In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Laura Kalpakian’s memoir Undesirable is a moving and profound exploration of her brother’s undesirable military discharge during the Vietnam War, her father’s attempts to change that, and the long-lasting effects of war on both combatants and their families.
Paula Becker wrote of the book:
“Undesirable is a poignant examination of duty: the author’s father’s to his son, her brother’s to his country, society’s to those who serve, and her own obligation to her father’s memory. This book reminds a new generation that wars fought far away still exact bitter collateral damage from everyone they touch back home.”
In her own words, here is Laura Kalpakian’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice:
In late August 1970, my twenty-year old brother, Private Doug Johnson, boarded a plane in Vietnam bound for McChord AFB in Washington. He flew under guard because he had accepted an Undesirable Discharge in lieu of a second court-martial for going AWOL and sleeping on duty. The Undesirable denied him any veteran’s benefits. Thus, he had nothing to show for his fourteen months in Nam, nada, unless you count the dead man’s sandal that he clutched when he got off the plane where his father awaited him on the tarmac. His father, on learning the truth of Doug’s actual experience in Vietnam, was convinced the Undesirable was undeserved and, more than that, unjust. He set out to get it changed to an Honorable or a Medical.
Fifty years after these events I found in my basement a cache of documents that had not seen light since 1973. Hundreds of pages chronicled my father’s three-year battle with the Army. I read, re-read, pondered these papers, discovering in the process that the Army had covered up an egregious wrong perpetrated against my brother. Doug Johnson was once a promising musician, charming, attractive to women. He returned from Vietnam shattered physically, mentally, emotionally, still suffering from bouts of malaria, hepatitis, dysentery and jungle rot, and he was a drug addict daily shooting heroin and speed. He spent decades floundering amid addiction, alcoholism, PTSD, and mental illness, wreaking sadness and anger among those who most loved him.
As I fashioned these documents into a book, the music of that era played nonstop in my head, often intruding on the narrative. However, I could not use the lyrics on the page without expensive permissions. Fine. Lyrics alone are insufficient. You need the roll and thunder of the actual instruments, the plaintive melodies, the high-spirited hilarity and the doleful drum riffs, the youthful harmonies, the anthemic insistence. I created playlists. Each of the four sections of Undesirable has a playlist, songs illuminating the emotional, historical and thematic content of the book, primarily music of that era.
PART I PLAYLIST
Reflects the elegiac quality of these first chapters, laying out the essential tragedy of my brother’s life and my father’s efforts to save them both from despair. The songs are of the folk-rock variety, wistfully, poetically asking questions without trying or daring to provide answers.
Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag
Country Joe & the Fish
This is a whoopee-cushion of a song, as in, Whoopee, this war is totally fucked up! Here comes the Cong! Bend over, kiss your ass goodbye! I imagine this playing in the ether as my nineteen-year-old brother walked into the recruiting station in January 1969 after his parents found out he had stupidly dropped a class at the community college and made himself ripe for the draft. Big family fight ensued. Pissed off, Doug enlisted. Next stop is Vietnam!
Draft Morning
The Byrds
The Byrds were a seminal SoCal folk-rock group who broke off (evolved and devolved) into other notable groups. Here their harmonic voices and the gentle guitar work are framed with lyrics about learning to kill, and blended with warlike sound effects. Battle-flare music oozes, inevitably into “Taps,” the dirge played for more than 58,000 men whose names are on the granite wall in DC. The average age of soldiers in Vietnam was nineteen.
For What It’s Worth
Buffalo Springfield
This slow, metronomic song embodied the central question of that era for that generation: What the hell is happening here? Who is that man with the gun over there? And what can/will he do to me? (We, that is, my generation, would learn the answer to this question in May 1970 at Kent State.) Ironically, the song itself arose out of a civic disturbance at the Pandora’s Box nightclub on Sunset Boulevard in 1966. Never mind. The song reeks of both hope and fear.
[Four Dead in] Ohio
Crosby Stills, Nash & Young
Speaking of the man with the gun over there: on May 4, 1970, the National Guard shot and killed four antiwar protesters at Kent State in Ohio. Unthinkable photos of young people, lying dead on the ground, bleeding out, horrified everyone. Within mere weeks, CSN&Y created and recorded this solemn anthem, and it blared from radios. The song is both remembrance and preview. On May 15 city police and state highway patrolmen opened fire, blasted a dorm at Jackson State in Mississippi, killing two, wounding four. To me this CSN&Y live recording is more powerful than the polished studio version that played on the radio. The thumping insistence on the dead is heartbreaking to this day.
My Back Pages
The Byrds
This wistful song about being “so much older then…” speaks to me of loss perceived too late. Implicit in the rhyme scheme, the tenor voices, the harmonies is the sadness of young men in helmets, newly disillusioned. The back pages of my book Undesirable include a timeline of these brutal years, 1969 to 1973.
Turn! Turn! Turn!
The Byrds
The Byrds created this polished version of a song that originated with the legendary folk singer, Pete Seeger (1919 –2014). Pete artfully adapted Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1 –8 evoking the cyclical nature of life, any life. “A time to love, a time to hate, a time of war, a time of peace…” It becomes an antiwar anthem with the addition at the end, “I swear it’s not too late….”
Where Have all the Flowers Gone
Peter, Paul and Mary
Again, a cyclical song originating with Pete Seeger. I prefer this version with a multi-mix of guitar and harmonics, and textured volumes that underscore the thematic sadness. Mary’s sparkling soprano asks where have all the young girls gone, gone for husbands… But there are no weddings in these lyrics. Indeed, her sharp retort, “gone for soldiers, every one” stings like an indictment. The soldiers gone to graveyards, the women widowed, the orphaned children putting flowers on the graves of their lost fathers. The persistent refrain, the question, “When will they ever learn,” turns sadness into protest.
PART II PLAYLIST
Part II of Undesirable is not elegiac. These songs are not wistful, they’re insistent, angry. Part II begins to marshal the evidence, to answer the questions posed in the narrative (and the songs) of Part I. Doug’s letters and testimony reveal the truth of his time in Vietnam and his crumbling psyche. These songs played on the radio stateside, and judging from Vietnam vets’ social postings, they played in the hearts and minds of men in the warzone as well.
Can’t Find My Way Home
Blind Faith
This song rang in my head and heart from the time I brought the documents up, out of the basement. So much so that originally I planned to call the book “Can’t Find My Way Home.” The wail, the plea spoke to me of my brother’s many drugged-up AWOLs, adrift in warzones, wasted, lost, wandering, seeking some ephemeral path home which, in truth, and though he returned to California, he never quite found.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place
The Animals
The “We” of “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” includes the narrator and a girl who needs convincing to escape a dead-end town as if their lives depended on it. For men like my brother, soldiers in Nam, their lives did depend on it. For them, the “We” was a brotherhood of urgency, men who in Doug’s words were “scared shitless.” “If it’s last thing we ever do…” And for many it was the last thing.
Nowhere to Run
Martha and the Vandellas
The song itself describes obsessive love (or obsessive stalking). However, the chorus, the title, the refrain effectively describe incidents from my brother’s testimony at a hearing with the Army’s Inspector General in December 1970. Doug recounts his experience in the jungle, the long grass, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, with Vietcong on the ground nearby, and American helicopters overhead, gunners strafing the grass. (Let it be noted here that Martha’s brother served in Vietnam.)
Fortunate Son
Creedence Clearwater Revival
My brother loved CCR, so much so that he nicknamed his girlfriend after their song, “Suzie Q.” In the late sixties, CCR’s swamp-rock melodies saturated the airwaves. “Fortunate Son” pulses with hard-driving anger, testosterone rage. The refrain, insisting on everything the singer is not (“It ain’t me. It ain’t me, I ain’t no millionaire’s son…”) actually tells us who he is: some poor bastard, on point, humping through the malarial jungles, watching out for punji sticks and booby traps; he’s dirty, sweat-soaked, shooting up cocktails of speed and opium just to get through till sunset and still be alive. In short, Doug Johnson.
PART III PLAYLIST
Part III covers the events of May–August 1970 that led to Doug’s accepting the Undesirable discharge. Doug was a mere twenty days away from DEROS [Date of Estimated Return from Overseas] when Nixon finally admitted to invading Cambodia. Time Magazine ran a five-page spread of military preparations. A stringer for Time Magazine snapped a photograph of Doug and ten other hapless grunts just as they were ordered into a helicopter for the fight. (Photo from the May 25th 1970 issue is on the cover of my book.) That’s how Doug’s parents knew he’d been sent to Cambodia. That summer his parents lived in a cauldron of grief and fear while they battled the Army for word of their son because Doug went AWOL in Cambodia and vanished into a vacuum of silence.
Teach Your Children
Crosby Stills, Nash & Young
This poignant ballad from the summer of 1970 suggests—doesn’t promise, but certainly hopes—that “their hell will slowly go by,” that love will sustain parents and their children. The generational suffering, historically assured, is softened here, served with gently twanging guitars. For my brother and my parents, no song could be more apt. “Teach Your Children” could serve as a sad canopy to the themes of my book, the love of a father for his errant son.
Eight Miles High
The Byrds
Back to the Byrds, but in “Eight Miles High” their wistful and plaintive qualities are supplanted by harsh, intricate guitarwork and druggy lyrics that promise great highs and a bunch of really scary lows, a panoply of strange faces encountered once you “touch down.” The world served up with equal parts wide-eyed wonder and fucked-up fear.
Darkness Darkness
The Youngbloods
Another drugged-up interlude captured musically. The darkness alluded to, insisted upon here describes not just my brother’s experience in Vietnam but the next thirty years of his life. Darkness truly was his pillow. He crawled through shadows. He inflicted pain.
All Along the Watchtower
Jimi Hendrix, and “Battlestar Galactica” version
With its apocalyptic imagery, its dark prophecies, the wailing instrumentation that recreates the laments of humanity from ages past (and yet to come), “All Along the Watchtower” is an almost biblical anthem. The unforgettable imagery evokes not just the horrors of war, but the horrors that emerge from war. If ever a song belonged on an anti-war playlist, not as prescription, but as warning, this is it. Though Dylan wrote it, Jimi’s is the classic rendition of “Watchtower.” I include the Battlestar Galactica version as well because that’s the one emblazoned in my psyche by virtue of my sons, Bear McCreary on keys and Brendan McCreary, vocalist, particularly in the live version.
War
Edwin Starr
A song that asks—and unequivocally answers—its own question: “War! What is it good for?” “Absolutely nothing.” The call and response elements here compel the audience not just to listen, but reply, to clap hands and shout. Maybe even jump and shout.
PART IV PLAYLIST
Part IV begins September 1970. Doug Johnson (addicted to drugs, shattered physically, strung out emotionally, suffering PTSD) returns to his family, his fiancée and a world he scarcely recognizes and one which does not recognize him. In an effort to correct his past (reverse the Undesirable) and salvage his future (save him from the burden of shame) Doug’s father picks up the pen to do battle with the Army. At the end of a three-year ordeal, there is pale victory, a compromise short of Honorable.
Another Brick in the Wall, Pt 1
Pink Floyd
My father marshaled voluminous materials to reverse the Undesirable and presented them to four different military entities. The Army met his efforts with the unflinching, unchanging stolidity of a brick wall. Deny. Defeat. Fail. Then they melted back into their institution and acronyms. The lyrics here matter less than the delivery, the unceasing thrum, the low, unrelenting menace.
The Weight
The Band
This doleful ballad, with its plain, plucking guitarwork and raggedy piano sound epitomizes my parents’ weary journey in these years while my father wrote and my mother typed. The lyrics are oblique but unmistakable. The grizzled singer is all but beaten, seeking rest, resolution, some sort of safe harbor, but the answer is always defeat, denial, and failure, an echoing No No No.
Imagine
John Lennon
In assembling his materials, my father’s writing often closes with words imploring the faceless, unknown Army brass to think, to feel, to imagine the life that Doug Johnson might yet have if only he can be spared the shame of this undeserved Undesirable. John Lennon, of course, says it better. The simple piano backgrounds swell with strings and a slow drumbeat as the lyrics sweep us all up in their embrace. Lennon too asks questions, but he has answers. He says they’re simple: If a world without hate and cruelty and violence can be imagined, then maybe it can be achieved. Maybe Lennon is dreamer, but we all long to join him.
What’s Going On
Marvin Gaye
This song begins with the families: mothers crying, brothers dying, fathers imploring against escalation. It’s the canopy anthem for the whole of Undesirable. Marvin knew whereof he spoke; his brother Frankie fought in Vietnam. From Frankie’s letters, Marvin made music about the death, the dying, the racism and the confusion, people turning to one another, asking “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He layered his music artfully with random voices not beautifully gathered in choral harmonies, but in ragged confusion, protests, pickets in the streets punished with brutality. The song demands to know what’s going on, but there are no answers in these lyrics—except that war is not solution.
Theme from “The Mission”
Ennio Morricone
This song came on the random playlist in my car as I was driving to my widowed mother’s house on January 5, 2021, to tell her that I had heard word from California that Doug had died that morning. Morricone’s forlorn beauty brought me to tears. Still does. I wept for my brother’s death, but even more so for Doug’s wasted life, that his gifts had been squandered, that he had both lived in pain and inflicted pain.
Wander My Friends
Bear McCreary, from Battlestar Galactica
When “The Mission” ended, “Wander My Friends” came on random and I outright blubbered, sobbing in the driveway of my mother’s house, moved by this simple, sad thrum of farewell written by Bear and the wistful Gaelic lyrics, sung by Brendan. The song throbs with loss. But it also has something of a martial air and it is as close as Doug Johnson would ever get to “Taps.” Doug lived far away from us, and there was, to my knowledge, no farewell service whatever for him. On January 10th my mother had a heart attack.
Laura Kalpakian is the author of Memory into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook (UNM Press), a memoir, sixteen novels, and five prize-winning collections of short fiction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.