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 dead man before him had died for nothing.
….At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, scholar Craig Werner and Vietnam vet Doug Bradley have found that music is a highway into veterans’ memories of the war.