The Vietnam two-step. Back and forth. Forth and back. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? The music of the Vietnam era can help ground us, get us out of the quagmire, by moving us away from these polarizations. Music truth is complex, an implicit recognition that no one voice can tell the whole story, that our public memory is inescapably plural. If we can value that Country Joe McDonald is a veteran and that gallows humor is part of the soldier experience; if we can grasp how Johnny Cash, after his tour of Vietnam, could describe himself as “a dove with claws”; if we can understand why Freda Payne would want to record “Bring the Boys Home” in 1971; and if we can appreciate why, until his death, Merle Haggard was conflicted about his song “Okie from Muskogee,” then maybe there’s room in our public memory for dichotomy and diversity? For forgiveness?

During our Q & A call and response sessions after presentations on We Gotta Get Out of This Place, audiences didn’t do the usual griping or head shaking; instead, they listened, intently and respectfully, to what all sides had to say. Maybe that’s why just about every conversation eventually moved somewhere to the middle, and, in the end, toward some type of communal healing, with every person who stood up and shared—veteran and non-veteran—feeling as if they had been heard.

Having engaged in innumerable conversations about Vietnam for more than 50 years, I’m here to tell you that this is not what usually happens. It was more than extraordinary; it was redemptive. Music gets credit for this positive development, and for creating a more accepting, and authentic, environment. But the participants themselves, albeit self-selected, deserve credit too—credit for their patience, tolerance, and courteous listening. Those sessions have important meanings for our processes of forming public memory.

In order to be accurate, our public memory has to be fundamentally different from the endless, recycled assertions of polarized interpretations of Vietnam, the U.S., Vietnam veterans, and non-veteran Americans. These interpretations seek to define in unchangeable terms what our collective and individual histories mean. While they’re argued with emotional intensity, they totalize; they move from the individual to the abstract and general.

Our experiences interviewing veterans for We Gotta Get Out of This Place, and during the call-and-response sessions after our presentations on the book, suggest an approach that can preserve both the universal and the individual. Music’s call invites a multiplicity of response: Where were you when you first heard this song? What did you feel? Who was with you? How do you feel when you hear it now…?

For millions of Americans, Vietnam and the mid-20th century are ancient history. But my co-author Craig Werner and I realized that the music and nonjudgmental sharing helped audiences to reflect on thorny issues of their responsibilities and duties as citizens; the meaning of patriotism, loyalty, and morality; and the authority of government. The Vietnam War, as (former U. S. Secretary of Defense) Chuck Hagel and others have observed, severely tested our democracy. But that war also speaks to the depth and resilience of the foundational aspects of American life—an important lesson at the present moment.

The strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Pete Seeger, the soundtracks of innumerable Vietnam movies, and the testimony of Vietnam veterans like Sue O’Neill and Bill Ehrhart echo in my ear. It’s their voices, their stories, and their songs that should populate our public memory. And maybe if we listen hard enough, we can hear them when we touch a name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Excerpt from Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America  by Doug Bradley (Warriors Publishing, 2019)