“I’m a rolling thunder, a pouring rain. I’m coming on like a hurricane.” – AC/DC, Hell’s Bells
Nostalgia. It’s a sensation that seems to strike when you least expect it. It causes you to take pause, relive an old memory, and bask in the past for an ever-so-brief moment in time. It’s a sight, a sound, a smell. Sometimes, it’s something as innocuous as the odor of diesel exhaust, while other times it’s the sound of a voice you haven’t heard in decades.
After stopping to pick up coffee early on Saturday morning, I pulled my Jeep out onto the deserted two-lane road and pushed the button for the local classic radio station. The peal of bells rang from the depths of the speakers, a familiar sound I hadn’t heard in nearly thirty years. Brian Johnson growled out the lyrics to “Hell’s Bells” as AC/DC carried me back to another place, another time. In a moment, it was 1991 and I was trudging along MSR Texas in my HMMWV, navigating a cloud of dust as I followed the traffic north into Iraq. On that day, the same song echoed through a cheap portable speaker connected to a Sony Walkman. It was part of my soundtrack of war.
A dozen years later, on another road, in another HMMWV, a different soundtrack played as we entered southern Baghdad along Highway 8. On that day, my driver’s version of a stereo system (an iPod and computer speakers) blared “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses. To us, it was part of a new soundtrack for a war that maybe wasn’t so new. Each song on that soundtrack conveyed something meaningful to us, from “Oops!… I Did it Again” (a song that played well for Round Two of the Gulf War) to “Highway to Hell” (which seemed apropos for those tense movements through Mahmudiyah). Our soundtrack spanned the decades, from the foreboding of the Doors “Five to One” to the in-your-face lyrics of the Drowning Pool’s “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.” Sadly, the iPod didn’t survive the war, but the memories those songs elicit live on.
War Music Through the Generations
Each generation seems to bring its own soundtrack to war. The Greatest Generation has the big band era sound that seemed to bind them to home while they battled an existential threat far from our shores. The soundtrack of the Vietnam Generation conveys the tumult of the sixties while capturing the attitude of the impending end of the draft era. Eighteen years into Afghanistan and another sixteen since we crossed into Iraq for the second time, what is our soundtrack?
To be fair, our “generation” of veterans is different in many ways from those that fought before us. Like a number of others, my son followed me to war in 2008, and I followed him again four years later. We are now seeing troops deploy to war who weren’t alive on 9/11, who took their first steps long after Toby Keith promised to light up the world “like the Fourth of July.” If our country ever fought a multi-generational war, this is it. My soundtrack of war in 2003 was markedly different from the soundtrack someone took to Ramadi in 2006, and that soundtrack is nothing close to the one that deploys to the mountains of Afghanistan today, or one that will venture into the Syrian desert tomorrow.
So, when someone asked me last week what would be on the “Forever Wars” soundtrack, I was – to say the least – a little stumped. We have, after all, different generations fighting the same wars. The songs that followed us to war two decades ago are not necessarily the same songs that go to war today. What are those songs? When our grandchildren look back on our wars in thirty years, what will they hear as our soundtrack? What is our soundtrack of war?
