Badger Talks
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Portrait of Doug Bradley

Doug Bradley

Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus

College of Letters & Science l Integrated Liberal Studies

Doug Bradley has worked for the UW for three decades, is a veteran of the Vietnam war and has written three books, DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle and co-authored, with Professor Craig Werner, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War which was named “Best Music Book of 2015” by Rolling Stone magazine. He and Dr. Werner co-taught a very popular class at UW–Madison on the music of the Vietnam War. His new book, Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America was released in December 2019.

Talks:

  • “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” places popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. The presentation explores how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. It also demonstrates that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American; men and women; officers and “grunts”—whose personal reflections drive the book’s narrative.

  • In their 2015 award-winning book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner placed popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. Over the next two years, they made more than 100 presentations coast-to-coast, witnessing honest, respectful exchanges among audience members. That journey prompted Bradley to write Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America and to further explore how the music of the era, shared by those who served and those who stayed, helped create safe, nonjudgmental environments for listening, sharing, and understanding.

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