Study of Vietnam Veterans Explores Music's Power to Summon the Past

Songs seem to have a deep connection to the human mind, a form of nonverbal communication evoking feelings.
by Shankar Vedantam 

Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody/ I've got some money 'cause I just got paid/
Now, how I wish I had someone to talk to/ I'm in an awful way …

It came to him unbidden, that song from his college days. Only now it meant something completely different. There was a man on a stretcher before him, draped in a poncho. Blood dripped off the end of the stretcher, the only sign of life from a lifeless body. It was 1967, but Howard Sherpe had already decided that the war in Vietnam was pointless, that the man before him had died for nothing.

He felt alone, existentially alone. In his mind, he heard Sam Cooke's voice, but the lyrics were different.

Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody/ I got all bloody and feel some pain/ I just want to get the hell out of here/ I'm in an awful way…

Nearly 40 years later, Sherpe needs to hear only a few bars of the song to be transported back to Vietnam, where he served as a medic attached to the 4th Infantry Division. The music brings the sights and sounds and smells roaring back. He can even see a cigarette in his hand that is splotched with blood — the dead man's blood.

"What I feel is the sense of all of this was in vain, it was for nothing," said Sherpe, 62, of Madison, Wis. "That sense of loss …"

Sherpe's experience is both unique and universal. That moment in Vietnam was highly personal, but the experience of having a tune bring to mind a powerful memory is something almost everyone can relate to. For neuroscientists, this raises a question: How is it that music connects people to faraway places and events from long, long ago?

Music hooks deep into emotions and memories in ways that words do not; in fact, Sherpe is contributing to a project that aims to get at a history of the Vietnam War through the music of the era. At the University of Wisconsin, scholar Craig Werner and Vietnam vet Doug Bradley have found that music is a highway into veterans' memories of the war.

Ancient parts of the brain

For neuroscientists, the power of music poses a puzzle.

Scientist Robert Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal once hypothesized that because music is abstract, it must activate parts of the brain that process abstract ideas — areas that developed relatively recently as humans evolved from apes. But when Zatorre asked people to listen to their favorite pieces of music as he ran brain scans on them –whatever kinds of music sent chills down their spine — he found that music activated very ancient parts of the brain.

Zatorre hypothesized that the capacity to appreciate music might be an accidental outgrowth of other abstract human skills. But Mark Jude Tramo, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and a songwriter, said that notion sells music short — and overestimates the importance of words to survival.

"Some of the most emotionally laden sounds we hear and make are non-speech vocalizations, like moans and groans and oohs and aahs and laughing and crying," Tramo said. "If you believe music does not have evolutionary significance, you are in a very small minority."

Tramo argued that the sounds and grunts widespread in the animal kingdom set the stage for the human brain to appreciate music. If music grew out of nonverbal communication, and nonverbal communication is essential to survival in much of the animal world, it would make sense that music should hook deep into the brain.

A veteran connection

Werner, who was part of a band that used to play at Colorado's Fort Carson Army base during the Vietnam War, said the issue of music always comes up around veterans. But as he started researching his book, which is to be called "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Experience of Vietnam Vets," he found that songs popular among troops in the field were not always the ones popular on the home front.

Music by the Doors, for example, was huge on campuses back home and even in Saigon, but not out in the field where the battles raged: "Some of the psychedelic music was more popular in Saigon than in Khe Sanh," Werner said.

Creedence Clearwater Revival was always popular with vets, as was that old sailor's anthem, the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B." Martha and the Vandellas' hit "Nowhere to Run" and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" were others. As with Sherpe and Sam Cooke's "Another Saturday Night," Werner said the vets often took away their own meanings from songs. The lyrics of "Sloop John B" — why don't they let me go home/ this is the worst trip/ I've ever been on — came to be about wanting to leave Vietnam.

Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" was about a relationship gone bad — five long years I thought you were my man/ but I found out I'm just a link in your chain.

But for many vets, especially blacks, Werner said it became a song of disillusionment after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Why, these soldiers asked themselves, were they being asked to fight for freedom in a distant land, when their own country had allowed a leader who fought for their freedom to be murdered?

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