Weaving together interviews and written accounts of numerous veterans, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner add detail and nuance to our understanding of the roles that popular music played in the lives of American soldiers serving in Vietnam. As one would expect, the changing tastes of young Americans fighting the war reflected the changing tastes of their generation as a whole during the series of musical revolutions between 1956 and 1975, but as Bradley and Werner demonstrate, veterans’ memories gravitate toward songs that either explicitly – “Fortunate Son” – or by association – “Chain of Fools” – commented on their own situations. The ultimate example of a song whose original meaning shifted and deepened in the context of the war provides the book's title: in the introduction, the authors make the case for the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” whose lyrics express longing for escape from working-class life, as the “Vietnam Veterans’ National Anthem.”

If the book is not exactly full of surprises, it is full of poignant, vivid oral and written histories of veterans. Bradley and Werner punctuate their chapters with “solos” written by veterans with a wide range of experiences with music and with their military service. The authors admirably want the book to be true to veterans’ experience and language, and free of their own editorializing about the war, and they succeed on both counts. Three of the five chapters provide a narrative overview of changes in the war's soundtrack. Though the alignment of chronological divisions with shifts in musical styles and soldiers’ attitudes toward the war are understandably blurry, Bradley and Werner trace the “soundscape” through the pre-escalation phase, the “LBJ” phase, and the “Nixon” phase. In the war's early years, soldiers subsisted on a steady diet of mainstream pop and country – evocative hits for soldiers would have included, for instance, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “Mr. Lonely.” Early 1960s songs that referred directly to the war tended to echo World War II-era sentiments of patriotism and temporary separation from sweethearts, while more hawkish lyrics appeared in pop and country music throughout the decade, Sgt. Barry Sadler's 1966 hit “The Ballad of the Green Berets” being by far the most prominent example.

As American involvement escalated and rock and soul music quickly matured in the mid-1960s, the music's relevance deepened for soldiers, while their devotion to their favorite performers – the Beatles, the Stones, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Hendrix, Creedence – became increasingly intense. While chapter 2 – “Bad Moon Rising” – reflects the camaraderie and self-expression that soldiers gained from the music of the mid- to late 1960s, chapter 3 – “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin’-to-Die” – stresses the cynicism of the war's later years and the divisions music created among soldiers. Racial divisions in particular expressed themselves through musical taste, as country music reflected the values of older, white, conservative soldiers; soul and funk reflected black pride and black power; and psychedelic rock reflected the ethos of “heads,” mostly but not exclusively young and white.

The fourth chapter illuminates what might be called the logistics of bringing American pop to Vietnam – official AVFN radio, pirate radio, and Hanoi Hannah; portable tape decks and state-of-the-art electronics; visits from Nancy Sinatra and Johnny Cash; Asian bar bands who specialized in British and American pop; soldier–musicians writing songs and staging impromptu performances. For nonveteran readers who know only the music and some basic Vietnam War history, this is probably the most informative chapter. The fifth and final chapter surveys the uses of popular music in the aftermath of the war, with emphasis on veterans who have written and recorded their own songs. The authors also offer examples of how music helped veterans cope with the transition to civilian life and the role it plays in physical and psychological therapy. They pay tribute to Marvin Gaye's 1971 album What's Goin’ On, inspired by Gaye's brother's experience in Vietnam and focussed on the social problems confronting the country that veterans returned to. Most postwar music by nonveterans is dismissed, with the exception of Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the USA”; Bobby Muller of Vietnam Veterans of America credits Springsteen's advocacy with saving the organization and changing the image of Vietnam vets.

Overall, We Gotta Get Out of This Place is a lucidly written academic crossover book that should appeal to veterans as well as to journalists, teachers, and cultural historians. Despite occasional nods to studies such as Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006) and Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), Bradley and Werner generally avoid theory and go easy on cultural analysis. Instead they provide a wealth of firsthand accounts of soldiers’ experiences with music, deepening our understanding of the war and its soundtrack.