"Next Stop Is Vietnam" war & music symposium

I learned alot & heard many moving stories at last weekend's Wisconsin Veterans Museum symposium, celebrating the release of the archival CD set Next Stop is Vietnam:  The War on Record (1961-2008), curated by musicologist Hugo Keesing.  This event in Madison served as a valuable reminder that music has the power to help musicians tell personal stories as well as to help listeners endure traumatic experiences.  

Country music expert Bill Malone, PhD candidate Charles Hughes (who's writing a dissertation on soul music), African-American writer/vet Art Flowers and musician/vets Jim Walktendonk & Lem Genovese offered fascinating insights into how those who served in Vietnam were uplifted by popular music and how folks on the home front reacted - through country, rock & soul music - to the war's unfolding futility. 

Emotions were strong among Vietnam vets in the audience, but the abundance of laughter made attending the 5 sessions a pleasure.  Here's a list of the songs most mentioned by Vietnam vets - including nurses - as having a special resonance, according to researchers Doug Bradley (a USARV reporter in Vietnam) and Craig Warner (UW professor and a self-described "undrafted hippie" musician from Colorado):

1. "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" by The Animals, written by Barry Mann & Cynthia Weill (for the Righteous Brothers) - the title suffices to explain its popularity among US troops in Vietnam.

2. "Fixin' to Die Rag" by Country Joe MacDonald (a veteran who still supports fellow vets as well as an iconic anti-war activist) & the Fish. 

3. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" by Peter, Paul & Mary (written by John Denver) - originally released in 1967, but not a hit till '69 - beloved by soldiers overseas for its theme of reluctant parting from a lover.

4. "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding (co-written by Steve Cropper) - sadly, a posthumous release & another melancholy lyric full of longing.

5. "Detroit City" by Bobby Bare, a crossover country hit popular among troops due mainly to its mournful refrain "I wanna go home."  Some 58,000 of our nearly 3 million Vietnam vets never did make it home.  Many more couldn't adjust to their post-Nam world.

6. "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix, an ex-paratrooper & rebel hero to many fighting men, especially combat grunts in Vietnam, after the war turned sour in 1967.

7. "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" by Nancy Sinatra, who has made a living largely from entertaining Vietnam vets.  And, of course, she looked damn good in those boots circa 1966.

8. "The Letter" by The Box Tops, memorable mainly because of its urgent theme - i.e. missing my gal - and the late Alex Chilton's great growling vocal delivery.

9. "Chain of Fools" by Aretha Franklin - US troops in Vietnam apparently applied the lyrics to the military chain of command, among other sources of irritation.

10. "What's Goin' On" by Marvin Gaye - title track of  that masterpiece album, which Marvin wrote after deep conversations with his brother Frankie upon Frankie Gaye's return from combat duty in Vietnam.  Art Flowers said that the cut "What's Happenin' Brother" just about blew his mind when he first heard it after his Nam tour.

Black Power! Vietnam vets exhibit at the NCRM in Memphis

After following the "Music Highway" stretch of I-40 from Nashville to Memphis this weekend, I visited the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM), located at the old Lorraine Motel near downtown Soulsville USA. My favorite exhibit was not the permanently displayed assassination paraphernalia (eerily placed in the former rooming house where Ray fired the fatal shot at Dr. King on April 4, 1968), but rather the NCRM's moving temporary exhibit about the bitter experiences of African-American veterans who served in large numbers in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973.

I learned so much in that single small room, laid out around a recreated "hootch" (i.e. hut where soldiers bivouaced awaiting combat, from the Japanese "uchi" or house). For example:

* I dug the video demonstrations (from file footage & vet testimony) of "dapping," a complex system of hand/fist touch-signals used by black soldiers to communicate such information as how long they'd been on patrol & how many assaults they'd endured.

* Mau Mau was a black nationalist organization established on U.S. military bases in West Germany (including the Heidelberg Army HQ where I was born) in the 1960s, which quickly spread to 'Nam; a few black-red-green MM-type flags - rich in war & peace symbolism, some featuring Swahili slogans - were on display, along with several photos & filmclips of troops giving the black-power salute, occasionally alongside sheepish white guys trying to look hip to the brothers.

* Civil-rights hero & Nashville native Julian Bond authored an anti-war comic book called "Vietnam" (with stylish illustrations by T.G. Lewis) at age 27 in 1967 while appealing his expulsion from the Georgia House of Representatives for opposing the war & the military draft; he was ultimately exonerated by the United States Supreme Court (see Bond v. Floyd, 385 U.S. 116), which ruled that the state legislature had violated Bond's free-speech rights by refusing to seat him.

* NAACP attorney (later U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall attended Pres. Truman's ceremonial signing of Executive Order No. 9981, ordering desegregation of the Armed Forces, in May 1948; Marchall stands tall & dignified as ever behind the beaming but seated "Buck-stops-here" Harry with an expression that conveys both well-deserved pride & appropriate skepticism.

* Pres. Lyndon Johnson, in cahoots with then-warmonger/Defense Sec. Robert McNamara, authorized "Project 100,000" in 1966, lowering the Armed Forces' qualification standards so as to instantly raise available troop levels, i.e. to summon more cannon fodder for LBJ's Vietnam Disaster.

* The Selective Service System suspiciously issued Orders to Report for Induction even to 26-year-old activists with student deferments who dared to drop out of school in order to work for civil rights in the South; sometimes SSS induction orders were sent in clusters to black neighborhoods.

* African-Americans suffered about 40% of the combat casualties in Vietnam, despite comprising just 10% of the U.S. population at the time.

* The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) officially came out against the Vietnam War in 1966; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. followed in 1967, upsetting even Bobby Kennedy, who didn't dare publicly oppose the war until early 1968.

* Wallace Terry, a journalist who covered the war up close as Time magazine's Saigon bureau chief starting in 1967, wrote a classic book called "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War," which focuses on African-American combat troops; in 1957, at age 19, Terry disguised himself as a waiter in order to get an interview with Arkansas' segregationist Gov. Orville Faubus - the story caused a sensation when it hit the front page of the NY Times.

Perhaps the most moving items at that NCRM exhibit, however, were a pair of telegrams sent by the Dept. of Defense to the family of sailor Leroy Mudd in 1970: the first, dated June 29, states (in cold bureaucratic, typo-riddled language) that Mudd was missing & presumed drowned after diving into a river in pursuit of a football that had gone overboard; the second, dated July 1, notes that Mudd's body had been recovered, adding that the government would pay up to $500 to cover any private burial costs. Mudd, 18, had only been in 'Nam for a few months.

"Afghanistan," as I like to remind friends with whom I correspond through the U.S. Postal Service, nearly rhymes with "Vietnam." The Masters of War just can't seem to inflict enough violence & mayhem on humanity. Sorry, Bob - your 1963 protest song has fallen on too many deaf ears, even all these years after the Cold War ended.