James Brown in Vietnam (1968)

June 1968. Seven new US Army officers — six Afro-Americans, one Caucasian, all honorary lieutenant colonels — are collected from Tan Son Nhut, Saigon’s main airport, and rushed through the city’s muggy, dusty streets, along boulevards bustling with the noise of a million mopeds, jeeps and soldiers, past sandbagged checkpoints and gun posts, before clambering out at the steps of the Continental Hotel.

Dressed in jungle boots and fatigues, the officers unload their weapons. These include a Fender bass guitar, trumpet, tenor saxophone and guitar.

At the height of the Vietnam conflict, James Brown, with a dramatically downsized orchestra — just six musicians from a total of 22 — flew into the middle of the warzone. The mission was to play sweet, funky music to battle-fatigued US troops.

Dave Gallaher, an infrared specialist with the 16th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, remembers that Brown’s trip was big news among GIs: “When they said Bob Hope wasn’t going to come to Saigon on this tour, we were very disappointed,” he says. “Then we heard James Brown was coming!”

One of the era’s prime Afro-American icons, JB had been anointed “Soul Brother Number One” by the black community.

Brown himself acknowledged, “I knew that the black soldiers were complaining that the USO [United Service Organisations] didn’t send enough acts they could identify with, and I wanted to change that. I didn’t go just to perform for the blacks – I performed for the soldiers, period.”

The musicians the USO employed before Brown’s 1968 visit were often insipid country-and-western troupes.

Jarnes Brown’s Vietnam corps, however, comprised the heart of the hottest live act in the States: bassist Tim Drummond, drummer Clyde Stubblefield, guitarist Jimmy Nolen, saxophonist Maceo Parker, trumpeter Waymon Reed and esteemed funky diva Marva Whitney.

In 1968, the US controlled Saigon, but it was hardly a safe haven. In January, the North Vietnamese launched the devastating Tet Offensive. Just one month before Brown’s trip, the May Offensive started. Saigon was subsequently mortar-bombed each night.

“Flying into Saigon, you could see all the blown-up buildings and damage that had been done,” said Brown.

One of the principal targets was the president’s palace, near the Continental Hotel. JB remembered that just a few hours before they walked into the hotel, “a mortar shell hit a few doors down and killed 17 people”.

Viet Cong hitmen certainly operated in the city. “In my hotel room, the window was facing the president’s palace,” recalls Tim Drummond, Brown’s white bassist at the time. “It had a sign on it saying, ‘Don’t open the blinds with the light on behind you at night; you will be shot as a sniper’.”

“You could hear American bombs hitting a few miles out,” added Brown. “You could feel ’em too — the bed would shake.”

Bob Hope flew back to the safety of Bangkok, Thailand, after each show, but as Drummond points out, “We were in the thick of it.”

Soul Brother Number One and his 22-piece orchestra flew out from JFK airport on 5 June 1968. Brown cancelled $100,000 of domestic gigs to go to Vietnam.

After a stop in Tokyo, they performed in Korea for American troops enjoying some R&R.

At this point, the full orchestra was set to push on to Vietnam. But as the war intensified, Brown was abruptly told that only six musicians would go with him. This came as a relief for the majority of the orchestra, but Drummond, whom JB described as “a playing cat”, quickly volunteered.

“I said, I want to go to Vietnam, because I want to show people back here that black and white can get along,” he explains. Brown selected the other musicians out of necessity. “Just the essentials,” the bassist says. “Guitar, bass and drums, trumpet, sax.”

After one night in Saigon, Brown and his group geared up for their itinerary of three shows a day — late morning, mid-afternoon, early evening — with each performance often at a different camp.

Their first trip out of Saigon illustrated the dangers of gigging in Vietnam. JB remembered being reassured upon boarding a decrepit military aircraft, “This plane’s a workhorse. It’ll go anywhere.”

“But I looked out of the window and saw oil coming out of the engine!” recalls Drummond. “One of the guys in the air force went, ‘Oh shit!’ So we came in 20 feet off the ground where the Viet Cong were sleeping — they only moved at night.”

The crew and musicians braced for a white-knuckle emergency crash, but luckily the smouldering aircraft wobbled onto the swampy perimeter of the Tan Son Nhut airfield.

“The pilot said, ‘Everybody get out! And I mean move it!”‘ says Marva Whitney of the experience.

“We’re in the marshes, the doors open, no time for a ladder. It was like, Would someone give me a helping hand? Forget it!”

They watched as US planes attacked the enemy. “Right where we had just landed, here come the Viet Cong after the plane,” says Drummond. “We’d woken them up! That was a real toe-tapper. ”

The punishing Vietnam heat – up to 126° Fahrenheit (52° Celsius) tested the stamina of Brown and his band. For each show, they changed from combat fatigues into stage outfits, with Marva sporting fashionable miniskirts.

“You’ve got to give James Brown his credit; he had the greatest show,” says Whitney. “And the man really worked; he worked hard. He gave full shows, so you’re talking at least an hour.”

Since 1966, when Brown had collapsed from dehydration on-stage at the Apollo, a Harlem doctor had prescribed a regular intravenous injection of sodium lactate. In Vietnam, he admits, “I’d be so depleted I’d get my intravenous after almost every show.”

Marva handled Brown’s hair and struggled to mould just one or two curls in the wax-melting heat.  Whitney herself cheated, donning a wig.

Ultimately, though, sheer doggedness overcame the choking humidity and airborne dangers. The same tenacity fortified their electric performances.  “That was the best that band ever sounded,” argues Drummond, “stripped down like that. Oh, we got tight! Man, I wish we had recordings of that shit! We were smoking! The music could breathe!”

With Marva, the group pumped out Aretha Franklin classics; with JB himself, embryonic funk bombs like Get It Together, Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, I Got You (I Feel Good), and Cold Sweat.

The two concerts at Tan Son Nhut were in an air-conditioned theatre. In the early hours of the morning, before the afternoon gig, the Viet Cong rocketed the base.

At Long Binh, a huge army logistics complex 12 miles northeast of Saigon, 7,000 troops crushed into a 5,000-capacity theatre. Of this gig, the August 1968 edition of Ebony magazine reported, “The crowd turned out despite a 1 pm show time when the weather is so hot that even the Viet Cong take siestas.”

After the gigs, the band mingled with the troops. “A lot of ’em looked like 17- or 18-year-old kids, but they weren’t kids,” recalled Brown. “They were men. They had to be.”

Marva remembers some GIs just wanted to touch her hand. Others confided that they feared the war was unwinnable. “The fellas with less education were put on the front lines — they’d say, ‘We’re in trouble over here!'”

The band also witnessed increasingly hard drug abuse among GIs. “Some of the young guys after the shows, they’d be so fucked up — white and black,” says Drummond. “They could get pure heroin over there. ”

The group was transported to gigs by a ‘big-belly’ plane or helicopter. “A soldier always sat in the open door of the helicopter with a grenade launcher watching the ground to see if anything moved,” recalled Brown.

Whitney remembers that, despite their admittedly ineffectual non-combatant status, they were often shot at: “You would hear ‘Ping! Ping! Ping!’ — that’s bullets hitting our plane. We actually had to get out of our seats, roll and get flat in the belly of the plane.” At these times, panicky thoughts of North Vietnamese prison camps crowded Marva’s head.

Back in Saigon, the group watched in silent dread as neon-bright tracers whooshed toward them. “It was kind of pretty, if you didn’t think they were meant to kill you,” deadpanned Brown.

James Brown’s final gig in Vietnam was on Friday at Bear Cat, a camp where the 9th Infantry Division was stationed in Binh Duong province. It resembled a huge, surreal outpost straight out of Apocalypse Now.

“Dug out of the side of a hill, around the rim, at the top, tanks were pulled up like at a drive-in, with guys sitting in the hatches looking down on the show,” recalled Brown.

Drummond recalls about 40,000 troops being present: “It looked like the Hollywood Bowl — talk about a show.”

But though surrounded by armed GIs and artillery, they were still potential targets. “We were about two or three songs into it, and I heard this BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! They were shooting at the goddamn Viet Cong. ”

After one hell of a week of shows, JB and his band left the war zone, though not before recording a session for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network on the Saturday morning.

After flying to the Philippines, they reunited with the rest of the orchestra in Okinawa. But the implacable reality of war caught up with Drummond in Tokyo, where he was informed that some GIs he’d befriended had been killed.

It tripped up Whitney a couple of months later, too. “I’m walking downtown in New York City, shopping,” she remembers. “All of a sudden, I start shaking, and I can’t stop. I’m going into shock. I know it.”

“I don’t know how I made it,” Brown admitted. “God was carrying me all the time; it was like footprints in the sand. I didn’t have no problem.”

But headlining the Soul Festival at Yankee Stadium just three days after their return, stress symptoms set in. The crowd rushed onto the sacred turf of the baseball pitch three times, but unlike the extraordinary Boston Garden gig just two months earlier, Brown struggled to assert control.

From the stage, he grimly declared: “We went to Vietnam to show a black man could have self-respect, but I tell you . . . tonight is my last night. I’m finished with the stage. I can’t take it no more.” The audience exited in jarring silence.

But despite this emotional fallout, JB and the musicians readily appreciated how edifying their performances were for the often disillusioned GIs.

“We brought great joy to the guys there; that was the bottom line of the whole frigging thing,” argues Drummond.

Dave Gallaher remembers the concert he experienced as “very uplifting for me”. Thousands of other soldiers were equally inspired.

In August ’68, Ebony magazine noted, “Brown wants to go back, and urges other soul entertainers to get to Vietnam.” JB conceded, “Our men are starving for soul entertainment over there.”

Marva Whitney believes the shows had a stronger effect. “They could get down! They could feel the root. They wanted to jump off their frustrations. Soul music can make you turn a flip if you able. And when you sit in that bunker, and you think about what you’ve heard, you can feed offa that. That’s food for the soul!”

Excerpted from Mojo Magazine #116. July 2003. James Maycock.