In World War I the American doughboy sang ‘Over There, in World War II the American GI Joe sang The White Cliffs of Dover, in the Korean War the American GI sang Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, and in the Vietnam War American troops sang When the Mortars Come Rolling In.

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Every war or armed conflict has been a spawning ground for barracks songs or ballads of the fighting man. In fact, the same can be said even of warfare during Roman times.

But the Vietnam War (an undeclared war, actually) was an experience of a new and unusual kind. There’s no doubt about it. American involvement in the Vietnamese fracas was totally different, so different, in fact, that the whole 10-year affair turned into a bucket of worms before it came to be known as the no-win war.

The music that came out of the long, drawn-out Vietnam conflict was, likewise, totally different, composed by grunts, pilots, sailors, even CIA men. The music was a combination of country, bluegrass, even rock-and-roll.

There was a song about the Saigon Warrior, the rear-echelon trooper who worried more about sharp creases, how bright his brass shone, or what it would take to impress a Saigon bar girl than he did about combat. And there were the moody, reflective, true songs of the combat soldier or pilot who daily looked death in the eye from a thousand angles. One particular song even reflected on the shape of the table at the Paris peace talks. Vietnam was also where a deejay named Adrian Kronhour played music for the troops on Armed Forces Radio–and became a hero.

It has been said that life for the military in wartime is dull routine broken by moments of incredible violence. In Vietnam there were fewer breaks between the violence. That may be the reason that caustic and sometimes downright sarcastic songs, especially songs aimed at pompous authority figures, came out of the Southeast Asian conflict.

There is a hard irony: Those songs, composed and sung 20 years ago and even further back, though often ribald and caustic, have never been heard by rank-and-file civilian America. But they will now, if James P. Bull Durham, who served as a pilot in Vietnam, has his way. Durham, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel living in western Tennessee, considers himself a better than average guitar picker, with a better than average voice. Says Durham, I’m not just another pretty face.

In fact, says the 6-foot-2-inch Durham, a lot of these songs [he's collected more than 300 of them] are protest songs. But he quickly adds, Most of the songs are about the day-to-day fight to survive in a strange land where all the rules were vastly different. In one of his own compositions, Crack Went the Rifle, he sings: While cultured men in shirts of lace/Debate the shape of the meeting place/The common man plays hide and seek with death. Obviously, this is not a song to play at a party–unless you want to throw a very wet blanket over the merrymaking.

Bull Durham is on two Flying Fish Records albums, Songs of S.E.A. (SEA is the military lingo for Southeast Asia) and In Country. The second album was produced especially for the soldiers and Marines who crawled and walked the jungle trails on Charlie’s (the Viet Cong’s) real estate.

Durham appeared on Austin City Limits, a PBS production, with megastar Kris Kristofferson. His collection of songs has been recorded and placed in the archives of the Library of Congress. But Durham wants to make sure his Vietnam songs have wider distribution than being for sale at flea markets or being buried in attic junk.

He contends that: If Robert Strange McNamara [he emphasizes the middle name] can now publish a book saying how wrong politically and militarily our involvement was in Vietnam, I should be able to emphasize the soldier’s side of the story. If I’m not successful, that Wall [the Vietnam Veterans Memorial] in Washington and all the names on it, are for naught.

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