The Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project

Volume 30
Fall-Winter
2004

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Music served as a strategy for survival, as a means of unit bonding and definition, as entertainment. The songs also provided a means for the expression of protest, fear, and frustration, of grief and of longing for home...

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
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nyfs@nyfolklore.org

The Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project

The songs of Americans who served in the Vietnam War follow in the tradition of the music composed by soldiers in the world wars and Korea, focusing on loneliness, camaraderie, the opposite sex, and humor. The music is usually in folk or country style but sometimes soft rock. In an ongoing effort, musicians and scholars have been collecting old recordings of these songs and encouraging veterans to contribute their tapes and recollections.

Since 1983, the Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project, a loose association of singers, songwriters, and scholars of military occupational folksong of which I am director, has been engaged in an undertaking to collect, preserve, and make better known the folksongs of Americans in war. We have been collecting the tapes and songbooks that circulated informally in Southeast Asia and attempting to locate the singers and songwriters.

In 1987 I published my study of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Last Firebase. For the two preceding years I had spent a great deal of time interviewing veterans from all the armed services, and in the course of conducting these interviews I became fascinated by the occupational folklore of the military. In 1986 a former student, Michael Licht, now a freelance folklorist in Washington, D.C., and at that time a contract worker at the American Folklife Center, told me about two collections of military occupational folksongs of the Vietnam War, made by General Edward Lansdale, in the archives of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. I purchased copies of the tapes from the library and began tracking down the singers. The results of my research was an article, “General Edward G. Lansdale and the Songs of Americans in the Vietnam War,” published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1989.

Because of Hollywood’s use of the popular music of the era in the soundtracks of films about the war, for most of us the Vietnam War has a rock-and-roll soundtrack. The songs of the sixties were part of life in the combat zone; troops listened to music in the bush and in the bunkers. But there were other songs in Vietnam, too—the songs composed by the American men and women, civilian and military, who served there, for themselves.

Some of these songs were part of the traditional occupational folklore of the military. The pilots who flew off the carriers and out of Thailand sang songs that were known by aviators in the two world wars and the Korean War; the infantrymen knew songs that had been sung by their grandfathers in the trenches in France. Other songs grew directly out of the Vietnam experience.

Music served as a strategy for survival, as a means of unit bonding and definition, as entertainment. The songs also provided a means for the expression of protest, fear, and frustration, of grief and of longing for home. All of the traditional themes of military folksong can be found in this music: praise of the great leader, celebration of heroic deeds, laments for the death of comrades, disparagement of other units, and complaints about incompetent officers and vainglorious rear-echelon troops. Like all soldiers from time immemorial, the troops in Vietnam sang of epic drinking bouts and encounters with exotic young women.

Civilians serving with agencies such as AID, JUSPAO, CORDS, and the State Department had their own songs. The Cosmos Tabernacle Choir comprised CIA agents who used to meet in the Cosmos Bar near the American Embassy. Women serving with the Red Cross and Special Services sometimes sang songs of their own composition to the troops.

In some cases both the words and the music were original, but usually new lyrics were set to existing folk, country, or popular tunes. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” alone spawned dozens of parodies. The influence of the folksong revival was strong, especially in the early, adviser period of the war. Many of the soldiers, particularly the young officers who had been exposed to the revival in college, were already experienced musicians when they arrived in Vietnam. Often they sang together in Kingston Trio–style trios or quartets: the High Priced Help, the Merrymen, the Blue Stars, the Intruders, the Four Blades. Country music groups were also formed in Vietnam, and many songs are based on country favorites. Later in the war, many of the young soldiers had played in rock bands before being drafted, and this, too, is reflected in the music. Even the songs of the antiwar movement at home were sung in Vietnam.

The same technology that made it possible for the troops to listen to rock music from the Delta to the DMZ provided ideal conditions for the transmission of folklore. The widespread availability of inexpensive portable tape recorders meant that concerts, music nights at the mess, or informal bar performances could be recorded, copied, and passed along to friends. Some especially popular groups made tapes for their fans, and several singers had records cut. Many units published mimeographed songbooks.

Since 1986 I have been tracking down and copying these tapes, working with a talented recording engineer and sound editor, Gary Lee, who is the owner of Wild Cat Studios and Border City Records. Dozens of scholars, singers, collectors, and veterans have worked with us.

On July 13, 1989, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., presented In Country, a symposium and concert of songs of the Vietnam War, which was the subject of special broadcasts by National Public Radio and Voice of America. On Veterans Day, 1992, PBS broadcast an Austin City Limits special featuring singers associated with the project. Other concerts have been presented in various parts of the country, including one at the Smithsonian in summer 1994 and one for the National Archives–Central Plains Region in spring 2000.

In 1991 the project produced a recording of these songs, In Country, for Flying Fish Records, which was nominated for both the Grammy and the Indy awards. Articles about the project have appeared in the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and on April 21, 2000, it was featured on Morning Edition on National Public Radio. The publicity generated by these activities has inspired many veterans who have tapes of the music they made or heard in Southeast Asia to offer them to the project for copying.

Since 1991 I have been owner of vwar-l, a Listserv discussion group instituted to facilitate communication among scholars, students, and veterans of the Vietnam War. In 1998, I constructed a research-based web site on folklore of Americans in war in cooperation with the graduate program in communications at George Mason University. Additional material flowed in, and the project archives now contains more than five hundred hours of recorded songs.

One of the basic tenets of contemporary folklore scholarship is that the “folk” who are the subjects of the scholar’s research should both actively contribute to and benefit from that research. Thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of the singers and songwriters who work with the project and who have often traveled at their own expense to participate in concerts for veterans and community groups, these songs now enjoy a much wider audience. As a participant in the New York Council on the Humanities Speakers for twelve years, I was often able to persuade the sponsors of my lectures to include a concert of songs in the program. Since 1999 I have produced an annual concert for the Society of Old Bold Aviators, a Washington-based organization dedicated to the preserving and making better known the traditional songs of military aviators.

The technological innovations of the past few years have made feasible the production of documentary recordings on a small scale. Border City Records, a Buffalo-based company, has already produced six superb recordings of material from the project archives, as well as two recordings based on the concerts presented by the Society of Old Bold Aviators, and several more are in the works.

When the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress was initiated in 2000, the Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project was invited to become an official partner. The following year I was selected by the American Folklore Society to be one of the folklorists giving oral history training workshops to volunteers. So far I have done three and have enjoyed them immensely. The quality and enthusiasm of the volunteers, especially at the Chemung County Historical Society in Elmira, have been truly impressive.

As both a historian and a folklorist, I bring a slightly different perspective to my workshops. I encourage the volunteers to look at my web site before the workshop and to read Bruce Jackson’s superb article on personal narrative. I spend a lot of time emphasizing the importance of documenting folk speech, songs, customs, and stories about everyday life in basic training and base camps, as well as the “big” stories like the invasion of Normandy. I also explain that oral history is not just about the narrator’s experiences, but may include traditional tales of folk heroes and characters, jokes, or ghost stories.

The web site that the Veterans History Project has put together is extremely useful as a resource, especially the bibliography. I suggest that the volunteers look at some studies of the informal culture of the military such as Les Cleveland’s “Dark Laughter” or Juliet Gardiner’s “Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over Here.”

The folklorists working with the Veterans History Project convened at the Rochester meeting of the American Folklore Society in 2003. I think it would be extremely helpful if we could meet more often and share experiences and resources. I have suggested a presentation by the New York State trainers at the Round Table and have put Saul Broudy’s excellent notes on presenting these workshops on my web site, http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/fishlm/folksongs/americansongs.htm.

"The Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project" by Lydia Fish appeared in Voices Vol. 30, Fall-Winter 2004. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.

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