Saul Broudy, Chip Dockery, Bull Durham, Bill Ellis, Toby Hughes, Dick Jonas, Chuck Rosenberg

To most of us, the Vietnam War has a rock and roll soundtrack. Almost every novel, memoir or oral history of the war by a veteran mentions the music that the author listened to in country. All the songs of the sixties were part of life in the combat zone; troops listened to music in the bush and in the bunkers (Perry 1968). Sony radios, Akai stereos and Teac tape decks were easily available, American music was performed live by the ubiquitous Filipino rock bands, AFVN Radio broadcast round the clock, and new troops arrived weekly with the latest records from the states. GI-operated underground radio stations, playing mostly hard acid rock, were part of the in-country counterculture of the war. Even the enemy contributed to the sound of American music on the airwaves; Radio Hanoi played rock and soul music, while a series of soft-voiced, Oxford-accented women announcers known collectively to the troops as Hanoi Hannah competed with AFVN disk jockey Chris Noel for the hearts and minds of the American soldiers. The troops had their own top forty, of songs about going home, like "Five Hundred Miles," or "Leaving on a Jet Plane," or of darker or more cynical album cuts which reflected their experiences: "Run Through the Jungle," "Bad Moon," "Paint it Black," or "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." References to popular music are an integral part of the language of the war: "Puff the Magic Dragon" or "Spooky" meant a cargo plane outfitted with machine guns, "rock and roll" fire from an M-16 on full automatic. But there were other songs in Vietnam, too 310 kb -- the songs made by the American men and women, civilians and military, who served there, for themselves.