Monday, Mar. 18 2024
2:00 pm-3:30 pm
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” places popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. The presentation explores how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. It also demonstrates that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American; men and women; officers and “grunts.”
Led by
Doug Bradley
Doug Bradley is an author, educator, and Vietnam veteran who lives part-time in Phoenix. He co-authored We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, named the Best Music Book of 2015 by Rolling Stone. According to David Martin, Emmy-award winning correspondent for CBS News, Doug’s latest book, Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, “uses music to bring us together after a war that so bitterly divided us.”
After college graduation, Doug was drafted into the U. S. Army in March 1970. He served at the Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City and as a combat correspondent for U. S. Army headquarters at Long Binh, South Vietnam, from November 1970-November 1971. He relocated to Madison, WI in 1974 where he helped establish Vets House, a storefront, community-based service center for Vietnam vets.
Doug has blogged for PBS’s Next Avenue and The Huffington Post, taught at UW-Madison, Baldwin-Wallace University, Edgewood College, and Arizona State University, and is the author of three books grounded in the Vietnam experience, including DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, recently released as an audiobook.