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By Marc Leepson
Big plans are afoot for the Opening Ceremonies at VVA’s
National Convention in July. The biggest of all will be the
appearance on Wednesday morning, July 18, of one of the top
country music acts in America, Big & Rich, known in real
life as “Big” Kenny Alphin and John Rich. Big & Rich
will perform their hit song, “The 8th of November,” which
deals with the bloody battle for Hill 65 fought by the 1st/503rd
of the 173rd Airborne Brigade on November 8, 1965. The song
and its stirring accompanying video were inspired by Hill
65 veteran Niles Harris of Deadwood, South Dakota, who also
will attend the Convention.
“I first heard Big & Rich sing ‘The 8th
of November’ at the dedication of the South Dakota
Vietnam Veterans Memorial last September, and it was a memorable
moment for everyone in the huge crowd, but especially for
the thousands of Vietnam veterans who were there,” said
VVA National President John Rowan. “I have no doubt
whatsoever that everyone who sees Big & Rich at the Convention
Opening Ceremonies will have the same reaction. We are honored
that they are taking time from their national touring schedule
to join us in Springfield.”
Big Kenny Alphin and John
Rich are young veterans of the country music singing and
song-writing scene who met at a Nashville club where Big
Kenny was performing in 1998 at a time when their careers
were at a standstill. They soon became friends, then music-writing
partners, and, in 2000, began a series of Tuesday-night jam
sessions at a nondescript Nashville club called The Pub of
Luv. They quickly attracted an eclectic coterie of musicians
and admirers who came to be known as the “Muzik Mafia.”
Big & Rich
signed their first recording contract with Warner Brothers
Records in 2002. The rest is country music history. Their
first album, Horse of a Different Color, featuring the hit
single, “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,” came
out two years later, went double platinum, and zoomed to
No. 1 on the country music charts. Their follow-up, “Comin’ to
Your City,” released in November of 2005, sold over
a million copies and was nominated for a Grammy. The critics
raved, especially about Big & Rich’s unique blend
of musical styles and genres.
“Announcing that they’re
here to make ‘country
music without prejudice,’ they mix a fiddle, big-ass
guitar groove, and some hair-metal ‘hey!’ yells
and even make room for a Spanglish rap by a six-foot-five
black Texan named Cowboy Troy,” Rolling Stone’s
Christian Hoard wrote of Horse.” That album, Hoard
said, “is as long on song-writing and down-home twang
as it is on genre-f*&^ing eccentricity.”
Or as Rich puts it: “Country listeners find it completely
okay to own an Eminem record or an OutKast record. I want
Big Boi to say, ‘I don’t really like country-western
music, but this Big & Rich record is cool stuff.’ ”
Following
the release of their first album, Big & Rich
joined big country stars Martina McBride and Tim McGraw on
a sold-out stadium tour. Then they went out on their own,
performing to huge crowds and to more critical acclaim.
“From
start to finish, a Big & Rich concert is
a visual and aural experience hard to forget,” music
critic Ken Tucker wrote recently. “Whether it’s
John Rich bedecked in his cowboy finest and playing a flying
V [guitar], or Big Kenny in one of his trademark [top hats],
high-stepping around the stage like a deranged drum major,
you ain’t seen nothing like this.”
The Big & Rich
connection with Vietnam veterans came in 2003 when the country
duo happened to walk into the Buffalo Bar in Deadwood. Niles
Harris was tending bar. Harris sported a distinctive black
top hat, which Big Kenny took an instant liking to. “Big
liked the hat, so he wore it during the set, and I just told
him to keep it,” Harris told
the Rapid City Journal last year.
The following day, Harris
gave the musicians a tour of old gold mines in the area and
told them the story of what happened on Hill 65 on November
8, 1965, one of the first big pitched battles of the American
war in Vietnam, and one of the costliest. Forty-eight 173rd
Sky Soldiers died in the fighting in triple-canopy jungle;
more than a hundred were wounded. Medic Lawrence Joel, who
treated more than a dozen men in mid-battle while seriously
wounded himself, received the Medal of Honor for his heroism
that day. Of the thirty men in Harris’s
platoon, just five survived. Harris himself was wounded at
Hill 65 and out of action for almost two years. He went on
to a 25-year Army career before retiring in 1987.
Harris kept
in contact with Big & Rich after their careers
took off. A year later they wrote “The 8th of November” in
tribute to Harris and the men of the 1st of the 503rd. Then,
in September of 2005, Harris accompanied Big & Rich and
a documentary film crew back to Vietnam. When they found
Hill 65, Harris ceremoniously buried the boots he wore during
that battle, and the three men offered a toast to the Americans
who perished there.
The resulting 51-minute documentary appeared
on the Great American Country cable network last June. Big & Rich
will perform the song, along with its music video, at the
Convention’s Opening Ceremonies. And Niles Harris will
be on hand for the occasion and for the song that John Rich
says that he and his partner “consider the most important
piece of music we’ve ever been a part of.”
MOVIN’ OUT
AGAIN
The excellent Twyla Tharp music and dance extravaganza Movin’ Out
is now back on the road after a six-month hiatus. The new
tour of the Vietnam War-themed production set to Billy Joel
tunes will hit several dozen smaller cities, such as Peoria,
Illinois; Toledo, Ohio; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Roanoke,
Virginia; Augusta, Georgia; and Lafayette, Louisiana; in
the United States and Canada through June 2008. It began
with a long run, from June 13-August 21, at Harrah’s
Casino in Atlantic City. The show’s web site does not
list the tour schedule, so keep an eye posted for it in your
neck of the woods.
In as many venues as will allow it, Tharp—as
she has done in the past—has made arrangements for
discounted tickets for veterans and active-duty military
personnel. At Harrah’s she invited members of an employee
Vietnam veterans group to the opening and cast party.
ARTS IN BRIEF
The Army Historical Foundation has announced its First Annual
Photo Contest. Two winning photos will be chosen and prizes
of $300 for first place and $100 for second place will be
awarded, along with the possibility that the winning photos
will be published in the foundation’s magazine, On
Point, or in another AHF publication.
Each photo must have
a U.S. Army-related subject prior to 2007 and must be an
unpublished, original work. Send your black-and-white prints,
color slides, or color
prints to: Graphic Designer, On Point, 2425 Wilson Blvd.,
Arlington, VA 22201, or e-mail your images to AHFphotos@gmail.com
The
deadline is July 15. For more info, contact Randy Yasenchak
at 703-522-7901,
ext. 4172, or e-mail randy.yasenchak@armyhistory.org
Members of Rochester, New York, Chapter 20
took part in the opening in February of “Ghosts in
the Landscape: Vietnam Revisited,” an exhibition of
46 prints by photographer and Marine Corps Vietnam veteran
Craig J. Barber, at the George Eastman House International
Museum of Photography and Film. Barber, who today is one
of the nation’s
top landscape photographers, served in Vietnam for 20 months.
He returned three times in recent years to the same places
where he once fought. The photographs in the exhibit were
taken with an eight-by-ten pinhole camera.
“These profound
and dreamlike photographs are far from the horrific images
we carry inside us that reduce Vietnam to a place of perpetual
guerrilla war,” said Alison
Nordstrom, the George Eastman House curator of photographs. “These
pictures look like dreams imperfectly remembered. Still and
slow as they are, they suggest an imminent scream of fear
or anger beneath an apparent tranquility.”
Maxine Hong
Kingston, the noted author who has worked closely with Vietnam
and other American war veterans for many years, took part
in a conversation with Bill Moyers on the Memorial Day Bill
Moyers Journal on PBS. The topic was her work helping veterans
express themselves on the printed page. The show is available
in its entirety on www.pbs.org/moyers
You can take a look
at a three-and-a-half-minute video preview of Crossing Over:
The Vietnam Stories, a still-being-developed stage play based
on Richard Currey’s acclaimed 1980
book, Crossing Over: A Vietnam Journal online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=
PbS7-MzY6_A The book, Currey told us, “has been
done on stage before, once in a student production at San
Francisco State University and another time by veteran-inmates
of Raiford State Prison in Florida, both in the early 1980s.” Stay
tuned for updates on the latest production.
Hooah!!!! Radio,
the Internet station that is aimed at active-duty military
folks as well as veterans and their families, has begun its
second year on the world wide web. The non-profit operation
is run completely by volunteers who play music and offers
news of interest to the militarily inclined. “As
the War on Terror plays out every night on the evening news,
Hooah!!!! Radio is a place where all can go for good music,
good fun, and unwavering support of our troops, veterans,
and their families,” Mary Ann Reitano, the assistant
director of marketing, told us. To tune in, go to www.hooahradio.com
Also
in the radio vein: John Thompson, who is just 36 years old,
started his own Internet radio station, www.radiovietnam.net,
in 2004 because he couldn’t find any other stations
that played the music he liked—tunes of the Vietnam
War era. Now the Ohio IT guy has hundreds of songs on the
site and has dedicated the enterprise to Vietnam veterans. “It’s
a blend of what was on the transistors in country as well
as back home,” he told us, a mixture of pop, rock,
hard rock, psychedelic rock and R&B. Thompson also “works
in AFVA PSAs, Chris Noel, presidential speeches, and some
movie quotes throughout the broadcast.”
The Last Ghost
of War, a documentary about a lawsuit filed by Vietnamese
victims of Agent Orange against dozens of American chemical
companies, which we mentioned in the January/February issue,
has been shown in recent months at college campuses on the
East Coast. The 57-minute film makes the case that the chemical
companies knew of the dangers of dioxin and that scientists
warned top officials against using it in Vietnam. The film
also deals with research projects by Vietnamese scientists
who linked Agent Orange to birth defects and diseases. For
more info, go to www.gardnerdocgroup.com
HALBERSTAM, WEBB,
AND VONNEGUT
David Halberstam, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times
Vietnam War correspondent and the author of The Best and
the Brightest (1972), the seminal book on Kennedy and Johnson
Vietnam War managers, died in a car crash April 23 in Menlo
Park, California. He was 73 years old and working on a book
about the famed 1958 NFL Championship game between the New
York Giants and the Baltimore Colts.
After graduating from
Harvard in 1955, Halberstam began his journalism career at
a small newspaper in West Point, Mississippi. He went to
Vietnam for the first time in 1962 and gained national fame
for his reporting of the war. He went to Vietnam in favor
of the American effort, but became an early critic of the
war. “His dispatches,” Halberstam’s
New York Times obituary said, “infuriated American
military commanders, but they accurately reflected the realities
on the ground.”
Halberstam quit daily journalism in
1967 and went on to write 21 books on topics as varied as
the Vietnam War, civil rights, baseball, football, and basketball.
Three weeks after Halberstam’s death, on May 13, another
noted Vietnam War correspondent, Kate Webb, died of cancer
at age 64. Webb, who was born in New Zealand, came to Vietnam
without a job in 1967. She soon found work freelancing for
United Press International and went on to head UPI’s
bureau in Cambodia.
Webb, one of few female Vietnam War correspondents,
is best known for her fearless, in-the-line-of-fire reporting
and for being taken prisoner by the NVA along with five other
journalists on April 7, 1971. The prisoners were held for
23 days. During her arduous captivity, erroneous reports
surfaced that Webb had died and several newspapers ran her
obituary.
On April 11, twelve days before Halberstam’s
death, another illustrious chronicler of an American war,
Kurt Vonnegut, died at 84 in a New York City hospital. Vonnegut,
who served in the U.S. Army in World War II, wrote fourteen
novels, including the masterful Slaughterhouse-Five, a fantastical
recreation of the WW II Dresden firebombing that came out
in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War. That book was seen
by many as a fiercely antiwar statement. Vonnegut witnessed
the firebombing firsthand as an American prisoner of war.
QUERIES
Toby Morris, a magazine photographer, is working on a series
of portraits of veterans who have PTSD. “I am just
taking simple, clean studio or environmental portraits,” Morris
told us, “which seldom takes more than an hour or two.
I arrange my schedule to visit veterans whenever and wherever
I find them.” If you’re interested go to www.tobymorris.com
or call 917-312-0621, and mention you found out about the
project in these pages.
Towers Productions, a non-fiction
TV production company, is putting together a documentary
telling the story of the Vietnam War through the voices of
those who participated in it. “The goal of the production,” Towers
tell us, “is to tell the first-person accounts and
visualize the war anew by marrying individual soldiers’ tales
to archive material filmed or photographed by the soldiers
themselves.” If you have images and are interested
in participating, contact Archive Manager Jennifer Scott
at 312-601-6967 or email jennifer.scott@towersproductions.com
Ginger
Cucolo is doing research on ID tags and dog tags for a book
she is writing. She is looking for personal stories dealing
with dog or ID tags that would help her convey “their
deeply personal meaning.” To
find out more, go to www.dogtaghistory.com
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2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
Street, Silver Spring, MD 20910