It is difficult to ascertain the exact relationship of these songs to the formal and informal broadcast traditions of the war. Bill Ellis sent me a tape of his EP record, First Cav: Impressions of a Skytrooper, being played on "Skytrooper News," AFVN, Saigon in 1969. Joe Tuso obtained a tape of Dick Jonas, one of the best-known Air Force singer-songwriters, from Hank Fordham, who claims to have recorded it from AFTN Radio. Alexis Muellner recorded an interview with Pete Zastrow, who was an infantry captain and brigade information officer for the Second Brigade of the First Air Cavalry Division from 1968 to 1968.

...and I know that at one point in the First Air Cav a troop who had been a painter and done all types of things and in any case, ended up recording a bunch of songs for the First Cav, in fact before he'd come to Vietnam he was singing "I won't go to Vietnam" songs, when he got there he was singing songs about how he wanted to get home and while they were in some ways anti-war songs, they weren't so violently anti-war that the First Air Cav Division wasn't willing to support him, so they made recordings, gave recordings of his songs to everyone and part of our job at Lai Khe was to get Radio Lai Khe to play these. We would stomp over to the Radio Lai Khe office and stomp around outside for a while and say, "Here we are, here are some great songs that you won't get anywhere else." And as I recall they wouldn't play them because they were from the First Air Cavalry Division and there was some rivalry between units. (Muellner, Alexis. Letter to the author. 23 February 1988.)

Doc Ball, who served with AFTN in NKP, Udorn and Korat between 1966 and 1970 writes:

You noted that at some bases and some times, the work of the local songwriters was played on our AFRTS/AFTN/AFVN stations. I'm sure that was true, and I know I did it several times. But we were VERY attuned to anything which might be offensive to the host country(ies), or which violated our "good practices" dictums. I suspect that this limited a great deal of the "original music" of our songwriters of the day, but even though we didn't play a lot of it, we did our best to help out by making copies of the tapes for the guys who wanted them. (E-mail to the author, 15 June 2003)

Tape and Songbook Networks

The widespread availability of portable tape recorders meant that concerts, music nights as the mess, or informal bar performances could be recorded, copied, and passed on to friends. As Dave Post put it, "We didn't have access to a lot of things (like soap, for example) but, ironically, to state-of-the-art (for then) recording equipment." (E-mail to author, 29 January 2003) Bob Salzman recalls that fifty copies were originally made of "Songs of the UTT." Toby Hughes recorded the three songs he wrote in country for some friends, but asked that they not make copies of the tape, since he planned to include the songs in a book someday. Toby says, "Copies of the tape were all over SEA in thirty days. One actually beat me back to the States." Some groups, such as the Merrymen, put special tapes together for their fans. Several edited and narrated collections were compiled and circulated widely. Ann Kelsey, Special Services librarian, remembers, "The Special Services library at Dong Ba Thin had a taping facility and a huge 'catalog.' You brought blank reel to reel tapes and chose from the 'catalog.' Tapes were usually three hours long, ninety minutes each side." (Letter from Ann Kelsey to the author, n.d.) A copy of the edited collection produced by Major John Roberts was in the library at Udorn, where it was copied, in whole or in part, by an amazing number of pilots – I have complete copies from three sources and at least a dozen partial copies.

The narrators of these tapes make it clear that they are intended to be historical records. John Roberts prefaces his collection with the comment

As might be expected, the war in Southeast Asia has generated quite a number of songs, written and sung by the participants, and, as much as anything else, they tell it like it is. This is history, and it deserves to be preserved. So on this tape you will hear some fifty songs that I've been able to collect from the wings in Vietnam and Thailand. Some of them are happy; some are sad. Some are fresh and enthusiastic; some may seem cynical or disdainful of the way things are. Fighter pilots have never been reluctant to complain a little. Just let's not forget that we often pretend to deride those things we hold most dear. You're going to hear genuine courage, and honest understandable doubts about the good sense of doing things which are then done with the fullest enthusiasm. But let's also not forget that not nationalism, not even patriotism, but only comradeship, the loyalty to the group, is the essence of fighting morale. And that morale is certainly embodied in the songs you are now going to hear.

According to the narrator of the widely circulated "Hundred Mission Tape," an edited tape of the singing at Irv Le Vine's hundred mission party at Korat on 14 February 1968, a copy was sent to General Ryan, the Commander of Pacific Air Forces. One of the most moving of the edited tapes, which is often incorporated into larger collections, was compiled by Al Tichenor, who flew with an RF-4C squadron at Udorn RTAFB, from songs he had recorded with Dave Post, Dave Buermeyer and Fred Wozniak two nights before Wozniak was shot down on 17 January 1967.

In 1965 General Edward Lansdale began taping the singing at parties at his Saigon villa. The entire cast of the early years of the war appears on these tapes: visiting American dignitaries and newsmen, Philippine and Korean visitors, American soldiers serving as advisors to the Vietnamese military, and American civilians working for the CIA, USIS, CORDS, the Foreign Service or AID. The great Vietnamese singer Pham Duy was a regular performer as well as Vietnamese students, military men and bureaucrats. In 1967 Lansdale put together a narrated tape of 51 of these songs as a "report from the Senior Liaison Officer of the U.S. Mission in Vietnam to top U.S. Officials" and sent copies to Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Kissinger and General William Westmoreland, among others. He had hoped, he wrote later, "to try to impart more understanding of the political and psychological nature of the struggle to those making decisions." (Fish 9) Unfortunately, Washington was not listening to what Les Cleveland has described as "perhaps the only example known to military history of folklore being used for the transmission of military intelligence. (Cleveland)

Unit songbooks proliferated, plagiarizing from each other to such an extent that several completely unsingable texts show up in identical versions in half a dozen Air Force songbooks. These collections contain many of the old World War II and Korean War standards, with the references to equipment and places updated, or songs from other units with a few words changed. If your squadron hadn't gotten around to making its own songbook, Chip Dockery (13th TFS, 432nd TFW) explained, you just used somebody else's. However, some units, for example the Blue Stars (148th AHC Helicopter Company), compiled wonderful collections of songs written by its members, with the authorship carefully noted. These compilations were not limited to the military; Civilians serving agencies such as OCO, JUSPAO, AID, CORDS, the State Department, and the CIA had their own songbooks. One of them, Songs of Saigon, was published in office copier format in at least three editions. I have been given copies by an Army nurse, an officer of the 101st Airborne, and several members of the CIA.

Servicemen and Women as Archivists and Historians

As Les Cleveland has pointed out, very little has been written about the informal and off-duty of activities of the military, especially of troops in wartime.(Cleveland, NMAH lecture) The men and women who served in Southeast Asia served as their own archivists and historians and it is primarily due to their efforts that we owe our knowledge of the in-country culture of the Vietnam War. When Alexis Muellner of Interlock Media produced his superb series on radio in Vietnam, Radio First Termer, for NPR in 1987, he discovered that Armed Forces Radio had literally no recordings of their own broadcasts. It was from the cherished tapes of soldiers, sailors, nurses, and doughnut dollies that he was able to reconstruct the sounds of in-country radio: sixties rock, spots reminding personnel to check their jeeps for booby traps and take their malaria pills, and the antics of Chicken Man, as well as pirate broadcasts by the infamous Dave Rabbitt, of Radio 69, Saigon, fame. When Robin Williams was studying for his role in Good Morning Vietnam, he learned the traditional opening to the Dawnbuster Show ("Goooooooooooooooooood Morning Vietnam") from tapes supplied by Roger Steffens, an in-country DJ. Armed Forces Radio did not have one example! (Vietnam Special, parts one and two)

They also taped incoming rounds and rocket attacks. One tape that has been copied many times was made when someone taping a letter home left his recorder running during a B-40 rocket attack at Binh Thuy while he headed for the bunker. Ray McCleery cherishes a tape made on the flight line at Tahkli – two hours of Thuds taking off and landing. (He says it helps him to sleep.) I have many tapes of parties: a fourth of July party in Pleiku in 1969, a party with some wonderful singing from Chu Lai in 1971 which includes members of a MACV team, some Marines and a few stray Australians, a concert at a Commanders Conference in Nha Trang in 1967, a Mike Force initiation at Bien Hoa in the course of which the participants shoot holes in the ceiling, a Hundred Mission party from Korat, and the party the night before the F-105s left Korat. Bill Scaff issued a fascinating commercial recording, Bong Son Blues, of some of the bits and pieces he recorded in Vietnam: helicopters taking off and landing, an electric guitar solo, several minutes of chat with a Malaysian mercenary, a children's choir from a local Protestant church, songs by ARVN soldiers, and a marvelous traditional narrative by an Afro-American soldier. Bob Salzman recorded a unknown singer named Barry Sadler in a safe house in Saigon in 1964: the first extant version, as far as I know, of "Ballad of the Green Berets."

Many pilots recorded the radio transmissions of their own missions, with the aid of miniature tape recorders. Some of these recordings "Detroit Lead," "Strobe Eleven: The Death of 'General Worley" and "Pintail Shootdown," became classics and circulated throughout the war. In 1968, four Phantom drivers at Cam Ranh Bay revved up their planes and recorded a wonderfully funny fake mission, "Sharkbait 21," while sitting on the runway.

These tapes were cherished and now, thirty years later, often form the basis of personal websites. Sometimes an amateur historian will collect tapes and photographs from a unit and put up a more elaborate website. Cruising the Veterans' Web Ring will turn up a fascinating assortment of these. The Blue Stars (the 48th Assault Helicopter Company) includes copies of its unit history and songbook on its website. Recordings of in-country songs are available from several small record companies and squadron songbooks circulate on CDs and zip disks. Rainer Otter, the primary collector of NATO songbooks, works through a website and sends and receives his manuscripts electronically.

The relationship between technology and folklore is an old one. As soon as print became widespread and cheap, ballads were disseminated as broadsides; one of the first uses of the Net was for the transmission of jokes and legends. The ingenuity of the youngsters who turned the world's most sophisticated communications technology into a vehicle for the transmission of their own folk and popular culture is therefore hardly surprising, but I think it serves as a particularly interesting case study in the many creative ways the folk use whatever media and technologies that are available to them. The technology that these soldiers coopted enabled them to create and preserve their own vision of the war. They would be quite at home with the bloggers of the Iraqui campaign.6

NOTES

1. I am indebted to Michael Kramer, author of a brilliant dissertation on rock music during the war, for this insight.

2. Steve Robbins, who served four flight tours in Vietnam flying airborne radio/TV broadcast missions with the U.S. Navy Project Jenny, the original military airborne broadcast PSYOPS outfit, writes:

As to the existence of Dave Rabbit, I just have no specific personal knowledge. I have however, listened to some of the clips on the Radio First Termer web site (http://www.ibiblio.org/jwsnyder/rft/rft.html), and something simply doesn't sound right to me. The production (switching, mixing etc) seems a bit to professional for a field operation and probably would have had to have been done at a larger base such as DaNang AFB where the studio equipment could have been thrown together. The small portable mixing consoles that are available today, were not generally commercially available during the Vietnam War period. However, almost any good military technician with a basic knowledge of audio systems could have fabricated one. Clearly, the folks who produced these shows had some professional broadcast experience, there are some cross fades used on the Rabbit shows that others probably wouldn't have known how to do. There were a number of folks who came into the military with broadcast experience, and for whatever reason, found themselves turned down when they tried to get on the staff of AFVN. This might account for this type of pirate broadcast, guys got PO'd and simply set themselves up in business. The 69 MHZ broadcast frequency listed on the Radio First Timer as the broadcast frequency would have been a valid frequency for the type of reception gear generally used by the field troops. At that frequency, reception would have been strictly line of sight, and accordingly quite limited in coverage area. (Robbins)

3. At some point the opening of the original recording of "What the Captain Means" appears to have been damaged. There were two attempts to supply an introduction to replace the missing first lines. The only version of the recording currently on the Web has the less common "here in Cam Rahn Bay, where the sewer meets the sea" introduction. The more popular version, which describes an interview with a "shy unassuming Phantom pilot," is available on the Web in text only.

4. An excellent discussion of the relationship between popular song and military occupational folksong in wartime can be found in Les Cleveland's "Singing Warriors: Popular Songs in Wartime."

5. For a more complete discussion of these songs, see Lydia Fish, "General Edward G. Lansdale and the Songs of Americans in the Vietnam War," JAF, 102 (1989): 390-412 and "Songs of the Air Force in the Vietnam War." .

5 The tapes and manuscripts on which this paper is based are part of the archives of the Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project (http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/fishlm/folksongs) The men and women who contributed these and who untiringly answered my questions are too numerous to name here, but I would like to give special thanks to Roger Steffens, Steve Robbins, Doc Ball, Steve Brown, Bob Morecook, and Alexis Muellner for their tapes and information about AFVN and to Ann Kelsey and Rick Holen, who generously shared their research on CMTS. Also to Les Cleveland, for his invaluable insights about the relationship between folklore and popular culture in wartime.

WORKS CITED

American Forces Vietnam Network <http://www.geocities.com/afvn>

Cleveland, Les. Dark Laughter: War in Song and Popular Culture. Praeger: Westport CT and London, 1994.

--------"Singing Warriors." Journal of Popular Culture 28.3 (1994): 155 176.

--------"Songs of the Vietnam War: An Occupational Folklore Tradition." New Directions in Folklore 7 (2003). Available: <http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/military/songs.html>

--------"Voices from the Frontline: Soldiers' Songs as Occupational Folklore." Lecture at National Museum of American History, 7 June 1988.

Fish, Lydia. "General Edward G. Lansdale and the Songs of Americans in the Vietnam War," JAF, 102 (1989): 390-412. <http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/fishlm/folksongs/lansdale.pdf>

Graves, Jim. <jamescgraves@ATTBI.COM.> "Re: Journalistic ethics." 15 February 2002. <vwar-l@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>

Hauser, Lee Wilson. "A History of the American Forces Vietnam Network: 1962-1972. MA thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures, 19. <http://www.geocities.com/leehauserthesis/>

Heuer, Marty. "Songs of Army Aviators in the Vietnam War."< New Directions in Folklore 7 (2003). Available: http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/military/songs.html>

Radio First Termer.. Proposal. Interlock Media. n.d.

Radio First Termer, pilot program. Prod. Alexis Muellner (Interlock Media Associates). n.d.

Radio First Termer, parts one and two. Prod. Alexis Muellner (Interlock Media Associates), NPR, WGBH, Boston, 11 November, 1987.

Radio First Termer, special program, All Things Considered. Prod. Alexis Muellner (Interlock Media Associates), NPR, 11 November, 1987.

Robbins, Steve. <midivet@erols.com> "Re: pirate broadcasts (second try)." 19 October 2001. <vwar-l@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>

Sam, Ken. "Grunt Free Press." Nam: The Vietnam Experience, 1965-1975. Tim Page and John Pimlott, consultant editors. New York: Mallard Press, 1988. 413-416

Suid, Lawrence. "Armed Forces Vietnam Network" Unpublished manuscript. n.d.

Treaster, Joseph B. "G.I. View of Vietnam," New York Times Magazine, October 30, 1966:100, 102, 104, 106, 109.

Vietnam Radio Music and Features: The "Big Red One" - The First Infantry Division. <http://swc2.hccs.cc.tx.us/rmorecook/bigredone.html>

Vietnam Special, part one. Prod. Roger Steffans, NPR, KCRW, Santa Monica, 4 March 1983

Vietnam Special, part two. Prod. Roger Steffans, NPR, KCRW, Santa Monica, 11 March 1983

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