“I thought, that’s my story,” and that chain is gonna break … 8. Marcus Miller, an infantryman in the Mekong Delta during the war, said the song referred to the military “chain of command.” And David Browne, who’d grown up in Memphis and served with the 101st Airborne, recalls that when he first learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., while a soldier in Vietnam, the only thing that stopped him from “killing the first honky I met” was listening to Chain of Fools. Usually heard in the States as another of Aretha’s powerful statements on racial and sexual equality, which it certainly was, “Chain of Fools” took on special meaning in Vietnam. While some liked the Tom Jones version better, others we interviewed felt the earlier, Porter Wagoner version was “more real, more sad.” 9. 1 song that takes me back to Vietnam is ‘Green, Green, Grass of Home’.” Songs like this, those that tapped into loneliness, heartache and homesickness hold a special place in the hearts of Vietnam vets. Neil Whitehurst, a native of North Carolina who served with the 1st Marine Air Wing at Marble Mountain, states emphatically “the No. Green Green Grass of Home by Porter Wagoner Realizing, of course, that every soldier had their own special song that helped bring them home. These are the 10 most mentioned songs by the Vietnam vets we interviewed. Well, it didn’t take long for us to realize that to do justice to the vets’ diverse, and personal, musical experiences would require something more like a Top 200 - or 2,000! Still, we did find some common ground. When we began our interviews, we planned to organize it into a set of essays focusing on the most frequently mentioned songs, a Vietnam Vets Top 20 if you will, harkening back to the radio countdowns that so many of us grew up listening to. And the talking helped heal some of the wounds left from the war. But we found they could talk about a song - “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”, “My Girl”, “And When I Die”, “Ring of Fire” and scores of others. Many of the men and women we interviewed for We Gotta Get Out of This Place had never talked about their Vietnam war experience, even with their spouses and family members. Denton (Mogie) in uniform, with siblings Candy and Randy, 1965. 7 – The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968-May 1969) on PBS. In fact, it’s sustained me for the past 45 years, as it has countless other Vietnam veterans.įrom THE VIETNAM WAR Ep. Music was going to get me through my year in Vietnam.
That pop song was blasting from four or five radios some of the guys had, and with the calliope-like rhythm and lines like “it’s only to camouflage my sadness,” I was having a hard time figuring out just where in the hell I was.īut I knew one thing for sure.
As my fellow “newbies” and I were being transported from Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base to the Army’s 90th Replacement Battalion at Long Binh, I vividly recall hearing Smokey Robinson and The Miracles singing “Tears of a Clown”. I say that because my earliest Vietnam memories aren’t about guns and bullets, but rather about music. It’s personal, of course, but in a way it’s lyrical, too. Needless to say, the date is etched in my mind and will always be. Army tours of duty in Vietnam, which meant that Uncle Sam would send me back home exactly 365 days later - on Nov. It’s an irony I’ve wrestled with for 45 years, due in part to the precise timing of U. I first became a soldier in a war zone on Veterans Day (Nov. This post was originally published on August 29, 2017, and was updated July 31, 2020.
#Red orchestra vietnam song series#
The Vietnam War, a 10-part Emmy-nominated PBS series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, streams again to PBS station members on-demand with the member benefit Passport, beginning August 4, 2020. This article first appeared on the PBS site Next Avenue.
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