ravings of a semi-sane madwoman: music and memories of a war gone by

Monday, January 22, 2007

music and memories of a war gone by

but a war that will never be forgotten

and i think we all know how special music is. how it is indeed able to transport us back, like magic to a different place, a different time. unfortunately, it's not always a GOOD time

Same Old Song, but With a Different Meaning

By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, January 22, 2007; Page A08
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...........

...........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..........