Woodstock, Motown, rock and roll, Casey Kasem—and the songs that connected us to home.
This article is part of Brothers In Arms — stories of military service, Vietnam, brotherhood, sacrifice, survival, and the experiences veterans carry with them long after the war is over.
In August 1969, hundreds of thousands of young Americans descended on a farm in upstate New York for three days of peace, love, mud, marijuana, and music.
I was another young American.
I was in Vietnam.
While kids about my age were slopping around in the mud at Woodstock listening to Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and others who would become legends, I was serving with the United States Marines.
I remember hearing about Woodstock on AFVN, Armed Forces (radio network) Vietnam, while serving near Da Nang, and thinking:
Those people are all crazy.
Of course, from their perspective, they probably could have looked at what I was doing and reached exactly the same conclusion.
We were members of the same generation living two completely different versions of 1969.
But there was one thing connecting us across all those thousands of miles.
The music.
Vietnam had a soundtrack.
And contrary to the way Hollywood sometimes remembers it, we weren’t all sitting around listening to Fortunate Son while helicopters flew dramatically overhead.
We listened to what young Americans everywhere were listening to.
Rock.
Pop.
Soul.
Motown.
And eventually a new radio countdown hosted by a guy named Casey Kasem.
Vietnam Had a Soundtrack
Music mattered in Vietnam.
It wasn’t simply something playing in the background.
A song could take you somewhere else.
Maybe back to your hometown.
Maybe to a girlfriend.
Maybe to the car you left behind.
Maybe to a Saturday night when your biggest problem was figuring out where everybody was going to hang out.
For three minutes, the right song could make Vietnam disappear.
That’s difficult to explain to someone who has spent a lifetime carrying virtually every song ever recorded around in his pocket.
We didn’t have Spotify.
We didn’t have YouTube.
We didn’t have smartphones.
You couldn’t tell some little electronic box:
“Play me my favorite songs from home.”
You listened to whatever you could get.
And when a song you loved came through the radio, you listened.
At night, we kept the volume low. You still had to hear the incoming rockets so you could scramble to the bunker before they hit.
I eventually became so tuned to those sounds that I could sleep through the thunder of our own artillery but wake to the faint sound of an enemy rocket being launched. I wrote about that strange survival instinct in Sleeping With One Ear Open.
Because for those few minutes, America didn’t seem quite so far away.
We Didn’t All Listen to the Same Thing
Music also reflected some of the divisions among us.
Vietnam-era America was dealing with enormous racial tension, and putting a bunch of young men from every corner of that America into the military didn’t magically make those differences disappear.
They came with us.
So did our music.
Among the Marines I knew, musical tastes sometimes followed some of the same racial lines we had brought with us from America.
A lot of the Black Marines I knew loved Motown and soul.
A lot of us white guys did too.
The Temptations.
The Four Tops.
The Supremes.
Martha and the Vandellas.
James Brown.
Stevie Wonder.
Motown and soul could dominate their musical territory, and there could be some pretty strong opinions about who was allowed to mess with somebody else’s music.
We white boys had our favorites too.
Rock and roll.
Pop.
The bands and singers climbing the American charts.
But those boundaries weren’t absolute.
Music occasionally created a little common ground in places where common ground could be hard to find.
Songs Sounded Different Over There
Something else happened to music in Vietnam.
The words could change without the lyrics changing at all.
A song written about a relationship might suddenly remind you of somebody waiting at home.
A song about leaving could sound very different to a guy counting the days until his rotation date.
A song about getting away from someplace could acquire an entirely new meaning when the someplace you wanted to get away from was Vietnam.
The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place didn’t need to be written about Vietnam to make sense there.
The title alone pretty much covered the situation.
That was the strange thing about music.
The songwriter provided the words.
Vietnam sometimes provided a new meaning.
Meanwhile, Back at Woodstock
Woodstock has become one of the defining images of my generation.
Peace signs.
Long hair.
Mud.
Drugs.
Free love.
Jimi Hendrix playing the Star-Spangled Banner.
Today we look at photographs and documentaries and recognize it as a major moment in American cultural history.
At the time?
I thought they were nuts.
While Woodstock was happening in August 1969, I was in Vietnam.
That’s a contrast I’ve never forgotten.
There were young Americans standing barefoot in the mud listening to music and talking about peace.
There were other young Americans wearing combat boots halfway around the world.
Many of us were almost exactly the same age.
We had grown up watching the same television shows.
Listening to many of the same records.
Seeing the same movies.
Going to the same kinds of schools.
Then history sent us in radically different directions.
Some went to Woodstock.
Some went to Vietnam.
And the music somehow followed both groups.
Just three years earlier, my own road through the music of the 1960s had looked very different. I was a teenager with a press pass watching the Beatles perform at Busch Stadium—a night I remember in Beatlemania in the Rain.
Why the Marines Instead of San Francisco?
Looking back, I’ve sometimes wondered why I became a Marine while other young Americans my age headed for San Francisco, Woodstock, anti-war demonstrations—or even Canada.
One wrong turn after high school and I could have been one of those kids frolicking in the mud.
I liked rock and roll. I even liked some of the protest songs.
But my road went somewhere else.
But strangely enough, many of us were still listening to the same records.
We Weren’t Listening to a “Vietnam War Soundtrack”
My high school grades weren’t going to produce a college deferment, I had no desire to be drafted into the Army, and if I was going to serve, I wanted to be a Marine, just like my personal hero, a former Marine, my uncle, Jack Rice.
So while one part of my generation embraced the counterculture, I went through Marine Corps boot camp and eventually to Vietnam.
I never hated the young men who chose differently. Vietnam divided our generation in ways that are still argued about today.
Put a helicopter over a jungle and start playing the opening notes of the right song and everybody immediately knows:
Vietnam.
Some of those songs absolutely were popular with servicemen.
But there’s something slightly artificial about looking backward and deciding that a handful of records were the music of Vietnam.
We didn’t know we were supposed to be listening to the soundtrack of the Vietnam War.
We were just listening to music.
Whatever was popular.
Whatever came over the radio.
Whatever somebody had managed to get his hands on.
Whatever reminded us of home.
Nobody was curating our experience for a movie that would be made twenty years later.
Casey Kasem Brought the Top 40 to Vietnam
Toward the end of my time in Vietnam, something new arrived on American radio.
American Top 40.
Casey Kasem launched the program on July 4, 1970, counting down America’s most popular records from Number 40 all the way to Number One.
Through the Armed Forces radio system, American Top 40 made its way overseas to American servicemen, including those of us in Vietnam.
Programs recorded back in the United States could be distributed through military broadcasting, including the American Forces Vietnam Network—AFVN.
Think about what that meant.
A young Marine sitting in Vietnam could hear the same countdown telling him what young Americans back home were listening to.
Number 37.
Number 26.
Number 18.
Number 10.
Then the songs everybody was waiting for.
The Top Five.
And finally:
the Number One song in America.
There was something comforting about that.
Casey would introduce another record and, for a few minutes, you were connected to home.
You knew what people were hearing in California.
Missouri.
New York.
Chicago.
Everywhere.
The charts provided a musical connection to an America that sometimes seemed impossibly far away.
The Radio Didn’t Care About Politics
That’s another thing I remember about the music.
America was tearing itself apart over Vietnam.
There were demonstrations.
Protests.
Arguments.
Draft-card burnings.
College campuses in turmoil.
Politicians fighting over what to do next.
Some musicians became outspoken opponents of the war.
Bob Dylan.
Joan Baez.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and others became associated with the protest movement and the broader counterculture.
Some songs questioned the war.
I remember hearing Country Joe and the Fish singing about Vietnam at Woodstock, including the line about being the first one on your block “to have your boy come home in a box.”
That line hit me differently.
I remember thinking:
Wow, Joe. Some of my brothers really did go home in boxes.
To the crowd at Woodstock, it may have been biting anti-war satire. From where I was sitting in Vietnam, there wasn’t much funny about it.
Those boxes contained somebody’s son.
Somebody’s brother.
Somebody’s husband.
And somewhere back home, a chaplain and military escort might soon be walking toward a family’s front door.
I remember wondering whether the line would seem quite so clever if that door happened to be on Country Joe’s block.
Some questioned authority.
Some questioned just about everything our parents’ generation had taught us.
But when music reached us in Vietnam, we didn’t necessarily stop and perform a political analysis before deciding whether we liked the song.
Sometimes a good song was just a good song.
You could disagree with the politics and still like the music.
You could dislike the hippies and still listen to the bands they loved.
I certainly did.
That’s one of the contradictions of the era that tends to disappear when history gets simplified.
America wanted everyone to choose a side.
Music didn’t always cooperate.
Music Could Take You Home for Three Minutes
This is the part I remember most.
Not the sociology.
Not the politics.
Not which songs historians later decided were most important.
The escape.
A song could bring back an entire life.
Long before Vietnam, my generation had already watched popular music change almost overnight when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan and helped launch a cultural revolution that followed us into the rest of the 1960s.
You could close your eyes and remember driving around back home.
A girlfriend.
Your family.
Your neighborhood.
A party.
A particular summer.
A place where nobody was shooting rockets at you.
For the length of a record, you could be somewhere else.
Then the song ended.
And you were back in Vietnam.
Maybe that’s why so many Vietnam veterans still react so strongly to the music of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Those songs aren’t simply old records.
They’re time machines.
The Songs Still Take Me Back
More than half a century has passed.
I don’t need to see a photograph of Vietnam to remember it.
Sometimes all it takes is a song.
A few notes.
A familiar voice.
And suddenly something comes back.
Not necessarily combat.
Often it’s something much smaller.
A particular place.
A particular Marine.
A radio playing somewhere nearby.
Somebody laughing.
An argument.
A stupid joke.
A moment when none of us were thinking about history.
That’s the strange thing about living through something that later becomes a chapter in history books.
At the time, you don’t know you’re living history.
You’re simply living Tuesday.
We were young men listening to the same music millions of young Americans were hearing back home.
Woodstock had its soundtrack.
The anti-war movement had its soundtrack.
The civil-rights era had its soundtrack.
Hollywood eventually gave the Vietnam War a soundtrack of its own.
But those of us who were actually there had one too.
It wasn’t one song.
It wasn’t one band.
It wasn’t even one kind of music.
It was rock.
Pop.
Soul.
Motown.
Top 40.
Whatever somebody could tune in.
Whatever made us laugh.
Whatever made us remember.
Whatever made us homesick.
And whatever, for three minutes or so, could transport us thousands of miles away.
It was the music that reminded us there was still an America waiting for us on the other side of the world.
Two years after Vietnam, music would mark another turning point in my life when, freshly discharged from the Marines, I drove my Firebird to New York and saw John Lennon perform at Madison Square Garden—a story I tell in John Lennon, New York City, and the Firebird That Never Came Home.
Your Turn
What song can still take you back more than fifty years in just a few notes?
If you served in Vietnam—or anywhere overseas during that era—what music do you remember hearing? Was there a particular song, band, singer, or radio program that could make home seem a little closer for three minutes?
If you were back in America, what was playing on your radio while Vietnam, Woodstock, the protests, Motown, and rock and roll were becoming part of history?
Maybe it was a song connected to a girlfriend, a car, a hometown, a particular summer—or simply a moment in your life you thought you had forgotten.
Tell us the song—and the memory that comes rushing back when you hear it.
🇺🇸 Continue Exploring The American Time Capsule
The songs we carried with us were part of a larger America—the television, cars, radio, and shared culture that could make home feel close even when it was thousands of miles away.
📺 When TV Had Three Channels and Everybody Watched the Same Thing
Before streaming divided audiences into thousands of choices, millions of Americans often watched the same programs at the same time—and shared many of the same cultural memories.
🎵 The Commercials We Never Forgot
Some jingles became almost as memorable as the hit records, lodging themselves in our heads for decades and instantly transporting us back to another era.
📖 The Sears Catalog Was Amazon Before Amazon
Before online shopping and instant delivery, the Sears catalog brought an enormous world of products into American homes—and became part of the everyday America an entire generation remembers.
🎬 Remember When the Drive-In Was Date Night?
Cars, girlfriends, popcorn, giant outdoor screens, and summer nights—the ordinary memories of home that could mean something very different when you were halfway around the world.
← Return to 🇺🇸 The American Time Capsule
Bunker Rule
Music can bring back powerful memories, especially from wartime. Share what you heard, where you were, and what those songs meant to you. Different veterans remember the era differently—respect the memory even when it isn’t the same as yours.
Bunker Notice
This article combines my personal memories of serving in Vietnam with historical context about the music and radio of the era. More than fifty years have passed, so individual memories may differ—but sometimes a few notes of an old song remain clearer than yesterday.