Today, more than any other American conflict, the U.S. war in southeast Asia in the 1960s-70s has a soundtrack in the popular imagination. Thanks to films like
Apocalypse Now and Ken Burns’s epic documentary series
The Vietnam War, the American “police action” in Vietnam is widely understood as—in critic John Leonard’s words—“the first rock and roll war.” Cue up the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Jimi Hendrix. In fact, so closely is the war associated with rock and roll, that this characterization is often taken as self-evident, if not a cliché—a stand-in for the psychic life of both American soldiers and the American counterculture at large. This paper argues that we do not know the characteristic sounds of the American soldiers in Vietnam or what they meant for how the war was fought. Although rock and roll certainly was important to many G.I.s over the course of the war, the reality was more complicated—and more important—than Hollywood and Ken Burns have led us to believe.
Drawing on both military records and the counterculture press, this paper contends that a more accurate soundtrack to soldiers’ lives was the music of armed forces radio, to which eighty percent of soldiers listened for two hours a day or more circa 1968 (according to listener surveys), and which featured mainly pop, oldies, easy listening, and country music. While rock and roll also had a presence (via jukeboxes, tape trading, and live bands), it accounted for a relatively small minority of the soundscape. Moreover, where it have purchase, rock functioned less as a medium of transgression (as it did arguably among the counterculture at home) and more as a safety valve that sustained the soldiery by helping them, as one veteran put it, “make it through just one more day.”
