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Doug Bradley and Craig Werner , We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (Amherst and Boston : University of Massachusetts Press , 2015, $26.95). Pp. xi + 256. isbn 978 1 6253 4162 4 .
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Weaving together interviews and written accounts of numerous veterans, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner add detail and nuance to our understanding of the roles that popular music played in the lives of American soldiers serving in Vietnam. As one would expect, the changing tastes of young Americans fighting the war reflected the changing tastes of their generation as a whole during the series of musical revolutions between 1956 and 1975, but as Bradley and Werner demonstrate, veterans' memories gravitate toward songs that either explicitlyￂ -ￂ "Fortunate Son"ￂ -ￂ or by associationￂ -ￂ "Chain of Fools"ￂ -ￂ commented on their own situations. The ultimate example of a song whose original meaning shifted and deepened in the context of the war provides the book's title: in the introduction, the authors make the case for the Animals' "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," whose lyrics express longing for escape from working-class life, as the "Vietnam Veterans' National Anthem."
If the book is not exactly full of surprises, it is...