Who'll Stop the Rain

<p>In their 2015 award-winning book, <em>We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War</em>, 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 <em>Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America</em> 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.</p><p>Those insights, and others, can help redefine America’s public memory of Vietnam, one that invites a broader public understanding, sometimes written physically into the landscape via monuments, about what we revere and what we regret about who we are and what Vietnam did to us.</p><p>A chorus of voices in <em>Who’ll Stop the Rain</em>—famous and anonymous, female and male, veteran and non-veteran, American and Vietnamese—suggests new possibilities for understanding the legacy of Vietnam and, ultimately, for bringing the men and women who served their country in that controversial war home for good.</p>