I am pleased to bring you the thinking of today’s guest, Doug Bradley. He’s a Vietnam vet who, with his co-author Craig Werner, spent two years making more than 100 presentations coast to coast, witnessing honest, respectful exchanges among audience members. The purpose was to explore how the music of the era, shared by those who served in the war and those who stayed home, helped to create safe, nonjudgmental environments for listening, sharing, understanding and forgiving.

We will be discussing a range of topics, such as the traumas of wars, especially divisive ones like the Vietnam war, what forgiveness and reconciliation mean in the context of wars, and the role of music in healing the wounds caused by wars.

What Song Brings You Home?

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Play
• Stitcher

 

 

The following is a taste of my conversation with Doug.

Q: Why is music so important in healing the wounds left by Vietnam?

Doug: Music became a connective tissue. Radio was our internet. And whether you stayed or whether you served, whether you participated or whether you protested, you heard the same songs. The songs that spoke to them that helped them to get home

Q: What does forgiveness mean in the context of your work with Vietnam vets?

Doug: The forgiveness process gets all compounded and complicated by survivor guilt, and the divisions of that war, the lack of understanding, the miscommunication, the ignorance, and the misunderstanding that we’ve had for 40 or 50 years… I’ll go to maybe healing and reconciling more than forgiving because I think forgiving requires a level of understanding and dialogue that we don’t yet have.

Q: You have said that violence intoxicates young men. Kids start, at infancy, getting ready for war and there’s a sort of a John Wayne in every boy’s head. In your opinion, what will it take for this to change?

Doug: I quote my father-in-law Ted Shannon who said, “The opposite of militarism is not pacifism, but feminism – feminist approaches to problem-solving, to dialogue, to communication, to learning and to healing.”

Q: You’ve said that the Vietnam war is America’s second civil war. How so?

Doug: We had a tough time, and in many ways didn’t survive the first civil war, didn’t forgive, didn’t reconcile. We haven’t done it with this one either. And I think that this hurts the country, it hurts us as human beings.

When asked if there’s one last thing he’d like our listeners to hear, Doug says, “Let’s all be better listeners, let’s try harder to appreciate and understand where somebody else is coming from, especially somebody who, in our name, has had to go and fight and be traumatized by war.”

About Doug:
Doug Bradley has written extensively about his Vietnam and post-Vietnam experiences. Drafted into the U.S. Army in March 1970, he served as an information specialist (journalist) for the U.S. Army Republic of Vietnam headquarters at Long Binh, South Vietnam, from November 1970 to November 1971. Doug relocated to Madison, Wisconsin in 1974 where he helped establish Vets House, a storefront, community-based service center for Vietnam-era veterans. He is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America; DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle and co-author, with Craig Werner, of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War which was named BEST MUSIC BOOK of 2015 by Rolling Stone.

 

Find Doug on Social Media:
https://warriorspublishing.com/authors/doug-bradley/ (Website)
https://www.facebook.com/doug.bradley.77 (Facebook)
@DBradMSN (Twitter)

Doug’s Books:
Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America
We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War)
DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle

Book Mentioned in the Interview:

Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.

Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript:
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above.

Marlena: I’m very pleased to introduce today’s guest, Doug Bradley. In 2015, Doug co-authored, with Craig Werner, the award-winning book, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack Of The Vietnam War,” which plays popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. Over the next two years, the two of them made more than 100 presentations coast to coast, witnessing honest, respectful exchanges among audience members. That journey prompted Doug to write “Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America,” and to further explore how the music of the era shared by those who served in the war and those who stayed home, helped to create safe, nonjudgmental environments for listening, sharing, understanding, and forgiving.

So the title of this podcast is “Becoming Who You Truly Are.” And this season, we’re talking about forgiveness and reconciliation as paths to healing and finding our true selves. Over and over and in different ways, my guests are addressing the question, “What does it really mean to forgive?” Doug is uniquely qualified to explore this question, along with other issues related to forgiveness and reconciliation. Doug, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Doug: Well, thank you, Marlena. And just kudos to you for doing this kind of work and addressing these kind of topics. So critical to us.

Marlena: Yes, it is. Agreed. So you were drafted into the U.S. Army in March of 1970, and you served as an information specialist in South Vietnam from November 1970 until November of 1971.

Doug: Correct.

Marlena: Yeah. I’d like to begin by asking you to describe the highlights, the good and the bad of that year.

Doug: Boy, it’s hard to believe it’s almost 50 years ago because in some ways it feels like it was 15 minutes ago. As you know, it was a challenging time for all of us, especially us generation of young men who were, basically, every day of our lives facing the question of Vietnam service. There was a thing then called the draft, this was just prior to the lottery and now what we have the all-volunteer army. So, regardless of where you were in your life at that time, if you were in college, if you were graduating from high school, if you weren’t going to college, if you were working, you had to confront the issue of Vietnam practically every day. And for me, I was fortunate enough to have a student deferment, and so I was kept away from the draft through my four years of college.

But then as soon as I graduated in May of 1969, I lost my deferment. I became 1A status, which meant the army could come and get me. And I basically struggled that entire summer over the question of Canada, jail, or the army. Those were what I thought the choices were. I was not gonna enlist, I didn’t… Yeah, I wasn’t a active protester, but I didn’t believe in the war, and I didn’t want to do more than two years of compulsory service. I couldn’t get into the reserves or the guard because, by that point, those outlets were filled. So that was, you know, what was I going to do? And I decided, crazily enough, that maybe the army was the lesser of three evils because I didn’t ever know that if you left and went to Canada if you’d ever be able to come back home. I didn’t think jail would look good on my resume.

So, there I was. And it was, you know, the army could have done anything with me. Being drafted, they could have made me a combat soldier or an infantryman and we might not be having this conversation today. Luckily for me, the army at that point, because we had started the process called Vietnamization where were turning the ground war over to the South Vietnamese Army and escalating the air war, bombing a lot of North Vietnam thinking we’d bring them to the bargaining table. So they started to send some soldiers home, mainly combat soldiers. But they aligned my skills, I was a writer, I was an English major, I’d worked for the campus newspaper. With army jobs, so they may be an information specialist, otherwise their combat correspondent. And it would just…it would be hard for a lot of people, especially anyone who served in Vietnam, to appreciate the environment I was in because I worked for the generals, and the majors, and the colonels, that brass that was running the war.

And they wanted an air conditioning. They wanted a lot of creature comfort. So my office in Vietnam was air-conditioned. And you can…I mean, the blistering heat sometimes in the monsoons and all that crazy weather that you can get in Southeast Asia, in many ways, I was protected from at least 12 hours a day when I was in my office. And it almost felt like I was working for, you know, IBM or some big corporate environment. You know, we had to look good in our fatigues, we had desks, we had typewriters, we had receptionists and secretaries, Vietnamese, of course, and we worked on an army newspaper and magazine. And half of the office were to go out into the field and do stories, and cover units, and do hometown stories about soldiers serving. The other half guys like me would edit the paper, and write the headlines, and, you know, print the paper, and distribute it.

So, it was…I mean, it was almost like having a job for an American newspaper in Vietnam. But for those other 12 hours when you would leave the office and enter the non-air conditioned jungle, it was a different world because you never knew. This was a guerrilla war. You never knew where the enemy was. You never knew what was safe. Even though I was in the rear and my place was thought to be very safe, you know, my base was more than three times I was there. One of the guys I served with, a fellow in my unit was the only information specialist combat correspondent who was killed in Vietnam because he covered the invasion of Laos in February 1970 and stepped on a landmine. So, I mean, it wasn’t without its danger, but somehow doing work that challenged you mentally, that brought…yeah, you used your skills for, that you were with a bunch of guys who also were college graduates for the most part, or writers and editors, it had a very different feel. And it was lucky for us to have that feel because, for others who could only be a matter of a few kilometers away from us, it was a whole different war.

Marlena: Yeah, in fact, you write that there’s not one Nam story, there are nearly 3 million of them. And Nam is not one 10-year war but 10 one-year wars, because each year was so different. In your view, is this true of all wars or is this unique to the Vietnam War?

Doug: That’s a great question. There are many things that are unique to Vietnam, and including the music and the access we had to it via so many different media, radios, and live groups, and cover bands, and Bob Hope, and cassettes, and tape decks, etc. But, you know, I do think there were some things about this that are similar to war in general in terms of what your Military Occupational Specialty issue job, it’s a thing called MOS, where you are located, you know, in the line of fire or in the war theater, and when you serve. That was so very dramatic in Vietnam. But I’ve talked to a number of Iraq and Afghan vets and I’m sure we’ll get to that in terms of as we talk more about healing, and forgiving, and reconciliation. And in many ways, having the same experience, you know, they’re getting a lot more kudos and a lot more pat’s on the back, and a lot more applause.

But this war, given that you never know where the enemy is in Afghanistan or Iraq, and where the danger lies, it’s, again, a matter of maybe when you were there, when it was really bad around Fallujah, and Baghdad, and Kabul, or what your job was, were you right in that fire or were you reporting on it? Guys like me. So, I think there are both similarities and differences. I think what, of course, markedly made Vietnam so very different was that there were so many of us that participated or could have participated who had to make decisions, frankly, our whole generation, as opposed to this war and that the country was incredibly divided. And it was hard to find where the heart of the country was at the time and if there would be any forgiving and reconciliation.

Marlena: Yeah, and in some ways, that remains an open question. But your project certainly is making a difference. Would you describe to our listeners the primary purpose of your music project with Vietnam vets?

Doug: One of the sad legacies of that war, Marlena, is that we never welcomed these men and women home. You know, it was a divisive war, it was an ugly war as all wars are. It was basically about the proportions. Of course, we didn’t know at the time, but we came to realize that we were being deceived about what we were doing in Vietnam, and what our motivations were, and what the prospects for winning were. And it was very difficult for the men and women who were there. And never bringing them back I think is a shame on us and I think it really continues to plague us as a nation. I think when you…other cultures, in Native American cultures, for example, the entire community will bring the veteran home and they’ll have rituals, be it a gourd dance or, you know, a water ritual, and they will help to heal and purify and then bring that soldier home. We didn’t do that. We didn’t even say, “Thanks.” We didn’t even say, “Welcome home.”

But what we found was that if you asked a Vietnam vet what his or her song was, was there a song that spoke to them that helped them to get home, that helped them to keep their spirits up, that connected them to the people they were serving with or their loved ones back home? Boy did it open just an abundance of responses and epiphanies for these men and women. And that’s what Craig and I did when we started out on this project with the book. If you had told me then it was going to take about 10 or 12 years to do this, I probably would have said that’s too much time. But because these can’t be small conversations, I can’t just send you a text or an email and say, “Hey. Glad you made it home. What was your favorite song in Vietnam? Thanks.”

No. You would have to earn people’s trust, you would have to be in their space with them, you would have to spend time listening, carefully listening, not interrogating, not interrupting, not questioning, just listening. And, boy, I mean, I can’t begin to tell you the number of occasions where… I still get goosebumps when I think about the moments when I was in somebody’s home where they would bring their other family members and pull out this memorabilia they had from Vietnam, and start to talk, realizing that no one in that room had heard that story ever before. And the power of that, and the great thing about music is that it was all shared. And so when we’d have these moments with these individual veterans, either alone or with their family members, that was so powerful and so important.

When we were in large group settings, we would have that almost replicated because the music would…it was shared. It would center people, it was authentic, it was honest, and it would help everybody to just sort of be in that moment. So at all of these presentations, and it’s hard to believe that, because there were so many of them, a veteran or his spouse would stand up and testify to a song and what it meant for them, and help to bring them home. So that’s basically what this was about.

I mean, yeah, we all have this. I mean, as the brain scientists have shown us, all the science, that music and memory are so interconnected. They’re both next to each other in the brain. So when a sound is heard, a memory is triggered. But, boy, when you bury that for 40 or 50 years and boom, it’s there, if it’s docked to the bay, whether it’s “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” or it’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” there’s a trigger, and the floodgates open. I mean, you have your own soundtrack, but, boy, for these men and women, because it hadn’t been expressed, all of Vietnam came out in that song, in that moment, in that sharing.

Marlena: Yeah. And we’ll talk some more about the role of music. But the way you just described being with people, Doug, I have to tell you that it reminds me so much of what another guest on this podcast recently said about the importance of presence for the forgiveness project.

Doug: I couldn’t say it any better. “I second those emotions,” as Smokey Robinson in The Miracles would have said. And, you know, I don’t know if we’re too busy, we’re too distracted, we’re too much into these devices that we carry around, but, boy, it takes that. And honestly, I think, you know, the men and women that have fought in the current wars need that as well. And we all do, as humans. And we just don’t seem to have the time or the space for it. And luckily for us, even before…you know, we started this project in 2005, so we were still going through Listservs and old bulletin boards, you know, things have gotten a lot crazier and speedier. But we needed those places and that notion, you said a presence then, we need it now.

Marlena: Yeah. Doug, music therapy for veterans actually has a long history. It was used in the U.S. Army back in 1945 for recuperation in army hospitals. How does the historical use compare to how you’ve used music for healing among Vietnam vets?

Doug: I think for us, it’s that it is…maybe universal is too strong a word, but it’s so ubiquitous in this cohort of men and women, because it was so essential to our generation. I mean, sure, there was popular music in the ’40s that people listened to and shared, but music became our…you know, a connective tissue. Radio was our internet. And whether you stayed or whether you served, whether you participated or whether you protested, you heard the same songs. And they could have very different meanings if you’re going to, or you’re in, or you’re coming home from Vietnam. But we had a shared soundtrack and I think the essentialness and the constancy of music for us made it different. And then the fact that so much of what was happening to us and the world and events that were, you know, changing things radically and dramatically from day to day was embedded and articulated in the music. So I don’t think there’ll ever be another time that music was so central, so essential, so ubiquitous, and basically, so defining.

Marlena: Yeah. Yeah. You write that Creedence, Jimi Hendrix, Peter, Paul, and Mary, these were some of the most important musicians for non-vets, but that of all of them, Creedence Clearwater most deeply reflected the music of the war. Why was this the case?

Doug: Well, I think that it was the case of looking back on it. And again, you know, this is, I mean, it’s relatively small sample. Several hundred vets, maybe. We’re over, you know, way over 1,000 now with two books and all the presentations, but it’s still not the entire canon of people that were there. But I think it’s very reflective and representative. And Creedence was one of the first groups at the time, who had two of the members in the group who were in the service. Fogerty was in the Army Reserves, Doug Clifford was in the Merchant Marines. So they understood that it was working-class kids like them that were fighting the war. That’s where that whole notion of “Fortunate Son” comes from. “It ain’t me,” you know, “I ain’t no millionaire’s son. I ain’t no senator’s son.” And they articulated through who they were and their music that you could support the soldier and oppose the war.

And that hadn’t been done. A lot of music was either you gotta be over here or you gotta be over there. And that’s how we like to look back on Vietnam. That it was just left and right, hawk and dove. It’s much more a gray area than black and white. Creedence was able to get into that space. Their music was so good. And then to sort of resonate that understanding and those messages whether it’s “Bad Moon Rising,” “Proud Mary,” “Run Through the Jungle,” or “Fortunate Son,” or as you articulate, “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” And it’s Fogerty himself who said, John Fogerty, who wrote the song, he was the leader of the group, that that was as much about Vietnam as it was about Woodstock. There’s been a lot of talk because we’ve been on the 50th general celebration of the Woodstock event. That second or third stanza in that song harkens back to Woodstock, and it does, with the mud, etc. But he’s also said that said that it’s as much about Vietnam and what was happening in Vietnam at the time.

Marlena: Yeah, and they were able to hold that gray space that’s not black or white thus, as I recall, they were anti-war but very pro-vet.

Doug: Absolutely right.

Marlena: Yeah. So when you and Craig toured the country, you used a call and response format. I have to tell you, Doug, I grew up as a Mennonite and so when I read that, when I read your description of your call and response, I went to the religious altar call. I mean, I attended a Billy Graham crusade when I was a kid and the altar call of, you know, “Come be healed” is where I went when I read about it. Can you describe the call and response format for our listeners?

Doug: Well, I think you just did it. That was perfect because that’s where a lot of its roots are. I was so fortunate to have Craig as my colleague on “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and to be my friend for all these many years. And he was very helpful and influential with my writing in “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” And Craig chaired Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He’s been in that field for years. And it is that notion, it starts with that Pentecostal gospel presence at a religious ceremony where, you know, the preacher from the pulpit will send out a call…

Marlena: I have to tell you, it still gave me goosebumps as I read it in your book.

Doug: Yes. Yes. And that format, it is so powerful, it is so communal. And, you know, what we realized was in the first book, the call had been “What’s your song?” where we got with a veteran, we had that presence, we were in their space, what’s your song? And then became the whole unraveling in many cases for them of what happened in Vietnam. For this, it was almost like the book was the call, and these broader audiences were responding to, “Jeez, I didn’t know that. I didn’t understand that. I hadn’t thought about that. I needed to say thank you, or I’m sorry.” But it is that basis of, you know, you hear the call, and, you know, you do what you want with it. You react to it, you can affirm it, you agree with it, you testify, you could disagree with it, you could reform it, you could send out a new call. But that’s how that dynamic worked.

And, you know, the responses are just so incredibly powerful and important for the audience members whether they get up and publicly do it, or they sit there and hold one another’s hands and nod their heads. I don’t wanna make it sound like this was a totally religious or spiritual experience, but there were many moments…I wouldn’t be one to sit here and deny that that wasn’t happening because of the power of the music, and people being present, and being respectful, and listening to what a veteran or their family member had to say about how that song brought them home.

Marlena: Doug, you used that word “presence” again. I’m beginning to think it’s the theme running through all of these podcast episodes. And it was not my intention that it would be, but it’s amazing how often it’s come up. Presence. So the theme running through this podcast season, another one besides presence, and maybe very similar to it, is forgiveness. Would you talk a bit about the role of forgiveness and what forgiveness means within the context of your work with Vietnam vets?

Doug: Boy, it’s such a big term and it carries so much weight. And it gets all compounded and complicated by survivor guilt, and the divisions of that war, and the lack of understanding, and discommunication, and ignorance, and misunderstanding that we’ve had for 40 or 50 years. When Craig and I talk about this sometimes, we talk about it as America’s second civil war. And we had a tough time and in many ways didn’t survive the first civil war, forgive, reconcile. We haven’t done it with this one either. And I think that that hurts the country, it hurts us as human beings. And I think that the notion of forgiving has to come with understanding, and appreciating, and getting back to that listening and presence. Because, you know, veterans need to be able for somebody to say to them, not that they forget, but, you know, that they understand and appreciate maybe better what they’ve been through and what the current soldiers are going through.

And this notion of we need to forgive, too, the people who disrespected us or blamed us for losing the war, or for many of the ugly things that occurred during that war. So it gets very complicated in the wall that we’ve put up between us for so long. And I think it’s more a matter of, you know, I’ll go to maybe healing and reconciling more than forgiving because I think forgiving requires a level of understanding and dialogue that we don’t have. And I’d like to think that maybe we can get there eventually, but I think, first, we need to start with the basics. And that is having ways that we can better understand and appreciate that experience and their feeling,s and the rejection, and the, you know, rehabilitation and reconciliation, and hopefully get to forgiving. I didn’t mean to go in circles on that, but I just think that, you know, it’s powerful, but I almost feel like it’s the end goal, and we got a long way to go.

Marlena: That’s fascinating to me, because many people speak of forgiveness as being an essential precursor to reconciliation, and yet you’re saying that let’s reconcile so that we eventually can forgive.

Doug: Yeah. It could just be my take or it could be just because, you know, war is something different than the…I mean, it’s probably the most surreal, and challenging, and difficult, and ugly things of the human experience so maybe that’s what makes at least my take on this a little different than somebody else’s.

Marlena: Yeah, yeah. Doug, I’m awed by the magnitude of the challenge of forgiveness, reconciliation, healing that you’re addressing. In this podcast, my guests and I are exploring the need for healing at very different levels, motivated in part by my own personal journey toward forgiveness and reconciliation with my father and my Mennonite Church, which I describe in my book, “Love is Complicated.” Here’s my question for you. In your experience, in what substantive ways does healing trauma at a personal level or within a family differ from healing the kind of collective trauma you’re addressing?

Doug: Boy, that’s a great question. You know, I think rather than…and I’m not saying that you phrased it that way, but I’m feeling like there’s an either/or there’s a both/and because the individual and the personal is very much in the soldiers experience like we said before in this conversation. You know, there’s not one Vietnam story. We didn’t all have the same experience. There were three million. And so that personal, I think, trauma and experience is tied up in the collective. Because the crazy thing about that war, and as I’ve already said, war is crazy, to begin with, was that we didn’t go over as units. I mean, you know, one thing that can help anybody, I think, in any situation if you have a collective experience and the way that war was run, we went over as individuals and we came back as individuals.

Now it’s different, but in those days we didn’t train…you know, the guys having some basic training with were not the guys that I was in Kansas City with, were not the people I was in Vietnam with, with one exception. You know, guys would go through basic with one cohort group, would go through advanced training with another, and then be in Vietnam with another, and have people in those units rotating in and out on a daily basis. And so we had the shared experience of Vietnam, but we didn’t have a collective experience that was common that we could go back to and say, “How are you doing?” Frankly, the internet’s made that possible. And what we experience over the course of our interviews with vets as things changed with the internet, was that guys could go back and connect and find fellows that they had served with in Vietnam. And that they could then talk about, “Was I right about this memory?” And, “Were we there when this happened?” And, “Did these guys really die?”

And so it’s a long way to getting into your story. I think that we may need to both heal…and let’s face it, this is one or two years in somebody’s life and how things have gotten complicated since, you know. Because many Vietnam vets because of that lack of appreciation, understanding, welcoming home, self-medicated for years. So, on top of all this, you’ve got PTSD, you’ve got alcohol and drug issues, many vets were homeless. I mean, you’ve got a lot of work to do. And then you also have, you know, the collective work that all of us Vietnam veterans, and then the greater society. So, I mean, that’s a challenge of epic proportions. So, let’s at least start somewhere. Let’s use music, let’s use dogs, let’s use guitars, let’s use horses, let’s use storytelling, memoir, whatever we can for that individual person.

Then maybe they’re in a group where they’re sharing that, then there’s groups of those groups sharing it, those communities connect. And as I pointed out in “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” a lot of veterans have decided, Vietnam vets, that this generation of vets wasn’t going to have that same experience. And they’ve done things like veterans courts, like homeless initiatives, healing rituals, you know, writing workshops. That’s what it takes. So I think that’s what it takes for folks like you and me, even if we weren’t in a war, but, boy, I think even more so for folks who have been traumatized by that experience, we need to have these kinds of spaces and places where that kind of healing can happen.

Marlena: Yeah. So I mentioned Phil Cousineau earlier, another guest on this podcast. In his book, “Beyond Forgiveness,” he writes that “Atonement, the act of making amends, proves the depth of our desire for reconciliation and forgiveness.” How do you respond to that?

Doug: Amen. I think he’s right, definitely.

Marlena: How does it relate to reconciliation in the context of the Vietnam War?

Doug: Well, because as I said, part of this has been delayed or postponed or just ignored for 50 years. And I think such an understanding needs to happen, not just among Americans who participated in that, and everybody who’s been born since then, and how we’ve viewed Vietnam and then how we look at war now and soldier and soldier. And then we’re not even talking about the Vietnamese. I think the most powerful moments that I’ve had communicated to me, because I have not gone back to Vietnam, are by the men and women who have returned there and gone back to the places where they were fighting.

Marlena: Yeah. You write about Billy Bang going back and collaborating with Vietnamese musicians.

Doug: I mean, I think when the combatants can come together in that same space and place, Billy Bang, Bill Kristofferson, and Gordon Fowler who’d do this wonderful piece in the book about that and many others that even go back to where they were fighting, and they find somebody that remembers the battle or maybe participated, was a combatant on the other side, I mean, there’s making amends in so many different and powerful ways. All of that kind of healing could occur on a daily basis and for people who don’t have the opportunity to get back to Vietnam.

Marlena: Yeah. You write that music can help ground us by moving us away from the who’s right and who’s wrong polarizations. What is it about music exactly that allows it to do that for us?

Doug: I think because music is, it’s a different kind of language. It’s a different… It occasions us and affects us in different ways. I won’t say all music can or does or that this works for everybody, but I really think for our generation, what I found, and what Craig and I discovered, was that it allows people to be in that moment of that song, whatever the song is, and there are thousands of them that we’ve been told by the men and women we interviewed. And it just sort of it changes the air, it changes the environment, it changes them. And sometimes it’s the lyric, which is very expressive, sometimes it’s the music. I mean, we had people describe that Jimi Hendrix sounded like Vietnam because he did, you know, just the way he played the guitar. But there’s just something there in that expression that is unique to sound and to melody that I think affects us. And again, I’m not a brain researcher, but I think it’s been proven that something happens to us when we’re listening to a song, especially a song that has a connection to us that, that makes us who we are.

Marlena: Yeah. I heard just a few days ago on NPR, someone reporting about the fact that we use both sides of our brains when we listen to music with lyrics. And so, it’s a whole-brain activity which probably also enters into the equation. I’d like to go back a bit to something you said earlier, that moving on from Vietnam is as challenging as moving on from our civil war. And really, in many ways, we haven’t done that. Closure requires, as you’ve described it, deep awareness and understanding. In what ways are the wounds of the Civil War similar and different from the wounds of the Vietnam War?

Doug: Well, that’s a great question. And not being a noted historian, you know, my pedestrian take on this is that when you look at the chasms around race, around discipline, around authority, around, you know, ideas, and ideals, and values, I think that that was a lot of what the post-Civil War experience was trying to deal with. I mean, what do we do with Southern prisoners? What do we do with the people who lost the war? What do we do to the nation that won, but maybe didn’t really win? What do we do about the people who we had in indentured service for years as servants and now they’re free in some ways, maybe not in all ways? I mean, when you think of questions like that and then you look at Vietnam in terms of what was happening during that war that…I mean, during that era that was so much, you know, life in the military was so much a micro chasm of the greater society.

You know, the sexual revolution, drugs, music, authority, discipline, and race, race so immensely powerful and so combustible in many ways. So I think there are definite connections, and I think, in many ways, there are lessons that were unlearned and there’s painful legacies. Because, you know, I don’t know what we could have done 160 or so years ago when we were trying to recover from that, and the gaps and the wounds that were here. But I do know, from my own experience, I think there were things we could have done for our men and women in Vietnam that we didn’t do, including just helping them to get home and helping them to heal. And so, I just think there are similarities and there are legacies. And like I said, I think, unfortunately, too many that still require our attention and our diligence that haven’t received it.

Marlena: Yeah. You talk about the racial tensions. Isn’t it true that music brought soldiers together during the Vietnam War, but it also tore them apart, especially when it exacerbated those racial tensions? Can you say more about that?

Doug: Yeah. Now, you’re absolutely right. And that’s both the wonderful thing and, of course, maybe the less than wonderful or challenging thing about music, especially in that war. You know, when you’re out in the field, which wasn’t the…it’s not the universal experience in Vietnam. I think part of the thing we’ve done, and even Ken Burns did it on his PBS series a few years ago, is the emphasis is on combat. That’s what war is about, it’s kill or be killed. But it’s overly emphasized, and of the about three million people who served in Vietnam, less than 500,000 of them were combat troops. The rest of them were guys like me who were writing their stories, or flying their helicopters, or fixing their meals, or making their uniforms, or giving them their orders. So it was…you know, it’s a different kind of experience, so it’s not totally combat-related.

And, you know, I’m sorry I went off on a tangent there, but I tried to get exactly what… Oh, the combustibility… So when you’re in the field, silence is what’s valuable to you, for those men and women in the field, well, there weren’t any women in the field in that war, for the men, you couldn’t have music. But you could get in the helicopter, you could get back to a support base, you could get back in the rear, you know, to get cleaned up and to get, you know, ready to go back on another mission. And you heard music for guys like me in the rear all the time, because the military realized that music was essential to our generation. And they gave us many different ways to have access to that music because they thought it would keep our morale up and that’s where you get things like “Good Morning America” and Adrian Cronauer, and that whole notion of, you know, popular music being there for the troops so they can relate to it.

And we got that in so many different ways, especially in the rear. But, you know, you would have moments where if you’ve just come out, you’ve rotated, you’ve been out in the bush, out in the boonies, out doing the fighting, and some of your friends have died in over 30 days and you’re back, you’re getting showered, you’re getting fixed up, you’re getting a new assignment, you’re getting the chill, and, you know, somebody plays a song you don’t like, and you want to hear “Detroit City” by Bobby Bare and somebody is going up and playing “Hold On, I’m Comin'” by Sam and Dave all the time, you know, sometimes, now it’s like, “Hey, I can’t be angry. I’m angry about a lot of things and I’m mad at that guy that song he just played.”

So I don’t wanna make it sound like every night there was like, you know, these camps that sat there and just waited for somebody to play a song they didn’t like, but sometimes, you know, fueled by a joint or too many beers, something could happen and it wasn’t pretty. But on the other hand, there were way, way, way too many stories about guys that grew up in Northern Wisconsin listening to Polka Band music, who ended up liking The Chambers Brothers, and Motown, and James Brown because they had never been aware of it.

And the guys they served with, black GIs in many cases in Vietnam, the first black people they ever met, turned them on to music that meant something and worked the other way too. We have guys that talked about never listening to country music, who served with guys from Mississippi, or Alabama, or Georgia and would bond with them over Waylon Jennings, or Merle Haggard, or Tammy Wynette. So, it was both end, and I like to think and because of the stories that I’ve gotten and the research that I’ve done, more often we find the connecting, and the bonding, and the healing powers of music than we do the antagonizing part of it.

Marlena: Yeah. Doug, you write that war and violence intoxicate young men. Kids start, at infancy, getting ready for war and there’s a sort of a John Wayne in every boy’s head. And one of the solos in your book, I should just mention for the sake of our listeners, this book has wonderful excerpts throughout that are written by numerous contributors and they’re referred to as solos. And in one of those solos, it says, “Things haven’t changed. Watch any commercial during a football game. We’re still at it, selling prowess and sexual license.” In your opinion, what will it take for this to change? Or maybe I should ask, do you agree because you were not the one who wrote this, but it was in one of your solos? And then… Go ahead.

Doug: No, you can finish. I’m sorry.

Marlena: No, no, do you agree? I should have asked that first, and then what will it take for this to change if you do agree?

Doug: But, you know, I do agree in many ways. And both Karl Marlantes, who is an extraordinary writer, you know, a decorated Vietnam veteran who’s written some wonderful books, including “Matterhorn” and, “What It Takes to Go to War,” and Alfredo Vega, who was a young man, went into the army at 17. He lied about his age and they didn’t catch it because he should have been 18. And this is what they both say, from their experience, and that’s what they believe. And parts of me agree with it, especially during the Vietnam era because we were all the sons of World War II fathers. We sort of had this sort of…it was a different world then, I think more macho-oriented. And John Wayne was this guy that sort of became the personification of this, of the, you know, “You gotta go take them on. This fight’s ours, you know, we gotta go beat them up.”

And, you know, they stopped fascism and we had to stop communism. So it was sort of in the air and in the water, and it got promoted. And that’s how it got promoted. And if you look at the age of soldiers who served in Vietnam, especially guys, you know, in the infantry working-class kids predominantly 18, 19, 20, 21. I was an aberration for being, you know, 23 years old in Vietnam because I’d gone to college. And so I was older and I had a little different experience. Now, because it’s the reserves and the guard in many cases as well as the volunteer services that are fighting this war, it is somewhat different, but I still think they get sold the same bill of goods.

There was a book a few years ago called “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” And it’s about just this whole notion of how we get sold on, you know, fast cars, and sexy girls, and beer, and testosterone. And, boy, I mean, you know, I think it can probably plug into anybody at that age, but young men I think are just…you know, they get sucked into this. And so even though we have older soldiers fighting now, I think the younger ones are still succumbing to that kind of fantasy, if you will. And, you know, as Karl Marlantes says, you know, he saw war and combat as finishing school for a lot of what we were preparing this generation of young men to do, to be macho, to be heroic, to be stoic, and to fight.

Marlena: Yeah. You quote your father-in-law, excuse me, Ted Shannon as saying, “The opposite of militarism is not pacifism, but feminism.” Could you comment on that?

Doug: You know, and here’s a guy…what an amazing experience. This is a fellow who was, you know, I think one of the more interesting and, how shall I say? His experience in World War II was pretty phenomenal because he was raised Lebanese. So when the army found out he could speak Arabic, they took him out of MP school and sent him to Africa in 1942, 1943, where we were fighting Rommel and the Germans in Africa because he spoke Arabic. And he ends up becoming assigned to the British Eighth Army as a military governor. The Brits and the Americans had a joint military government force and half the people could go with the American forces, half went with the British. So he ends up as a U.S. soldier, a captain in the British Army, going in and trying to resuscitate and bring back towns in Sicily and Italy that the Germans have left as we begin to move into Europe.

And, you know, here’s a young kid, young captain, you know, from Connecticut, and what he’s got to do is he’s got not only does he have to speak Italian, so he’s learning Italian on the fly. He has to, you know, inoculate the population, he has to find if the granary hasn’t been wired and they can get the food. He has to find who we can trust. He has to get the mayor. He has to… I mean, he’s got to do everything and then move on to the next town. So he had this really fantastic experience, and then had an illustrious career because this is the generation that came back and rebuild America. They had all of us children, the baby boomers, and then they went on and built the nation and all our great institutions, you know, and colleges, and universities, like the University of Wisconsin where Ted was.

And we would have… So here’s a guy that, you know, has had this incredible experience, and yet he sits with me and we talk. And he was curious to know what my experience was like and what my veteran peers were going through. And he was very supportive of what we were doing in Madison. He was very supportive of my writing projects and the work that I was doing. And yet, he… I’ll never forget the day he told me this, he said, “You know, I don’t think that pacifism, the peace movement, and peace advocates…” I mean, he supported that but that that was the answer to…

And he said feminism because his notion was, and I think maybe it was growing up, he was born in 1918 in a different year and a different time that he felt that the feminism that he knew about the approach to problem-solving, to dialogue, to communication, to learning, to healing, that he saw, at least in that way, practiced by the women in his life, and in his experience, was the antidote better than pacifism. And I can’t articulate it as well as Ted and he’s no longer with us, but, boy, that has stuck with me and I think in many cases, he’s right. Even though now we’re trying to get women in combat and train them to do things that we had men doing, I do think women bring just a different perspective and understanding to things like this that men don’t possess.

Marlena: I really appreciate you giving us the background and the story of Ted Shannon. It adds a real punch to the quote, and I’m just going to quote it again because it, for me, makes that quote all the more meaningful, knowing a little bit about his history and his story. “The opposite of militarism is not pacifism, but feminism.” It seems to me, just to go to the more recent wars, that our relationship to music may be changing. We’re all in our own little worlds with our own little iPods, and I’m wondering, in your view, does this mean that it’s no longer the collective experience that it was back in the ’60s and ’70s?

Doug: I’m afraid you’re right. You know, when we teach our class at the university and it’s this interesting conglomeration of, you know, 18 to 22-year-olds, many of whom Vietnam for them is the Peloponnesian War, but they know the music because every song ever sung or strummed is available to people now. You can have it. We can all have it available. But that music is so, you know, elastic and omnipresent that they come in knowing Creedence, and Hendrix, and The Doors, and James Brown, and Motown, and country. So, that gives them a nice basis for us then to connect that to a veteran story and then the Vietnam experience. Our two GIs in that class are post-911 vets, the Iraq, you know, one guy’s a black kid from Brooklyn, the other’s a white guy from Minnesota, both Marines and they…so, of course, the students want to ask them, you know, “Is your experience different from Doug’s or the other Vietnam vets that we bring into the class?”

And they point directly to the music. No shared soundtrack. It’s what you’ve said. Put on the headset, have your own mp3 player or whatever you got, your own iPod, your own soundtrack, and there you go. The curious thing was when they said when they ever had communal music sharing, and they didn’t have it a lot but when they did, they’d listen to Credence or Motown, you know, so our music became the music that was communal for them. And yeah, I still think music can do wonders for us because of what we discussed before and how powerful it is, and you talked about how it affects our brains, etc., but I don’t think that for this generation and future generations there’s going to be that kind of common connective, you know, shared music soundtrack that we had during that era. Because, again, like I said, radio was our internet, we all listened to the same songs, all the stations played the same songs. If you didn’t want to listen to the “Little Green Apples,” if you just stayed on, they’re going to play “Satisfaction,” or, you know, “Ring of Fire.”

Marlena: Yeah. So we’re almost out of time and I’d like to end…

Doug: No way.

Marlena: I’d like to end my questions on a personal note. How has your music project with the veterans over the years changed you personally, Doug?

Doug: Oh, boy, in profound ways. I think it’s made me realize how essential music is to my life. It’s made me realize how one year of your life can change it forever. I mean, if I hadn’t gone to Vietnam, you know, I was in law school. I got drafted at law school. I was on a different track and I wouldn’t have found the woman that I married. I wouldn’t have the children and grandchildren I have. And then, of course, I wouldn’t have been witness and present for the conversations and the moments when I think people, because of the music and because of what we were sharing in those moments, helped to bring them back home. I mean, I was just honored to be there, but I do think that we helped facilitate some folks finally, after 40 or 50 years, getting back home.

Marlena: Yeah, coming home. Doug, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to know, to hear from you, what would it be?

Doug: Well, I think listen to podcasts like this. You know, pay attention to what we need to do for those around us, you know. In the dedication to “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” I dedicate the book to the voices we still need to hear and the hearts we still need to heal. There are too many of those. I mean, and they’re beyond just veteran hearts and voices. So, I think let’s all be better listeners, let’s try harder, I think, to appreciate and understand where somebody else is coming from, especially somebody who, in our name, has had to go and fight and be traumatized by war.

Marlena: This has been a very meaningful conversation and, unfortunately, we’re out of time. Doug, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Doug: Thank you for having me, and I appreciate the good work you’re doing.

Marlena: I’ve been speaking with Doug Bradley, whose latest book is “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” You’ll find details on the show notes about how to purchase his books, as well as my new book, “Nothing Bad Between Us.” And thank you, our listeners, for joining us today. If you know anyone who’d be interested in this podcast, please do share it with them. And if you liked it, take a moment to rate and review us on iTunes or your favorite podcasting network. Instructions on the show notes make rating and reviewing easy.

And remember, we are together on this journey.