--- title: The Vietnam War: Why That Conflict Produced Iconic Music description: The relationship between music and war was not an invention of the 1960s. So what made Vietnam's music special? canonical: https://time.com/4949617/music-vietnam-war/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-09-27T13:00:43.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:04:10.634Z article:section: History og:title: The Vietnam War: Why That Conflict Produced Iconic Music og:description: Technology played a role og:url: https://time.com/4949617/music-vietnam-war/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfba9b5b541a14ef1/6988de8886f68e290d6e67ef/vietnam.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Music in Vietnam og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Vietnam War: Why That Conflict Produced Iconic Music twitter:description: Technology played a role twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfba9b5b541a14ef1/6988de8886f68e290d6e67ef/vietnam.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why the Vietnam War Produced Such Iconic Music > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: the Influencers: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sebastian Junger [Watch (HLS stream): the Influencers: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sebastian Junger](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ApkZjOyL.m3u8) (6:16)  _Published 2017-09-26. Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sebastian Junger on war and human nature_  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Sep 27, 2017 1:00 PM UTC  In Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, Pfc. Daniel Wolff (L) of Springfield, Mo., and Pfc. Johnny Harper of Macon, Ga., listen to a record player as they stand in a trench at the beleaguered U.S. Marine outpost in 1968. In Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, Pfc. Daniel Wolff (L) of Springfield, Mo., and Pfc. Johnny Harper of Macon, Ga., listen to a record player as they stand in a trench at the beleaguered U.S. Marine outpost in 1968. Getty Images / Bettmann Archive  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Sep 27, 2017 1:00 PM UTC Some of the 20th century’s most defining pop music emerged from the period during which the Vietnam War was fought — and in the installment of the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick docu-series [_The Vietnam War_](http://time.com/vietnam-photos/) that premiered on Tuesday night, that fact was made abundantly clear. The sights and sounds of Woodstock are juxtaposed with those of Vietnam, where half a million Americans were fighting at the time, and the [Kent State shootings](http://time.com/3377949/urban-outfitters-kent-state/) blend into the strains of “[Ohio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN%5F9VqfVQ9c).” But, while the role of music in stateside protest of that era is well-known — with anti-war songs like “[I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W7-ngmO%5Fp8)” featured in _The Vietnam War_ — music also played an important role for those who were actually in Vietnam, fighting. For warriors across time, there have always been tunes to march to, and tunes to defuse the tension. But Vietnam was special. One key reason, say Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, authors of the book [_We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War_](http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/we-gotta-get-out-place), is the role technology played in getting the music to the battlefield. Between radio, portable record players, early cassette players and live bands coming to Vietnam, soldiers in that war had far more access to music than their forebears. “The thing about Vietnam is we had modes of playing music and the military gave us enormous access because they wanted to keep our morale up,” Bradley, who was drafted into the Army in 1970, says. “There was silence in the field, but in the rear there was music everywhere. It was the same music that your non-soldier peers were listening to in America, so it was a shared soundtrack.” Conversely, the technology was not so far along that the listening took place in solitude, the way it might today with headphones allowing each person to pick his or her own soundtrack. The diverse group of Americans who were fighting generally had to listen to music together, if they wanted to listen at all. And, Bradley and Werner note, that technological change is partly responsible for the [myth](http://time.com/4643778/trump-protest-songs/) that equivalent war and protest music is[ not being created today](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/22/protest-songs-folk-music-nancy-kerr-martin-carthy). “There’s a lot of very conscious music being made today. What there isn’t is great music addressing the wars that is simultaneously very popular and widely shared,” Werner says, adding that more niche music necessarily “lacks the political power \[music\] had then.” Another crucial element was the draft, which meant that the war was part of daily life even for those who were not serving in the military. Awareness of war permeated the lyrics and [sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvv--UkFfV8) of the music being produced. “Nobody was separate from it, or very few. It’s not like today where the war is being fought by a small number of people,” says Werner, who adds that in the year during which he expected to be drafted (he wasn’t, in the end) love songs like “Nowhere to Run” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” took on new meaning for him as draft-resistance songs. Plus, the soldiers in Vietnam and those waiting to be drafted _needed_ that music, Bradley and Werner argue. “Music gave soldiers a way to start making sense of experiences that didn’t make a lot of sense to them,” Bradley says. Songs that[ spoke directly to the war](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exm7FN-t3PY) were proof that people were talking about this cataclysmic event, and a way to safely express the ambivalence that many in the field felt. Even songs that weren’t directly about the war — like “[Chain of Fools](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGAiW5dOnKo)” — could take on new meaning in Vietnam. There’s a myth, “consciously propagated in the 1980s,” Werner says, that the hippie protesters were an out-of-touch elite opposed to the war, whereas in fact those who were more privileged tended to support the war while the working-class combat soldiers were the ones who “really put the fear in Nixon” with their anti-war sentiments. They were the ones for whom music became a safe way to access their doubts and emotions. And that’s still the case. Even decades after the war ended, the two found that the sense-making function of music has remained key for many veterans. When asked about the soundtracks to their war, the mention of a song like “Leaving on a Jet Plane” could trigger tears even in the most closed-in fighters. Music, Werner says, “is a truer memory.” ## Transcript [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We study war because we know, obviously, it brings out the worst. But we study war because it also brings out the very, very best. [ MUSIC ] The demonstrators resisted when police attempted to arrest a young man who tried to rip down an American flag. We spent ten years working on the Vietnam war. We wake up, and our films about mass demonstrations taking place all across the United States against the current administration. About a White House obsessed with leaks, in total disarray. About a president who thinks the press is lying and making stuff up about him. About asymmetrical warfare, about huge document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere. And about accusations that a political campaign reached out during the time of a national election to influence that campaign And we kinda go wait a second, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. A quote that's attributed to Mark Twain. This is all Vietnam and hundreds of other things rhyme, and I'm thinking what you're doing and the kind of stuff you're trying to grapple with seems almost exactly the same thing we're trying to grapple with. But specifically about who these people are that we make Do the fighting that we ask to put their lives on the line. Well, you know I'm anthropologist and I look at all my journalism and film making through that lens. We're a dominant species because we're capable of organized aggression against enemies, we are mean. [ FOREIGN ] [ SOUND ] And I think you have this dynamic tension in human society which is why you keep getting these stories repeated over and over and over again You have the sort of the collective will of the people and there's a certain sense of egalitarianism and fairness. And then you have a very necessary sort of hierarchical structure that keeps order in society. And people in power then resort to a kind of top- down hierarchy and abuse it. If war is human behavior, human nature on steroids, then Also it shows the exaggerated positiveness of our species because in these moments of our worst behaviour we also see this empathetic tendencies, the love. The lost soldiers that I know of [ UNKNOWN ]. Right. A lot of people that I know who look through catastrophes. [ INAUDIBLE ] I know a woman who [ INAUDIBLE ] my first [ INAUDIBLE ] early 90's Right . >> Now decades later, I interviewed her and she said a lot of people in [ UNKNOWN ] missed the war - >> Yes, right . >> Because it brought everyone together [ MUSIC ] You know, from the Vietnam era as you were talking I'm thinking it's not just soldiers who feel that way, it's people who protested the war. They were part of something that was deeply meaningful to them and they thought they sacrificed. Some of them went to jail, went to Canada. You know, really committed themselves in a deep way to something they though was right. It didn't involve aggression in the way that Going to wars but there was a sense of life being higher, more powerful, more [ UNKNOWN ] like I was saying. [ UNKNOWN ] primarily two things a sense of meeting within our community and closeness and the closer you get to a catastrophe, to a disaster, to a war. The more people depend on you and vice versa. And that's what humans are evolved for. You clearly have studied this. I wanna know stuff to do. I don't mean no more wars. We know that's never gonna happen because, as you suggest, people are kind of excited about that stuff. But what is it that we and do? I mean we remember that sense of collective solidarity in a Few weeks post 9 / 11 that got squandered by the hierarchy that said go shopping, rather than please pay 50 cents more a gallon per gas. Right. Please don't do this. Please do this All of which every single American would have done. Done with glee but now we just got a kind of political sense in which we don't ask anything of Americans, we want to cut their taxes even more we want to do all this stuff and have the same smoke and mirrors. I'm not suggesting a political answer from you but there's a social and human set of actions, perhaps is the way to say it, that might help This. Psychologists will tell you the more you sacrifice for something the more you value it and the problem in modern America one says very lucky that we're such a wealthy safe nation that we don't require individual sacrifice of anyone. In some sense that's very lucky. But in other sense is actually not very good for us. I'm against the draft, I think it's [ UNKNOWN ] for someone to fight a war that they don't believe in but I would be completely for national service. Yeah, we agree completely. Yes. [ CROSSTALK ] And if you do that, because people are sacrificing a year or two of their lives towards this collective goal of having this nation You raise the value of the nation in people's hearts and that's when you start to feel a real part of something. I mean, just thinking about Vietnam and we've been thinking about it for so long that the lack of [ UNKNOWN ] was usually traumatic for soldiers and for the people on the other side, too. That the country didn't know there was such incredible. Profound cognitive dissonance That's right. About what we were doing. And it was on every level. Modern society is easy on the body and hard on the mind. Most of the country, Democrat or Republican, either way, I think most people want a kind of collective good for country Yes, I agree. Right? The country has to come up with norms of behavior that confront and contradict what has happened in our political world. In a crisis obviously, we've seen in Texas, people do that immediately. Right. Right, no black, white, rich, poor, no one cares. Right. That's humans at their best. But can we achieve that without the hurricane, without the war, without the fight, can we do it? I think we can, but we have to espouse it in a proactive way. Well, it seems like counting on the politicians to beat in the lead on that is probably unlikely, but it can bubble up through the way people tell stories and the way human experiences [ CROSSTALK ]. 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