'Next Stop Is Vietnam':
A War In Song
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/11/131242902/-next-stop-is-vietnam-a-war-in-song
by David C. Barnett
November 11, 2010
The history of the Vietnam War has been told many times in hundreds
of books, movies and plays. But Next Stop Is Vietnam explores the
impact of that conflict through the popular music it inspired.
In 1969, Gary Hall was an orthopedic technician at the 17th Field
Hospital in An Khe, in Vietnam's Central Highlands. He saw what
seemed to be an endless stream of wounded and dead, and Hall says
music took him away, at least temporarily.
"In An Khe, the popular song was 'Love One Another' [by] The
Youngbloods," Hall says. " 'Come on people now, smile on each other,
everybody get together, gonna love one another right now.' That's the
one I remember really strongly."
But if you ask a lot of veterans, the song that captures their
feelings about Vietnam is "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," a 1960s
pop hit by The Animals, which was really about young people trapped
in a British urban slum.
There are more than 300 songs on a new 13-CD box set titled Next Stop
Is Vietnam. They range from a folk ballad released just before U.S.
troops landed to a 2008 song about the aftereffects that veterans
still suffer. Hugo Keesing put the collection together. It's a
project he's worked on since the early 1970s, when he taught
psychology courses to U.S. troops a few hundred miles up the coast from Saigon.
"By the mid-1980s, I had collected about 500 45s that dealt with the
Vietnam War," Keesing says.
The first Vietnam War protest song to become a commercial hit was a
three-and-a half-minute rant by Barry McGuire. "Eve of Destruction"
was banned by many radio stations and the entire Armed Forces Network.
"The perceived impact was such that, within several weeks, there was
already the first 'answer record' 'Dawn of Correction' where a
very clean-cut group of young men, who included members of Danny and
the Juniors, decided that it was important to refute, point-by-point,
some of the claims made in 'Eve of Destruction,' " Keesing says.
Perhaps the first song to explicitly support the growing military
effort in Vietnam was "Ballad of the Green Berets," co-written by an
Army soldier who recorded the demo version in a Saigon safe house in
the mid-1960s. Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler was a member of the U.S.
Army's elite Special Forces unit, identified by their green berets,
when his commercial recording of the song went to the top of the charts.
Art McKoy says the members of his platoon were impressed when they
first heard the song.
"We always admired those guys, because they went way up in the hills
and the valleys and did a hell of some stuff," McKoy says. "And, in
our hearts, even though we weren't that courageous to be Green
Berets, when we heard that song, we all wanted to be like Green Berets."
But when McKoy got back home to Cleveland, another Vietnam song
caught his ear: "War." It was by a local singer named Charles
Hatcher, better known as Edwin Starr.
"The fact of the matter is we went with nothing, we lost our lives,
and we came back, we really had nothing," McKoy says. "If you ask me,
that was one of the great battle cries. I think it's relevant right today."
A number of soldiers recorded their own songs while serving
in-country, and an entire disc on the new set is devoted to them. One
is "Battle Hymn of the Republic of Vietnam," a take on the daily news
briefings conducted by the U.S. government press office in Saigon,
recorded by perhaps with good reason an unidentified military staffer.
Mine eyes have seen the story of the winning of the war
It is published every afternoon a little after four
They put it in the briefing sheets and then they tell us more
And the truth goes sliding by
One of the best known songs of the era is another darkly humorous
ditty by Country Joe and the Fish about soldiers marching off to war,
titled "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag."
"By the early '70s, as troops were arriving in Vietnam, they were
singing 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag,' " Keesing says. "It was
an indication, not only of how divided the nation was, but there was
almost a gallows humor in singing, 'Whoopee, I'm going to die,' as
American troops are coming to Vietnam for the first time."
Country Joe McDonald's performance at the 1969 Woodstock festival
(audio NSFW) made him famous, but in a 1996 talk at the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, the Navy veteran expressed conflicted feelings about
the legacy of his signature song.
"When I sing 'Fixin'-to-Die Rag' for Vietnam veterans, I know what
they're feeling and they're thinking," McDonald says. "But when I
sing it for a regular audience, I don't know what the hell they're
thinking. I don't know if they're draft resistors. I don't know if
they paid a price."
Former Ohio legislator John Begala was a sophomore at Kent State
University in 1970, when four students were killed by National Guard
troops called in to quell an anti-war protest. One week later, a new
song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, "Ohio," came on the radio.
"To this day, I listen to that song and I get pissed off," Begala
says. "It tugs on your emotions and your anger tugs on your
disappointment, and the rage. My god, it takes you right back."
But "Ohio" won't be taking listeners of the new box set back. Keesing
couldn't get the rights.
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