We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner (review)

In We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley and historian Craig Werner aim to recover the "soundtrack of the Vietnam War," including the national memory of the war, but what they actually do is unearth the place of music in the lives of those who experienced the war firsthand. It is no small accomplishment. GIs breathed in the music of the 1960s, they thrilled to it, read deeply into it, and repurposed it to suit their existential needs. The book is filled with stories of survival—of surviving with and because of popular music—not to mention stories of coping, postwar, with the traumatic experience of combat with the curative power of music as a kind of sonic IV drip.

The book grew out of a discussion at the Madison, Wisconsin, Veterans Center between Bradley and Werner (who coteach a course on the Vietnam War at the University of Wisconsin–Madison) and other veterans. They conducted more than two hundred interviews for the project (though they do not use them all) and also draw upon oral history collections from the University of Buffalo Vietnam Veteran Oral History and Folklore Project and Texas Tech University's Vietnam Virtual Archive (it should be Vietnam War Virtual Archive). Finally, the historian Heather Stur shared the interviews she conducted for her excellent book, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (2011).

Bradley and Werner organize We Gotta Get Out of This Place roughly chronologically, and one of the book's virtues is that it is attentive to changing attitudes and opinions—chiefly among veterans—about the war over time. GIs who arrived in Vietnam in 1965 or 1966 experienced the war and the music they heard differently than GIs who arrived in 1970 or 1971. This is made especially clear through the use of nearly three dozen longer excerpts of interview transcripts—which Bradley and Werner call "solos" (imagine a guitar solo)—that provide opportunities for extended reflection on the part of some interviewees.

The result is "a collective portrait of a group of individuals trying to make sense of a multifaceted experience that mostly didn't make any sense." The many stories told in the book "document states of mind at numerous points in a long process," they say (5).

Although the book is written for a general audience (including veterans, who are unlikely to find anything offensive in the authors' interpretation, especially as they privilege veterans' voices over their own), it is fundamentally about reception (though the authors do not use the term): it is a collection of stories that tell us how GIs received and interpreted the music of the period, and it shows GIs as both audience and as artists themselves. Bradley and Werner thus argue that music, for those serving in Vietnam, "provided release from the uncertainty, isolation, and sometimes stark terror" of the war zone. Music also functioned as "the glue that bound the communities they formed in their hooches, base camps, and lonely outposts." Long after the war ended, popular music served as "a path to healing" for so many who served (1–2).

Music not only performed these vital roles in the lives of millions of servicemen and servicewomen who went to Vietnam but also transmitted, as though from a borderland radio station, between home front and war front. Music transcended the physical distance between the United States and Vietnam so that troops listened to the same songs "their friends were listening to back home." It was "a lifeline connecting soldiers to their homes, families, and parts of themselves they felt slipping away" (2). And as Meredith Lair has previously demonstrated, music and the technology required to play it were among the many stateside creature comforts imported to Vietnam.^1...