In Honor Of Veteran's Day Weekend. The Vietnam War and it's legacy, in song.→[More:]

Johnny Wright Hall - Hello Vietnam
Monitors - Greetings (This is Uncle Sam)

The draft was a fact of life for young Americans of certain demographics in the 1960's, especially the demographics described by the audiences for country and soul music. Neither of these songs is explicitly anti-war (the Hall song actually uses some Cold War rhetoric) but neither sounds thrilled about what's to come. To the contrary, there's a mournfulness and dread in both of them.

Elegants - A Letter From Vietnam (Dear Donna)
Johnny Cash - Singing In Vietnam Talkin' Blues

Both these songs address, in different terms, the experience of the war itself. Italian-American doo-woppers the Elegants load their song down with sentimentality and hokey sound effects, whereas Cash in describing his trip in-country to entertain the troops, communicates pure dread, but they both in their way attempt to do the same thing: bring the war home.

Bob Seger System - Two Plus Two Equals Question Mark
Monks - Monk Time
Mad River - Orange Fire
Jimmy Cliff - Vietnam (live)
Champion Jack Dupree - Vietnam Blues
Freda Payne - Bring The Boys Home

As the war dragged on for years, the apprehension and anger of the American people grew as they worried about the fate of their sons, daughters, husbands and friends and whether it was all worth the endless carnage.

There were several folkie songs protesting the war specifically, but it was a while before the rock and R&B groups got in on the act, which was important because they reached a larger audience and that aforementioned audience was far more likely to wind up in Vietnam. The Seger, Monks*, and Mad River tracks all are contenders for the first rock and roll songs to address the coflict in Southeast Asia specifically (as opposed to merely being generically anti-war), and all three are eloquent and musically stunning. The Cliff, Payne, and Dupree songs are all explicit protest anthems as well, by turns angry and mournful.

Auditions - Returning Home From Vietnam
Curtis Mayfield - Back To The World
Charlie Daniels Band - Still In Saigon

As in all wars, the men who fought them eventually returned home, undeniably changed. In Vietnam, as opposed to other wars, they returned home alone, undebriefed, with the conflict they left behind unresolved, to a country that had changed irrevocably. The songs above address this from the POV of the veterans themselves.

Whispers - P.O.W. - M.I.A.
John Prine - Sam Stone
Swamp Dogg - Sam Stone
Walter Brennan - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town
Bruce Springsteen - Born In The USA

The legacy of the war, of course continued long after the fighting had ended. Soul group the Whispers took on the issue of those Missing In Action, a difficult topic, because while the sacrifices and suffering of these men and their families can obviously not be denied, the exploitation of the issue by subsequent demogogues is also undeniable as well. Jonh Prine's song (also eloquently covered in a soul version by R&B maverick Swamp Dogg) tells the heartbreaking story of a drug-addicted veteran and his family. 'Ruby,' sung here by western movie stalwart Walter Brennan becme something of a cliche in the postwar years, but the lines about the 'insane Asian war' and 'patriotic chore' illustrate how deeply the legacy of the war had sunk into the American conciousness.

Springsteen's song may be the most probleematic one here, since it was grossly misinterpreted by many as a jingoistic call-to-arms rather than the howl of anguish and frustration that it actually is. The drummer in Bruce's first band, Bart Haynes (far left) was drafted and died in Vietnam, so Bruce felt this personally, like many Americans.

With our country currently embroiled in another pointless war, with another nation being decimated, and another batch of young men returning home dead or damaged, we'd do well to listen to what's contained herein methinks.

*the Monks were a group of GI's stationed in Berlin during the Cold War and one of the great proto-punk bands