This Independence Day, what does freedom mean to you?
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By Doug Bradley
I once wrote an essay in 7th grade on this very topic. It was the spring of 1960, and I was attending St. Patrick’s Elementary School in Hubbard, Ohio. I recall writing something about freedom meaning that anyone, including a fellow Catholic like John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK), could become president of the USA.
So, for that nearly 13-year-old I was back then, freedom equated with religion and politics. Maybe that’s not so far off these 56 years later?
Little did I know that my beloved JFK would set the stage for my eventually ending up in the jungles of Southeast Asia, ostensibly fighting for that very same “freedom” I’d been writing about as a St. Patrick’s 7th grader. But I’m a lot more jaded now, thanks to Vietnam and the current state of politics and political discourse, even if we do have an African American president and a woman running for that same office.
No, freedom for me will always mean Vietnam and the freedom that we soldiers and Marines found in the music that sustained us. In their efforts to keep us interested and engaged, especially young draftees like me, the military made music available in a multiple of ways – from AFVN (Armed Forces Vietnam Network) to pirate radio (Dave Rabbit); from Filipino and Korean bands at base clubs to in-country concerts by James Brown and Johnny Cash; from hooch minstrels plucking a guitar to reel-to-reel tape decks and cassettes. Music, our music, got me through my 365 days in Vietnam.
In fact, it’s sustained me for the past 45 years, as it has countless other Vietnam veterans.
I know that because Craig Werner and I discovered the power of music from more than a decade of interviews we did with hundreds of Vietnam vets. Our book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (insert link – http://wggootp.com) shows how music helped Vietnam soldiers/veterans to connect to each other and to the “World” back home and to cope with the complexities of the war we’d been sent to fight.
Many of the men and women we interviewed for We Gotta Get Out of This Place had never talked about their Vietnam War experience, even with their spouses and family members. But they could talk about a song – “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” “My Girl,” “And When I Die” “Ring of Fire” and scores of others – and in that remembering, were “free” to begin to heal from the war’s wounds.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” I listened to Janis Joplin sing the words of Kris Kristofferson, himself a former Army captain, when I was in Vietnam in 1971. We had nothing left to lose at that point, and fortunately, music like Joplin’s and Kristofferson’s and Marvin Gaye’s and Aretha Franklin’s kept us alive.
And free.
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Doug Bradley is a Madison, Wisconsin-based Vietnam veteran who has written extensively about his Vietnam and post-Vietnam experiences. He was drafted into the U. S. Army in March 1970 and served as an information specialist (journalist) at the Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City, Missouri, and U. S. Army Republic of Vietnam (USARV) headquarters near Saigon.
Doug’s first novel was DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle. He is also the co-author of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Vietnam Experience with Dr. Craig Werner, UW-Madison Professor of Afro-American Studies voted a “Best Book of 2015” by Rolling Stone. Doug and his wife, Pam Shannon, are the parents of two adult children.
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Visit Warriors Publishing Group, or find them on Facebook.
Photos by Doug Bradley and Tonya Ammon
Freedom to me means to be free of overt government intrusion to my life. To be able to speak my views without being shut out by radicals who only want their own voices to he heard. Whether that be right aislers or left. To let everyone practice their own religion and culture at home, but all of it needs to be kept out of influence public conversation and direction. You become a leader and now insert this into your office to impose it on everyone else you’re gone. Immediate release. And finally the ability to make my own choices and… Read more »