We Gotta Get Out of This Place

The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War

Doug Bradley, Craig Werner

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781625341624
  9781625341976
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613764268
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Rolling Stone's #1 Music Book of 2015

For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam's Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." For a "tunnel rat" who blew smoke into the Viet Cong's underground tunnels, it was Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." For a Black Marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools." And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die," "Who'll Stop the Rain," or the song that gives this book its title.

In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and "grunts"—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also "solo" pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.

1

“Goodbye My Sweetheart, Hello Vietnam”

THE SOUNDSCAPE TAKES SHAPE

IN April 1963 the Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne reported on a massacre of South Vietnamese government troops by the VC in the Ca Mau Peninsula at the southern tip of the Mekong Delta. Watching the dead bodies being laid out on the ground, Browne described hearing a song by Pat Boone emanating from a tower loudspeaker. “I asked an officer if he couldn’t turn the damned thing off,” Browne wrote. “Sure, but it’s better not to,” the officer replied. “Our people here don’t care. And for the Viet Cong out there, it’s a sign we’re still alive and still able to resist.”¹

That may be the only case on record in which Boone, the crooner best known for ballads like “Love Letters in the Sand” and white-bread cover versions of Little Richard and Fats Domino songs, served as a symbol of resistance. But for many of the soldiers who arrived in Vietnam before the country had become a fixture on the nightly news, Boone was part of a musical culture that connected them with friends and family back home. What mattered at Ca Mau was simply that his voice was American. Raised by the preceding generation that had served in World War II, most of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam prior to the escalation of 1964–65 took John F. Kennedy’s clarion call for self-sacrifice and a renewed dedication to the fight against Communism deeply to heart.

Whether they preferred Pat Boone, the ex-GI Elvis Presley, Little Richard, the jazz stylist Tony Bennett, or the Kingston Trio, the early Vietnam soldiers turned to music as a lifeline to the home front they’d promised to defend. They were serving because they believed that America was the embodiment of freedom and liberty. Taking that belief as an article of faith, the first wave of songs about Vietnam to appear on the radio reinforced the message that when America’s leaders told the soldiers they were engaged in a morally unambiguous fight for freedom, the soldiers wholeheartedly believed their leaders were telling them the truth.

And who better to be sending these strong, patriotic, anticommunist messages than the boyish, good-looking, dynamic John Fitzgerald Kennedy? The popular and carefully cultivated image of JFK as the head of a vigorous new generation belied his roots as a Cold Warrior in the vein of the former presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman. Like them, Kennedy, who willingly inherited America’s commitment in South Vietnam from President Eisenhower, was an ardent practitioner of the anticommunist ideology of containment and a strategy grounded on the domino theory. Emerging as a centerpiece of American foreign policy under Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, the theory posited that if one state (Vietnam) in a region (Southeast Asia) fell prey to Communism, then all the surrounding countries (Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, etc.) would follow suit.

At a news conference on April 7, 1954, President Eisenhower uttered the classic statement of the domino theory’s application to Indochina: “Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”² Ten years later JFK would echo Eisenhower’s words during an interview with the CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963, just three months before his assassination: “If we withdraw from Vietnam, the Communists would control Vietnam. Pretty soon Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Malaysia would go, and all of Southeast Asia would be under the control of the Communists and under the domination of the Chinese.”³ Extended to its logical conclusion, the domino theory conjured images of, as the popular phrase had it, “fighting the Reds on the streets of San Francisco.” The image was used repeatedly at the time.

In a world where international communism did seek to expand its sphere of influences, any president would have faced the practical necessity of taking a stand against it. Having campaigned on an aggressively militaristic platform, Kennedy had defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the election of November 1960 by a mere 112,000 votes (0.17 percent), increasing his sensitivity about accusations that he was soft on Communism. So it was particularly galling when his planned invasion of Cuba, aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government, had collapsed in a spectacular, demoralizing manner. As Stanley Karnow reports in Vietnam: A History, Kennedy’s response to the gloating of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader at the time, was clear: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.”⁴

From January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963 Kennedy and his advisers, most notably Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, oversaw a steady increase in the number of U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam from seven hundred to more than sixteen thousand; authorized clandestine warfare against the NVA; undertook a secret war in Laos; and rejected peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. At the time of JFK’s assassination the American death toll in Vietnam stood at more than four hundred. As Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts observe in The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, JFK had convinced himself that “the costs of pulling out of Vietnam appeared greater than the costs of getting in deeper.”⁵

The military situation was sobering. In early 1963 American advisers witnessed the devastating defeat of several thousand soldiers of the U.S.-trained South Vietnamese Army’s (ARVN) 7th Division by a small VC force at Ap Bac in the Mekong Delta. Even with major U.S. air and artillery support, the ARVN could not prevail, prompting Col. John Paul Vann and his fellow American advisers to observe that America was relying on “an army that suffered from an institutionalized unwillingness to fight.”⁶ The political situation was even worse for the Kennedy administration. The South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic, began to harass the country’s Buddhists, resulting in several horrific self-immolations by Buddhist monks that were captured on film and broadcast to an international audience. On November 1, 1963, the Diem regime was overthrown by a military coup that received at least tacit support from the CIA. Diem and his brother were found murdered the next day.

Nevertheless, most Americans knew little about Vietnam beyond JFK’s warning that American withdrawal would hand South Vietnam over to the Communists, thereby jeopardizing America’s national security position in the Pacific. In the end, it was the same JFK who rallied a generation of future Vietnam soldiers—reminding them that as Americans they “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”—who launched the United States on a policy of, as George Donnelson Moss observed in Vietnam: An American Ordeal, “not trying to win in Vietnam; he was doing only enough not to lose.”⁷

The opening sequence of the director and Vietnam vet Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, an adaptation of the searing memoir of the same name by Ron Kovic, also a veteran of the Vietnam War, perfectly captures the mix of patriotism, sentimentality, and rock ’n’ roll innocence that defines the early sixties in the cultural memory of white America. A marching band in an Independence Day parade plays “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and is followed by a float blasting out Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”; teens dance to “Moon River,” Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” and, in a nice touch of understated irony, the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy.” Stone offers a glimpse of the future when Kovic, played by Tom Cruise, overhears his brother trying to figure out the chords to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” By the end of the movie the soundtrack will have moved on to “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Born on the Bayou,” but for a few moments—call them patriotic, innocent, or naive—almost no one saw what was coming.

Army Aviator Marty Heuer, who enlisted in the army fresh out of his Algoma, Wisconsin, high school in 1953 and served two tours in Vietnam, sounded the keynote of the war’s early period when he said, “Music was our way of combating loneliness.” Heuer recalled his arrival in-country: “I remember arriving at Qui Nhon, climbing down the side of the ship on rope ladders to the bobbing landing craft waiting below. Here I was, going into the combat zone with a camera slung around my neck, a .45 caliber pistol in a shoulder holster without a single round of ammunition, and a handmade Peruvian guitar.”

Heuer had already begun to make use of the guitar on the twenty-one-day boat trip to Vietnam, during which he joined two other guitar-playing officers—Jack Westlake and Scat McNatt—to entertain the enlisted men in the severely cramped quarters below deck. Taking the name The High Priced Help in honor of their rank, the trio continued to play in Vietnam, performing for commissioned and noncommissioned officers as well as at the EMCs that sprang up because, as Heuer said, “the Vietnamese bars were generally off-limits, especially after sunset.” In his book Dolphins, Arabs and The High Priced Help Heuer recalled that by 1961 “Army Aviation companies were usually billeted in larger city strongholds for the security of both aircraft and personnel.” The isolated encampments “were typically surrounded by concertina wire, trip flares, mines, and sandbagged bunkers that offered some protection from the enemy, but not from the loneliness.”⁸

The High Priced Help set out to counter that loneliness with a repertoire that included both covers and original material. “We played the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, stuff like that,” Heuer says. “We played those tunes straight, and with Vietnam lyrics added sometimes too. We played versions of ‘Davy Crockett,’ ‘500 Miles,’ ‘Red River Valley,’ and ‘Take These Chains from My Heart.’ The other music I heard a lot was country and western—Jim Reeves, Tom T. Hall, Jerry Reed—no antiwar songs.” That included “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” which, Heuer observed, “wasn’t the Vietnam anthem when I was there. Nobody sang it. It just wasn’t picked up by the troops I served with.”

That didn’t mean The High Priced Help was naive about conditions in Vietnam. Even in the early days, Heuer acknowledged, many of the songs “expressed a certain bitterness about the fact that the Americans were in a camp surrounded by barbed wire, and that outside, the Vietnamese could not be identified as friend or foe.”

Like the folk-oriented groups, individual troubadours played an important role in forming the musical culture of Vietnam. In Singing the Vietnam Blues: Songs of the Air Force in Southeast Asia, Joseph Tuso, a weapons systems officer aboard an F-4D phantom who flew 170 missions, catalogs more than two hundred songs that reworked familiar melodies, popular and traditional. Tuso’s list includes “The Wabash Cannonball,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” “The Ballad of the Green Berets” (which we’ll come back to), “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad,” “Dixie,” “Down in the Valley,” “Shine on Harvest Moon,” “The Whiffenpoof Song,” “Red River Valley,” “Puff the Magic Dragon” (in honor of the AC-47 helicopter), “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “MTA” (known in-country as “The Man Who Never Returned”), “Bye Bye Blackbird,” pretty much every Christmas carol you can imagine, “I Walk the Line,” “The Streets of Laredo,” “Abilene,” “Downtown,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Oh Susannah,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Tuso’s closest contact was with Jeff Wilkins, “the minstrel of our own 435th.” Emphasizing Wilkins’s southern upbringing, Tuso described his friend’s creative process: “Southern folk ballads flowed through his veins, and many a night I heard him working on arrangements and lyrics through the paper-thin walls of our adjoining rooms. At first he busied himself by listening to tapes of country performers. Next, he plunked around and played American folk music on a guitar he brought with him from the States. Gradually home faded in his memory, and the war and his flying comrades began to occupy almost all of his waking thoughts.” The response to Wilkins’s cover versions at squadron parties convinced him to buy a Japanese twelve-string guitar and start composing his own songs. “Jeff would start with a feeling, a mood, or a theme,” Tuso recalled, “and a melody from the past would seem to fit. He’d play and sing, composing orally, and either he would write out the lyrics when he finished or another pilot would jot them down as Jeff composed.”⁹

It didn’t take long for the army to recognize the morale-building potential of the soldier-musicians. In 1966 Gen. George P. Seneff and his staff with the 1st Aviation Brigade instituted a series of song and ballad competitions which became a focal point for the emerging culture. Heuer fondly remembers The High Priced Help’s rivals: The Merry Men of the 173rd, whose call sign was “Robin Hood,” The Blue Stars of the 48th, The Beach Bums of the 117th, The Buccaneers of the 170th, the 282nd trio, The Black Cats, sometimes called the Hep Cats, from the 228th, and Pineapple Joe and His Lakanukies from the 57th, featuring a virtuoso ukulele player. Heuer describes the dynamics of the developing scene.

SOLO: Marty Heuer

The contest became the catalyst for the creation of original songs and provided the forum for them to be heard and recorded. The only rule of the contest was that the words to the song had to be original; and if the music was original also, that was all well and good, but it wasn’t necessary. Many of the contest songs were recognizable melodies, but the words were changed to tell a story about an individual, a unit, an aircraft, a combat assault, the enemy, or just about anything in Vietnam that triggered the composer’s imagination. Most of these early Vietnam Army Aviation songs were about the environment in this new war. They wrote and sang about the aircraft that were clearly not suited for the mission; the general lack of enthusiasm for the war for which they did not yet even receive combat pay; the people, culture, and soldiers of South Vietnam; their leaders and—whorehouses. The participants were soloists, duos, trios, quartets, quintets, and sextets. Their instruments included guitars of many varieties, mandolins, banjos, violins, ukuleles, bongo, and snare drums, and in one case, a complete drum set. Many of these, usually the string instruments, were brought to Vietnam by their owners. The others were ordered from Thailand and Japan, but some guitars were purchased in Vietnam, and those who used them complained constantly that they could not be tuned nor would they stay in tune.

The songs covered a wide spectrum of daily events in the life of Army Aviation personnel, and the majority was in a humorous, tongue-in-cheek vein. “Aviation Medicine” was written by Chief Warrant Officer Leonard Eugene Easely of the 282nd Assault Helicopter Company Black Cats. Gene’s song, to the tune “I’ve Had It,” is a spoof about the trials of a flight surgeon treating aviation personnel of all ranks for an unnamed social disease. The Doc treats a specialist fourth class, a lieutenant, a major, and finally a general, who, of course, was General Seneff, the brigade commander. The last verse goes like this: “Well, General Seneff / if you’re willin’ / Let’s bomb this place with penicillin / Or we’ll get it, ya ya, we’ll get it.”

And naturally, some did.

“Six Days in the Jungle” tells the story of a typical four-man helicopter crew shot down only to survive for six days. Major Austin of the 222nd Combat Aviation Battalion wrote the song to the tune “Six Days on the Road.” The song provides the details of the Cong troops, all of this in surreal, exaggerated terms. The last verse finds the crew still in the jungle with nothing but hope. It ends:

Well the crew chief and the gunner, they have eaten up all of my C’s,

And the AC keeps a-mumblin’ and a-crawling around on his knees.

I don’t think things ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Vietnam Veterans’ National Anthem
• 1. “Goodbye My Sweetheart, Hello Vietnam”: The Soundscape Takes Shape
• 2. “Bad Moon Rising”: The Soundtracks of Lbj’s War
• 3. “I-feel-like-I’m-fixin’-to-die”: Protest, Pot, Black Power, and the (Psychedelic) Sound of Nixon’s War
• 4. “Chain of Fools”: Radios, Guitars, Eight Tracks (and Silence in the Field)
• 5. “What’s Going on”: Music and the Long Road Home
• Notes
• Notes on Interviews
• Sources for Solos and Duet