardless of their branch of the military. From 1968 to 1971, the military conducted a series of surveys of the AFVN audience, offering a synoptic picture of who, when, how long, and to what G.I.s were listening. In 1968, 80 percent of respondents listened two or more hours a day, and a third of G.I.s listened to the radio for five hours a day or more. Further, at places like Long Binh Post, the daily averages were often substantially higher, especially among troops aged 20 and younger and those doing administrative or support work. And notably, these numbers remained fairly consistent, even as cynicism increased and support for the war declined in the military. By 1971, disaffection among the troops had grown substantially, yet average listening times to AFVN held rather steady.

On the air, music mattered most. Following the model of armed forces radio in World War II, AFVN tried to imitate stateside commercial broadcasting, with music-themed shows accounting for as much as 65 percent of the program schedule. Although the network also broadcast sports, informational spots on Vietnamese language and culture, and news reports, which were most listeners’ main source of information about the war and public affairs, one report noted, “music is the primary radio programming material for the American Forces Vietnam Network.”

As for what music the AFVN was broadcasting, program schedules and listener surveys offer a picture of preferences and listening habits that complicates the conventional wisdom. Audience members were opinionated — the vast preponderance of mail that AFVN received from listeners concerned music — and to keep soldiers’ ears, AFVN had to accommodate diverse tastes and tolerances, with contemporary rock making up only a relatively small proportion of what G.I.s were actually tuning in to. As much as the so-called rock revolution transformed American popular music in the 1960s, radically new sounds were not everyone’s cup of tea, or at least primary focus. For most listeners at the time, the cutting edge existed alongside a robust musical mainstream, as much Burt Bacharach as Big Brother and the Holding Company.

In 1970, listeners overwhelmingly ranked “current Top 40” and “oldies but goodies” (defined as songs from 1954 to 1969) as their first and second favorite styles or formats, followed distantly, in order of preference, by “easy listening,” “country-western,” “acid rock,” “soul,” “classical,” and “jazz.” Of course, rock and soul did feature prominently in the Top 40 at the time but in and among other styles, including a considerable amount of easy listening. To put this proclivity for Top 40 in perspective, the five leading recordings on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 1970 commingled the hard-driving rock of “American Woman” by the Canadian band the Guess Who with three decidedly softer numbers — Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water”; the Carpenters’ “Close to You”; and B.J. Thomas’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” The fifth song in the top five was Edwin Starr’s “War (What Is It Good For?),” an antiwar soul anthem which the AFVN did not play. Given the number of other top twenty artists that year who fell outside of the rock and soul orbit, including Ray Stevens, Bread, Vanity Fare, Neil Diamond, and Tony Orlando & Dawn, the designation Top 40 was far from synonymous with what today would be called classic rock. 

Some of AFVN’s music shows were produced in the United States, others in Vietnam. The most popular of the former was A Date with Chris, a Top 40 popular-music program hosted by Chris Noel, airing Monday to Friday for one hour in the late afternoon. Opening each program with her trademark “Hi, love,” she cultivated an air of flirtatious intimacy, and her patter emphasized to G.I.s that she was playing the same music their girlfriends and wives were listening to back home. Musically, a typical playlist moved easily between buoyant and soulful pop (the Dave Clark Five, “You Got What It Takes”; Arthur Conley, “Sweet Soul Music”), light, saccharine country (Sandy Posey, “What a Woman in Love Won’t Do”; Roger Miller, “Walkin’ in the Sunshine”), and the occasional rock number (the Seeds, “Pushin’ Too Hard”), with an inclination toward shimmering, string-and horn-soaked production (Andy Williams, “Music to Watch Girls By”). 

Along similar lines, G.I.s’ favorite shows produced in-country were Dawnbuster and Million Dollar Music. Thanks to the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam, the Dawnbuster morning show is the best-remembered AFVN program today. It aired for three hours Monday to Saturday, featuring primarily Top 40 music interspersed with lively commentary and patter. In 1965 and 1966, it was hosted by Adrian Cronauer (played in Good Morning, Vietnam by comedian Robin Williams) and later by future TV game-show emcee Pat Sajak and others. As in the film, the real Dawnbuster did present a lot of rapid-fire talk and (nominal) humor, but it rarely strayed outside the bounds of military-approved propriety and generic middle-of-the-road music. The manic, anarchic, on-air antics of Williams in the movie were a Hollywood fiction. (The real-life Cronauer described himself in 2005 as a “lifelong card-carrying Republican” and campaigned for Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000.)

The second show, Million Dollar Music, aired in the midafternoon, Monday to Friday, featuring “oldies but goodies,” a category AFVN defined not stylistically but as “pop standards and up-tempo music which continues to sell over a period of years.” Anything from the mid-1950s on was permissible, but generally this meant a repertoire of innocuous pop hits of the recent past which avoided any music that even whiffed of transgression. A typical show from 1971 featured Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” (1966), the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” (1963), the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” (1963), and the Association’s “Along Comes Mary” (1966). In this spirit, when the DJ/producer of another oldies program, Bob Casey, played the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” — a song banned by the AFVN for its “sexually suggestive” lyrics — a commanding officer tried to have him pulled off the air and reassigned to a remote location.

Looking outside of the military’s own data, we get a more complex and nuanced picture of music among G.I.s, but the contours are similar. In 1968, Rolling Stone magazine mailed its own questionnaire to a “select group” of military personnel from across the armed forces. In response to its queries about music and drug use, replies came in from servicemen stationed in nearly fifty locations, ranging from bases within the U.S. and ships at sea to Saigon and the Vietnamese jungle. The 10,000-word article summarizing these results, “Is This Any Way to Run the Army? — Stoned?,” both complicates and confirms the impressions created by the AFVN surveys. On the one hand, as would be expected of a leading organ of the counterculture, many of Rolling Stone’s respondents thought about and experienced music in ways that departed sharply from the AFVN’s official findings. Presumably, such G.I.s would have been among the soldiers less likely to have answered an AFVN survey. Numerous accounts, for example, emphasized the chasm between enlisted men and career military personnel, a.k.a. “lifers.” “Lifers can’t comprehend rock and roll,” one low-ranking soldier wrote. “They’re completely disoriented doers of the establishment.” Another recounted that fans of the Doors, the Grateful Dead, or Bob Dylan were subject to harassment from officers. To them, AFVN programming consisted of “mainly piped in restaurant type music” and “Big Brother Uncle Sam talking to you with his lifer-dog propaganda.” A corporal who gave his name as “Very Obscure” was blunter: “[AFVN] sucks, as the programming tries to please everyone. The Chris Noel show makes most G.I.s vomit.”

Such claims about the tastes and habits of “most G.I.s” and “most people” need to be taken with a grain of salt. If some scorned AFVN, others valued it as a weapon against soldiers’ great perennial nemesis: boredom. “It’s better than listening to the ship rattle in the wind,” a petty officer in the navy explained after cataloging how bad AFVN was. Further, other respondents to Rolling Stone suggested the committed partisans of rock accounted for only a relatively small minority of listeners. Another respondent from the navy, whose duties over three years in the service led him to interact with a wide swath of people, offered Rolling Stone readers a breakdown of sailors’ tastes that fell roughly in line with the AFVN’s own figures. Only 10 percent, he thought, were hard-core rock fans—the same proportion as fans of country (“in our idiom, shitkicking music”) and folk. Another 20 percent, he believed, liked rock casually and enjoyed “commercial sounds” equally well; 15 percent had “no musical tastes” or did not care; 5 percent favored classical; and 30 percent — the largest single group — were “R&B fanatics.” 

Country music had a presence equal to that of rock, if not greater. Compared to rock and soul, however, country music enjoyed a much higher profile within the military. It was heard more frequently on the airwaves and featured in USO shows like the Grand Ole Opry revue; the record bins in the PX stores teemed with Marty Robbins and Porter Wagoner discs; and jukeboxes in enlisted men’s clubs were regularly stocked with country hits. This prominence was not a simple reflection of consumer taste. It was also a product of the unusually tight relationship between the government and the music industry in Nashville. As historian Joseph Thompson has shown in a pathbreaking study, for more than a decade Nashville had promoted country music and musicians as the signature sound of both American patriotism and militarism. 

Although in World Wars I and II the music industries had also collaborated with the military, the connection with Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s elevated a particular stylistic preference — one long associated with whiteness, nostalgia, and regionalism — and linked it especially to career military personnel. These factors made country music unusually divisive. Equal numbers of write-in comments to AFVN specifically requested more country music and less of it, and far more listeners expressed a strong dislike of Town and Country, a show that featured country music every weekday for two hours, than for any other of AFVN’s programs. 

Mythologies of the 1960s and ’70s have rendered country music almost completely invisible. In 2017, PBS aired The Vietnam War, a sprawling ten-part documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, acclaimed upon its release for showing the war “from all sides.” The series’ promotional materials highlighted the filmmakers’ use of more than 120 popular songs from the period, and its website featured both Spotify playlists and an essay about the soundtrack by David Fricke, a well-known music writer. Far from evoking “all sides,” however, The Vietnam War relied overwhelmingly on rock music, with some folk, R&B, and soul numbers mixed in. For all their putative catholicism, Burns and Novick featured only two country songs over eighteen hours — Johnny Cash’s “Big River” from 1958 and Merle Haggard’s 1969 anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee” — neither of which was representative of the “Nashville Sound” and honky-tonk that soldiers heard daily on AFVN or that sparked clashes in bars and clubs, nor did viewers encounter any of the middle-of-the-road Top 40 music that hummed in the background of G.I.s’ daily lives.

If the rock-centered narrative gives voice to a cognitive dissonance many people felt during the war, this may help us explain why that narrative has become so entrenched and pervasive. It may accord with what many soldiers and civilians experienced even if it departs from what they were listening to most of the time. But the absence of country music distorts our understanding of social relations in the military. In particular, for African American G.I.s the prominence of country music was an affront. Black soldiers in the 1960s were well aware they made up a disproportionate number of draftees and combat troops and were dramatically underrepresented in the officer corps. Yet only a small slice of the music preferred by Black soldiers got airtime on AFVN. Wherever African American troops were stationed, the military’s elevation of country music and its exclusion or marginalization of Black music added insult to injury. In some cases, Black soldiers pushed back with formal demands for more soul records on jukeboxes. In others, social friction about music could spark explosive confrontations. “When trouble broke out over music,” historian James Westheider noted, “it almost always involved not rock but country and western.” 

Reprinted with permission from Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers by David Suisman, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2024 by David Suisman. All rights reserved.

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