American Music, American War

The first sentence of David Suisman’s new book *Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers *(University of Chicago Press, 2024) delivers a gut punch: in 2015, the final year of the Obama administration, government funding for US military bands was three times the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. We can only shudder to imagine the present-day status of this lopsidedness. Suisman’s study is the first to critically examine how music has intersected directly with Americans involved in armed military conflicts. Suisman finds that it’s a role with high stakes: music has been a top-down tool, designed by higher-ups to maintain compliance and morale; and also a bottom-up expression of the predicaments faced by those men and women tasked with the physi…

Beginning with the Civil War and continuing through the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, Instrument of War approaches the role of music in wartime with the degree of care, scrutiny, and comprehensiveness that characterized Suisman’s widely acclaimed first book, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009). We asked four music scholars whose concerns, in very different ways, dovetail with Suisman’s project to share how the book is impacting their own thinking about matters of war, military institutions, race, violence, trauma, and more.

—Gustavus Stadler and Gayle Wald, Public Books Music Co-editors

Matthew F. Delmont (Dartmouth College)

I finished reading David Suisman’s wonderful and incisive new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers, on the first day of Black History Month in February 2025. A day earlier, recently confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a statement that the Department of Defense and military branches would no longer host celebrations or events related to Black History Month or Women’s History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month. The guidance, titled “Identity Months Dead at DoD,” describes ending these cultural awareness months as necessary to “restore our warrior culture and ethos” in the military.

Hegseth’s policy obscures the true history of the US military, a failing illuminated by Suisman’s book. During World War II, Armed Forces Radio Service produced popular music, variety shows, comedies, dramas, and religious programs, as Suisman describes, and broadcast these to service members across the globe. While most of the AFRS programming featured white performers, a variety show called Jubilee was a showcase for Black artists, such as Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole. The AFRS show was intended to placate Black troops, who expressed anger and resentment at the racism and discrimination they faced serving in a segregated military. Yet the show did much more than that. Despite the AFRS’s strictures, Black performers found subtle ways to use jokes, slang, and performance styles to politicize the show. Thus, Jubilee contributed to the “wartime promotion of swing, at home and overseas,” explains Suisman, “not just as a style of music but as an ideology based on liberty, democracy, equality, and tolerance, regardless of the ways that these ideals departed from reality.”

The music also had to come from somewhere. Jubilee was hosted primarily by Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman before a live studio audience in Los Angeles. Even for soldiers listening within the European or Pacific Theater, they would have known that Los Angeles was one of hundreds of cities and towns that witnessed racial clashes during the war. The rallying cry for Black Americans throughout the war was “Double V”—victory over fascism abroad, and victory over racism at home—and that campaign’s soundtrack was provided by Jubilee, using music and musicians to stitch together the war front and the home front.

Performances put on by soldiers, moreover, frequently featured female impersonations and lyrics ripe with gay double entendre. Here, Suisman is building on Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, but focuses on performances as elaborate as Irving Berlin’s musical *This Is the Army *and as humble as makeshift shows on military bases. In 1943, at Hunter Field in Georgia, three soldiers impersonating the Andrews Sisters wrote and performed these lyrics:

Here you see three lovely “girls”

With their plastic shapes and curls.

Isn’t it campy? Isn’t it campy?

We’ve got glamour and that’s no lie;

Can you tell when we swish by?

Isn’t it campy? Isn’t it campy?

Those GIs all stop and stare,

And we don’t even bat an eye.

While they may not have picked up on all the queer references in these drag performances, military brass and enlisted soldiers generally praised the shows for boosting morale. “You are not fighting with machine guns, but your job is just as important,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander in chief, told a group of US Army performers in North Africa in 1943. “As long as you are doing your job well—and you are doing it extremely well—you will be rendering a service, and a great one, to your fellow soldiers and your country.”

Suisman’s book also made me think of Black musicians who served in the military, even while being ambivalent to the idea of being warriors. To avoid being drafted into the Army, John Coltrane enlisted in the Navy in August 1945, a month before WWII ended. On his Navy qualification form, he described himself as “musician—played saxophone and clarinet in orchestras during various musical engagements, both part time and full time.” The military remained segregated, so Coltrane was assigned to a Black unit at the Sampson Naval Training Center in upstate New York. He served two years in the Navy, primarily in Manana, Oahu, Hawai‘i, where he played clarinet and alto saxophone in a Navy band called the Melody Masters. While the GI Bill discriminated against most Black WWII veterans, Coltrane was able to use the GI Bill to study saxophone and music theory at the Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia.

Finally, Suisman’s nuanced analysis of cadences and chants in military training reminded me of two of my favorite video clips that illustrate how Black troops in WWII put their own unique stamp on these military traditions. In the first, a US Army unit marching in England shows off their style with stomps, slide steps, quick turns, and jumps. In the second, the 6888 Central Postal Directory Battalion, the largest unit of Black women to serve in WWII, marches and stands for inspection by Major Charity Adams shortly after arriving in Birmingham, England. Like generations of Black soldiers and veterans before them, these men and women claimed respect in a military and country that treated them as only second-class citizens.

After reading Suisman’s insightful book, it is impossible to ignore that “the United States military has used music for everything from recruitment and training to signaling and mourning.” In light of recent developments, the book and its focus on music can also help us better understand parts of history that the military itself would prefer to erase.

Joseph M. Thompson (Mississippi State University)

The US Department of War has managed its fighting forces and conveyed the legitimacy of its power through a series of balancing acts: attention and ease, free will and compulsory deference, corporeality and ideology, force and restraint. Tip the scales one way in any of these conditions, and chaos ensues. Shift too far the other way, and tyranny reigns. Yes, the military disciplines the bodies and minds of service members for the uniformity of purpose, but it also allows for a degree of individual expression and a retention of humanity. Soldiers train for war in relative seclusion, but they also need respite and contact with the public whom they have sworn to defend. By toeing this delicate line, the government has poised the nation’s military between a standing army of volunteer civilian soldiers and the militarism of a formal garrison state. David Suisman’s Instrument of War examines the integral, if underacknowledged, role that music has played in achieving this equilibrium.

In Suisman’s survey of armed service from the Civil War to the present, all the expected elements of military music are represented. We hear brass bands playing Sousa marches. We hear army privates singing cadence chants as they train. We hear rock and roll cutting through the swarm of helicopter blades and country music cranked for its patriotic paeans and declarations of white Americanism.

But one of Suisman’s most generative insights is the way he integrates the story of another kind of balancing act: the public-private partnerships that have ensured US service members remain entertained through an inundation of popular music. Scholars of political history will recognize these military-civilian relations as a function of the associational state. This form of governance filters federal action and authority through volunteer groups, private businesses, and trade organizations.

Suisman fills his book with examples of the associational state and its public-private partnerships. Take his analysis of the military’s reliance on the civilian music business during World War I. As the US Army mobilized, the Quartermaster Corps made the largest purchase of sheet music in the history of the business up to that point. Twenty-seven music publishers benefited from this mass purchase, delivering what was certainly a welcome payday to Tin Pan Alley. One can imagine stacks of song sheets alongside toiletries, socks, and field rations. The army understood it needed to supply US soldiers with the necessities of nourishment, hygiene, and entertainment. Music counted as one of the essentials for military morale. American fighting men needed popular melodies as desperately as they needed bullets.

Meanwhile, voluntary associations like the YMCA distributed musical instruments and planned concerts to buoy the spirits of the men in uniform. Here is the associational state in action. The US Army used its budget to benefit the profit-driven music business, while relying on the labor of volunteers to fulfill its mission of entertainment.

We see the associational state again through Suisman’s analysis of World War II and the Vietnam War, when the military enlisted the help of civilian musicians. Through outlets like the United Service Organizations or the Department of War’s Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, troops on the frontlines heard music and attended concerts that brought the home front a little closer to the battlefront, even as it tied the government a little closer to the entertainment business. This music, its creators, and the service members who consumed it wove a “web of relationships, both social and sonic.” And this web, in turn, not only boosted the morale of American warriors, but also built the associational state by enlisting the culture industries.

As the modern defense state grew, its entanglement with the music business normalized a military of unprecedented strength. In Cold War Country, I explored government growth and influence through the public-private partnership built by the country music industry and the Department of War since World War II. The Pentagon influenced and recruited country music listeners while delivering an economic boon to Music Row and the Country Music Association. Suisman takes an even more sweeping approach to examine multiple styles over a broader span of time, which even links Tin Pan Alley to recent productions like military-themed video games.

Music scholarship needs more of Suisman’s kind of political analysis. This is not politics through the lens of partisanship necessarily. This is politics from the angle of institution building and how music helped legitimize state power.

Suisman’s book gives readers clear evidence of how much the associational state has shaped modern listening and music-making practices. Music has not only enabled the growth and penetration of the government into Americans’ everyday lives. It has militarized the way they hear their world, with the echoes of war ringing in their ears.

Lisa Gilman (George Mason University)

My engagement with music and war has continued to expand since finishing my project on US troops’ musicking during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that culminated in My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (Wesleyan University Press, 2016). My current project, “My Culture, My Survival: Arts Initiatives by Refugees for Refugees,” continues to examine music (and the arts more broadly) but pivots from those fighting to those fleeing war: the people typically lumped together under the umbrella of “forcibly displaced peoples” or “refugees.”

I was deeply enmeshed in this refugee project when I read* Instrument of War,* David Suisman’s ambitious history of music and the US military. Moreover, I was horrified by the numbers of devasting conflicts across the world, all of which seem to constantly multiply and produce more and more people seeking refuge. And, even without having done the research, I know that music is part of all the war-making that is currently happening: in Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and Yemen, to name just a few. Those who are directing, executing, contributing to public opinion, trying to survive, fleeing, grieving, remembering, or forgetting in these conflicts are likely using music in many of the ways Suisman writes about. The details necessarily vary depending on different musical cultures, leadership goals, people’s positionality, publicity strategies, emotional demands, aesthetic preferences, access to technology, and expressive needs. Regardless, music is involved.

Though the US is not officially “at war” right now, US troops are nevertheless engaged in numerous conflicts. Their involvement includes people far removed from combat, with little experiential knowledge of the devastation they produce. It also includes those “on the ground,” in settings without easy access to US military bases, concerts organized by the USO, or access to musical instruments or consistent internet. Inasmuch as it is important to research music in major officially designated conflicts, it is just as important to examine music wherever and whenever troops are deployed.

What I kept thinking about while reading Instrument of War is that music scholars writing about war (including me) have not focused enough on war and destruction as it relates to music. Most of the wars Suisman writes about (other than the American Civil War) occurred outside of the United States. Yet, the musical damage happened both for US troops and in the locations where the wars happened.

Musical losses related to US troops appear here and there, implicitly and explicitly, in the book. Before and during World War II, for example, the US military expended extensive effort to train musicians, create and disseminate songbooks, organize singing gatherings, provide instruments (from harmonicas to pianos), deploy bands, and organize concert tours for civilian musicians. Suisman also reports that the US Congress allocated $437 million for military bands in 2015. But there is a paradox. As with combatants, some percentage of all the resources and musical stuff invested in by the military disappears when people are killed or physically and psychologically injured, and when instruments blow up. War may generate creativity and innovative uses of music; but it also destroys, sometimes simultaneously.

This dual reality is made explicit in a poignant moment in the book, where Priscilla Mosby, an “army stenographer and amateur singer,” toured Vietnam in 1970 for eight months as the leader of a nine-piece band. She returned one day from a walk in the Mekong Delta “to find her entire band had been killed by incoming enemy artillery.” This was a tragic human loss. But, it was also the loss of intangible cultural heritage: talent, knowledge, teaching capacity, and future musical pleasure.

The musical devastation across intangible and tangible heritage is, of course, far greater in the locales where wars are physically fought: a topic outside of the scope of Suisman’s book, but still worthy of attention. The killing of musicians destroys their musical offerings to the world; it impacts future generations because the dead won’t teach, perform, critique, write, raise children in creative homes, and all the other ways that musicians contribute to artistic vitality. The destruction of venues where music is shared—concert halls, parks, living rooms, and faith-based organizations—along with the fear of moving or gathering during war, collapse the opportunities for musicking. Given all we know about the value of music in war, especially as related to trauma and healing, these losses of spaces and musical opportunities for victims of war are especially grievous.

My current research with forcibly displaced peoples reveals how music and war extend beyond the locations or times of combat. My project is intended to be positive in its focus on the artistic creativity and agency of people often stereotyped as vulnerable victims, social leeches, or “criminal aliens” to use President Donald Trump’s current discourse. Yet the negative impacts of war and the violence of displacement often overshadow my attempts at positive narratives.

The musical devastation of conflict for forcibly displaced peoples is far reaching and too expansive to detail in this short essay. Briefly, in the short and long term, many displaced people don’t have access to teachers and environments to learn, venues for musicking, people knowledgeable about their cultural traditions, instruments or listening devices, or time and resources to develop as musicians or to make music. As with troops—those who have suffered physical and mental traumas, stripped from their homes and cultures, while struggling with ongoing trauma and precarious futures sometimes for years, or even decades—people displaced by violence need access to musicking more than ever.

Deborah Paredez, Columbia University

“The majority of us who come to Vietnam will go home with some piece of hi-fi equipment,” an Army Reporter columnist wrote in 1970.1

It wasn’t until I was a teenager that my father taught me how to thread the thin, slick tape from the supply reel along the guide rollers to the empty take-up reel, before turning the knob to hear music unspool from his reel-to-reel player. His stereo equipment, and in particular his prized reel-to-reel, was his own private and fiercely guarded domain. It was an honor to be invited in. Many of my earliest recollections of my dad are of him seated on the floor in front of the machine—his hands reaching out to play or record songs, to repair or reload tapes, or to plug in his headphones—in an act of reverence before his altar.2

This was a practice he had picked up as an Army sergeant in 1971 at a dental unit in Phu Bai, Vietnam, located about 60 miles south of the DMZ.

When my father returned from Vietnam in 1972 as a 22-year-old war veteran, he brought with him memories of countless horrors sealed in a nearly impenetrable silence that he carries with him to this day. He also brought back a stack of albums, tapes, and a brand-new stereo system that included his prized Akai reel-to-reel machine.3 The music that played from that reel-to-reel throughout my childhood was the only audible record of my father’s time in Vietnam.

Gilberto Villarreal, Phu Bai, Vietnam (1971)

II.

Many G.I.s assembled elaborate hi-fi sound systems, made up of the latest Japanese consumer electronics (Akai amplifiers, Sony turntables, Teac reel-to-reel and later, cassette-tape players, etc.) purchased at the military post exchange (PX) stores. … The preferred medium for rock fans was tapes—initially, reel-to-reel, and then, from around 1971, cassette—which soldiers frequently copied and traded with one another.4

My father was one of only two Mexican American soldiers stationed in his unit in Phu Bai, and the two of them became fast friends.5 They shared the same hometown, the same preference for Tex-Mex Spanglish, and the same musical influences that ranged from Mexican rancheras to doo-wop.

But a few months after my father’s arrival, his fellow Tejano hermano was shipped home, leaving my dad to navigate the social landscape on his own. Most of his fellow noncommissioned officers (NCOs) were Black, while all of the dentists and the other dental assistants in the unit were white. So, my dad established and maintained ties “across the color line” through musical exchange. Music was, for him, like for many soldiers, an action*—*“less a noun than a verb.”6

On his regular supply runs to the PX he would stock up on albums and reels for himself and his fellow soldiers: Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Isaac Hayes, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Tina Turner. When he wasn’t restocking the supply room, or hovering over the opened mouth of a fellow soldier to extract a tooth or bunkering down at the first sound of incoming rounds, he spent his time spooling and splicing tape onto reels, recording music to share with his bunkmates. And in this way, his musical tastes and his social circles expanded. One facilitated the other.

III.

Musical activity has been so valuable, so pervasive, so integral to war-making from above and below because it articulates—and allows soldiers to feel—the web of the relationships they are entangled in, and how those relationships, in turn, relate to one another.7

A month before he left Vietnam—about ten miles northwest of Phu Bai on December 24, 1971—my father attended Bob Hope’s Christmas show at Camp Eagle army base.8 He doesn’t remember what musical acts played that day; but he does vividly recall the feeling of camaraderie and conviviality and raucousness between him and his fellow soldiers. How most of them had shed their shirts in the humid December air, and were drinking and laughing together in a mixture of reprieve and longing for home. How when the photographers came around, he and his buddies were instructed to put their uniforms back on for the official documentation of the event. How they buttoned up for the photos and immediately stripped down right after the camera clicked. My father’s musical memories preserve the chorus and timbre and reverberations of this moment, in ways the visual record fails to capture.

Bob Hope show, Hue, Vietnam (December 24, 1971). Photo credit: Gilberto Villarreal

A Lubricant in the American War Machine: A Response by David Suisman

In 2024, the website Military.com surveyed veterans about the music that “defined” their military service in the Global War on Terror. One respondent, who fought in Afghanistan, wrote in, “I have literally returned fire with [Carly Rae Jepsen’s] ‘Call Me Maybe’ on.”9 Should it surprise us that American soldiers in the 21st century had a musical accompaniment for the mayhem of combat? Should it surprise us that the music was Jepsen’s 2012 monster pop hit?

The respondent’s insistence that this “literally” happened implies they feel we should be surprised. But we shouldn’t be.

Music has contributed to waging war since time immemorial, including, at times, during combat. In the Civil War, as many as ten bands were present at the Battle of Gettysburg, at least one of which played—polkas and waltzes, no less—when the battle was at its peak. In Cuba and the Philippines, at the turn of the 20th century, US soldiers sang the monster pop hit of its day, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-Night,” even as the bullets flew. In World War II, GIs waking up in a combat zone in Italy were reported to have belted out “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” a blockbuster smash of 1943.

These examples are not outliers. My book Instrument of War contends that soldiers’ lives have long been suffused with music: from the recruitment songs which ushered civilians into the military, to call-and-response cadences chanted in basic training, to pop songs ringing out in combat or moments of repose. Taken together, these and other forms of musical activity reveal a pervasive yet unacknowledged dimension of American war-making: the twinned history of soldier and song.

Hiding in plain sight is the fact that music has coursed through the United States’s rise as a preeminent military power. Also hiding is the fact that music—in multiple, complementary, and sometimes surprising ways—has been integral to large-scale state violence. However uncomfortably this may sit with some people, music has functioned as a lubricant in the American war machine: helping the armed forces to operate more smoothly and more effectively.

Of course, the technologies have changed over time (from brass bands to iPods) and the musical styles have too (from parlor songs to hip-hop). Still, once we start listening for it, music is everywhere: a signature element of military service from boot camp to battlefield, inflecting soldiers’ lives in ways both obvious and subtle. This warrants being taken seriously. Because the impact of the military is conventionally measured by actions, not feelings, the emotive character of music has generally been disregarded in the analysis of America’s wars.

It is a mistake, however, to conclude that affective power and military force are not closely related. “It sounds odd to the ordinary person when you tell him every soldier should be a singer, because the layman cannot reconcile singing with killing,” wrote General Leonard Wood in World War I. “It is just as essential that the soldiers should know how to sing, as that they should carry rifles and learn how to shoot them.”

The capacity of music to be deployed in so many forms and contexts in the military can make it an unruly subject. Still, this hardly makes it less important: a point amplified, in different ways, in these four written responses to Instrument of War, each of which addresses the book in a different register. Focusing on World War II, Matthew Delmont links the book’s discussions of musical activity among African American and homosexual soldiers, showing how they complicate sweeping generalizations and anodyne clichés about the “good war.” Musical activity did different kinds of work for different kinds of soldiers, Delmont stresses, which challenges facile, one-dimensional depictions of what motivated GIs and what kept them going.

There is a critical subtext to Delmont’s commentary as well. Despite the government trying to standardize soldiers in basic training, the military was never a monolith. As such, painting soldiers’ experiences with a broad brush obscures the complex relationship that individual warriors had with the institution: especially GIs who were not straight, white, and male, and for whom military service could be a claim on citizenship.

Rather than looking intensively at a single conflict, Joseph Thompson’s remarks draw out one theme running through the book as a whole. Musical activity in the military, Thompson notes, depended what scholars call the “associational state”: a mutually reinforcing relationship between the state (represented here by the military) and nonstate actors (notably the culture industry and social welfare organizations like the YMCA). This public-private entanglement enabled the military to equip musicians with instruments and soldiers with songbooks, phonographs, and radios; simultaneously, it offered volunteer groups and private-sector firms—like music publishers and record companies—a captive audience and market for their goods.10

Thompson’s attention to the political economy of music illuminates not just where music in the military came from. It can also help us think about the broader, long-term ramifications of musical activity in the military, such as the ways that musical conventions from within the military resonate in popular culture and the subtle ways that militarism gets legitimized. One thinks, for example, about the legacy of John Philip Sousa—a master of playing to both military and civilian audiences—and the imprint of military brass bands on marching bands at football games’ half-time shows even today.

On the face, Lisa Gilman’s interest is the mirror opposite of my own. Where my work focuses on the effects of music on war, her commentary primarily addresses the effects of war on music (a topic, she notes, “outside of the scope of Suisman’s book”). Yet this very difference sets in relief the goal of my book. I consider myself not a historian of music, but (borrowing a phrase from the French scholar Didier Francfort) a historian with music.11 Instrument of War asks: What has music meant for war-making on a psychological, emotional, and corporeal level? How can music help us understand how wars happen? It is an attempt to think in a fresh way—that is, through music—about one of history’s most written-about subjects: the waging of war.

Where my interest and Gilman’s converge is that we are both concerned with what music does in the world. My book focuses on soldiers, because their musical activity seemed to me consequential and little understood; meanwhile, Gilman centers other protagonists swept up in war’s epic drama, for whom music has likewise been meaningful. As Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us, “true” war stories can never focus exclusively on combatants, and Gilman’s remarks urge us to keep a different set of historical actors in our sights.12 I welcome this expanded purview, and look forward to learning from this work.

Finally, the response from scholar and poet Deborah Paredez connects with Instrument of War in an entirely different way: using the book as a point of departure for a series of poignant recollections about her father, who served in Vietnam in the early 1970s. However oblique this approach may initially appear, Paredez’s vignettes bring to the surface the intimate, personal, human stakes of the musical activity that the book explores.

Buying records and hi-fi equipment at the PX stores, thronging to USO shows, trading tapes with other soldiers: the book contextualizes practices like these, and explores their significance on a large scale. But Paredez, on the other hand, puts them under the microscope. Her reminiscences evoke what they meant on an individual basis, in the moment, over a lifetime, and across generations.

In closing, I wish to thank the editors of Public Books for convening this roundtable and to these four readers for their commentaries. I am gratified by the range of the responses and the knowledge that my book might spark such thoughtful remarks.

This article was commissioned by Gustavus Stadler and Gayle Wald

David Suisman, *Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers *(University of Chicago Press, 2024), p. 191. ↩
I have written at greater length about the role of music in my father’s time at and return from war in my essay, “Tina Turner and My Father,” Narrative Magazine, Spring 2024, which is excerpted from my critical memoir, *American Diva *(Norton, 2024), and in my poetry volume, Year of the Dog (BOA Editions, 2020). ↩
“From 1969 to 1971, PX stores in Vietnam did sell more than 44,000 record players, 80,000 tuners, and 435,000 tape players—alongside 550,000 transistor radios.” Suisman, Instrument of War, p. 191. ↩
Suisman, Instrument of War, pp. 190–191. ↩
I write at greater length about Latinx experiences in Vietnam and the difficulties in accounting for them in “Soldiers in la Guerra,” New York Times, January 5, 2018. ↩
Suisman, Instrument of War, p. 6. ↩
Suisman, Instrument of War, p. 8. ↩
“In conjunction with the army’s Special Services Division, the USO staged more than 5,600 live performances for U.S. military personnel in Southeast Asia by 569 different acts from May 1965 to June 1972.” Suisman, Instrument of War, p. 185. ↩
Blake Stilwell and Jared Keller, “The Battle Songs That Defined the Global War on Terrorism, According to Service Members and Veterans,” Military.com, January 13, 2025. ↩
See, e.g., Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). ↩
Luis Velasco-Pufleau, “La musique comme voie possible d’une histoire comparée des conflits armés: Entretien avec Didier Francfort,” Transposition: Musique et Sciences Sociales, no. 4 (July 2014). ↩
Viet Thanh Nguyen, “On True War Stories,” in Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 223–50. ↩

Featured image: The U.S. Marine Corps marching band at the Iwo Jima National Memorial by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Todd Frantom / Wikimedia (CC0).