Retired from the Air Force at Offut Air Force Base near Omaha as a lieutenant colonel, Durham bought a bar in nearby Iowa. After five years, he got out of the saloon business. Today, looking back on those five years, he says, I just got tired of drunks asking me to play tunes I never heard of, and then getting mad because I didn't know them.

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He tried the country music big time in Nashville but failed. He says now, I've never seen so many unemployed guitar pickers in all my born days. While in Nashville, he received accolades aplenty. But accolades don't put food on the table.

Tom Price of the School for Fretted Instruments says of Durham's act: The Bull Durham Show [he's also a better-than-average stand-up comedian] consistently thrills audiences. From the minute he walks on stage, Bull establishes a close relationship with the crowd through his puns, jokes and dynamic presence. Bull Durham's music is alive, his musicians excellent.

During his Nashville days, Durham met other musicians who had written songs while in Vietnam, including Bill Ellis and Chuck Rosenberg, who wrote: What I'd give for an ice-cold Coke/ Or, just a piece of ice to cool the water/ It's getting hotter. Pack on your back, rifle in your hand/ Every step you take, death is holding your hand/ Walking in Charlies' land.

Another song, The Ho Chi Minh Trail, is a trenchant twist on an old cowboy campfire ballad, with words about death and dying. Then there's Sittin' in the Cab of My Truck, written by Churck Dockery, which includes the lyrics: Here I sit, havin' a nicotine fit/ God I'm too scared to get a cigarette lit.

Durham wrote Jolly Green, a paean about the big rescue helicopters used in Vietnam: I sit here alone in this tree/ Scared of 'Charlie' as I can be/ Wish to the Lord that I could see Jolly Green.

Saul Brody, a first lieutenant with the 96th Quartermaster Battalion at Phan Rang, wrote most of his songs after talking to U.S. Army helicopter pilots in the 148th Assault Helicopter Company, the Blue Stars. In Green T-shirt Blues he sings, If I ever get out of this place/ I'm going back and join the human race.

Lydia Fish, a folklorist and musicologist from Buffalo State College in New York, is one of the world's leading specialists on war songs (see Fish's Perspectives article in the October 1990 Vietnam). She first discovered the works of Bull Durham when she bought one of his albums for 50 cents at an upstate New York flea market. Fish notes that most Americans were unaware of the music that was being made in Vietnam: The guitars were at Woodstock, the guns were in Vietnam–or so civilian America imagined.

Looking back, Durham says, I always knew my records were selling like hot cakes–but at that price, you could buy a whole stack for a buck and a half. It was Fish who convinced all of the soldier-songwriters, including Donut Dolly Emily Strange, a former Red Cross worker, that they should record their songs for the Library of Congress. Hardly anyone outside of the military has heard these songs, says Fish. The problem wasn't so much access as receptivity. Veterans of the Vietnam War bore the stigma of a war no one wanted to hear about.

Toby Hughes flew an F-4 Phantom fighter out of Cam Rahn Bay Air Base in South Vietnam. In his spare time he wrote down the songs he composed while in the cockpit of the big fighter. Hughes points out: It took us 20 years to get people to start listening. But they're listening now. Some are having their eyes opened.

Salient facts about the many Vietnam-era war songs have not previously been available to the public. Why? Because the subject matter was classified Secret. A respected American officer in South Vietnam sent to the late President Lyndon B. Johnson a tape-recorded collection of Vietnam war songs, in hopes that the president would be swayed into changing his political and war tactics. The subtle public relations play did not work.

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