Doug Bradley

“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.

Badger Talks speaker and Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley will present “Writing their Way Home: Veteran Stories and Survival”. During his talk, Bradley will point out how writing has helped many veterans to recover from their war-time experiences. Specifically, as the author of three books grounded in the Vietnam experience and as one of the founding members of The Deadly Writers Patrol magazine, he will demonstrate how writing has helped veterans to return to themselves, their families, and their communities.