Reel-To-Real: Intimate Audio Epistolarity During the Vietnam War Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requireme

Home , Adrian Cronauer, A Letter Home, Colditz (audio drama), Devocalization, Hanoi Hannah, Kramer (musician)

Reel-to-Real: Intimate Audio Epistolarity During the Vietnam War

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By Matthew Alan Campbell, B.A. Graduate Program in Music

The Ohio State University 2019

Dissertation Committee Ryan T. Skinner, Advisor Danielle Fosler-Lussier Barry Shank

Copyrighted by Matthew Alan Campbell 2019

Abstract

For members of the United States Armed Forces, communicating with one’s loved ones has taken many forms, employing every available medium from the telegraph to Twitter. My project examines one particular mode of exchange—“audio letters”—during one of the US military’s most trying and traumatic periods, the Vietnam War. By making possible the transmission of the embodied voice, experiential soundscapes, and personalized popular culture to zones generally restricted to purely written or typed correspondence, these recordings enabled forms of romantic, platonic, and familial intimacy beyond that of the written word. More specifically, I will examine the impact of war and its sustained separations on the creative and improvisational use of prosthetic culture, technologies that allow human beings to extend and manipulate aspects of their person beyond their own bodies. Reel-to-reel was part of a constellation of amateur recording technologies, including Super 8mm film, Polaroid photography, and the Kodak slide carousel, which, for the first time, allowed average Americans the ability to capture, reify, and share their life experiences in multiple modalities, resulting in the construction of a set of media-inflected subjectivities (at home) and intimate intersubjectivities developed across spatiotemporal divides.

Dedication

To my grandparents for your love, service, and support. Your courage and fortitude in the face of

insurmountable odds inspired this project and will continue to in my future endeavors.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my advisor, Ryan Skinner, who continually animated my academic curiosity but, through constant challenge and corralling counsel also kept me on track. I would also like to Danielle Fosler-Lussier for her invaluable guidance, both scholarly and practical. I am deeply indebted to you both. So many professors have inspired the work that follows but I would like to specifically extend my gratitude to Barry Shank, Dorothy Noyes, Galey Modan, Brian

Rotman, Udo Will, David Huron, Graeme Boone, and Katherine Borland for showing me how to write what I love. I am also indebted to archivist Sheon Montgomery of the Texas Tech

University and curator Lynn Heidelbaugh of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Thanks also to my many interlocutors for sharing your stories with me, and to members of the United

States Armed Forces more generally.

On a personal note, I thank my parents whose tireless and unwavering support made this dissertation project tenable through a particularly challenging period. I would also like to thank

Brian Campbell, Kelan Lowney, and Joseph Virskus, whose social sanctuary and intellectual foundations allowed me to make this project a reality without losing my sense of self.

Thanks to you all.

Vita

December 9, 1979……………….Born, Spokane, WA

2004……………………………...B.A. Music Composition, Whitman College

2009-2014……………………….Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University

2011-2013…………………….....Graduate Research Assistant, The Ohio State University

2014-2015……………………….Lecturer, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Music Area of Emphasis: Musicology/Ethnomusicology Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization: Folklore

Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………….ii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..iv Vita……...………………………………………………………………………………………….v Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………………..vii Transcription Key………………………………………………………………………………..viii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1: Distanced Dialogue…………………………………………………………………...16 Chapter 2: The American Military Epistolarium…………………………………………………50 Chapter 3: Scene-Setting & Methods…………………………………………………………...106 Chapter 4: Audio Epistolarity…………………………………………………………………...148 Conclusion: Legacies of Audio Epistolarity…………………………………………………….257 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………..276 Appendix A: The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University Sources..…………….294

Abbreviations

AFE Armed Forces Entertainment AFRN Armed Forces Radio Network AFVN Armed Forces Vietnam Network APO Army Post Office ARC American Red Cross ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam DASPO Department of the Army Special Photographic Office DOD Department of Defense EOC Enlisted & Officers Clubs (I)SOP (Informal) Standard Operating Procedure ICP Internal Colonial Postal Union MARS Military Auxiliary Radio System PRC Portable Radio Communications PSYOPS Psychological Operations USO United Service Organizations VVAW Vietnam Veterans Against the War NVA North Vietnamese Army VC Viet-Cong

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Transcription Key

… pause - mid-syllable, word interruption ? raised pitch ending . down pitch ending , phrasal pause, maintained pitch […] ellipsis repeated vowels extended syllables italics accent via raised pitch CAPITALIZATION accent via increased volume [brackets] paralinguistic respirations, prosodic qualifiers, non-vocal sounds, co-linguistic action, context cues

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Introduction

To me this is so intimate, so personal, just something I really want for myself … this taping is so … I wouldn’t tape to anybody but you and I don’t want you to tape to anybody else but me, and the kids. This is just something I feel because it brings the closeness that we really need right now … together. And, I just … want it this way. And … I don’t know, sometimes I feel selfish in a lot of my feelings but where you’re concerned, in this awfully lonely void, I feel I can just not think any further than our life together, and the children at times […] Our whole day revolves around our feelings and thoughts for you honey. You don’t have to worry about that. You’re our life, together. (Joan Gunby 1967)

It was just more … real … as if they were there. The tapes were really what got me through it. (Jim Gunby 2012)

These sentiments, expressed by my grandmother and grandfather respectively forty-five years apart, allude to the palliative, embodied and intersubjective salience of the auditory “real,” communicated between Spokane and Khorat, home and “the hooch,” via technology newly available to military families during the Vietnam War: the portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. For service members stationed abroad, maintaining substantive and emotionally fulfilling relationships with one’s family and friends at home is essential to sustaining one’s mental health and, by extension, occupational readiness. In addition to institutional resources, personal affective networks are also central to one’s ability to preserve one’s intersubjective integrity, a necessary

1 precondition for successful reintegration into civilian and domestic life upon returning from a tour of duty.

US military’s most trying and traumatic periods, the Vietnam War. By making possible the transmission of the embodied voice, experiential soundscapes, and personalized popular culture to zones generally restricted to purely written or typed correspondence, these recordings enabled forms of romantic, platonic, and familial intimacy beyond that of the written word. More specifically, I will examine the impact of war and its sustained separations on the creative and improvisational use of prosthetic culture, technologies that allow human beings to extend and manipulate aspects of their person—most commonly, memory—beyond their own bodies. Reel- to-reel was part of a constellation of amateur recording technologies, including Super 8mm film,

Polaroid photography, and the Kodak slide carousel, which, for the first time, allowed average

Americans the ability to capture, reify, and share their life experiences in multiple modalities, resulting in the construction of a set of media-inflected subjectivities (at home) and intimate intersubjectivities developed across spatiotemporal divides.

But what does it mean for a medium—principally, in this case, the acousmatic2 voice—to change one’s subjectivity or relationship to others? In the context of combat zones in Vietnam, phone calls were extremely rare, making the receipt and recording of reel-to-reel tapes the only way to actually hear the voices, and to experience the everyday aural environments, of one’s

1 This is the most commonly used term to distinguish the material artifacts of audio epistolarity from other forms and the one I will employ for the rest of this dissertation. Other common names include “auditory letter,” “tape letter,” “audio correspondence,” and “reel letter.” 2 Coined by Pierre Schaffer (1966), this term refers to the by then ubiquitous experience of hearing sounds without also seeing their instigating, vibratory source, common to all sound recordings. 2 intimates. From frying bacon to watching The Kingston Trio on The Milton Berle Show, pirate radio skits to the buzzing of giant dobsonflies, the importance to interpersonal intimacy of sharing mundane moments of “real time” cannot be understated. Among the most important

“untranscribable” sounds, according to my interlocutors, were those of infants born in absentia or children too young to write, voices joined in song or laughing at a hoochmate’s joke, and even the sounds of the family pet. These and other affordances of the auditory allowed service members and their correspondents to viscerally exist in more than one place at once for short periods of time, keeping all affectively involved in the very real and personal contingencies and consequences of the conflict while also reminding them that, in the words of one recordist, “the world isn’t all the war.”3

Beyond grounding individuals on the front and at home in the affective lives of their significant others, the recording practices I will describe were also irreducibly social in both production and reception. As most of those using tape recorders and playback systems did not have access to headphones or a surplus of private space, both making and listening to these tapes was almost always a shared, and often public, affair. Over the course of roughly eight years4 of sustained practice, involving the entire family, barracks, neighborhood, base, and even members of a local village in one’s “private” missives, became the norm rather than the exception. As many veterans describe it, before dealing with the culture shock of foreign deployment and the psychological necessity of dehumanizing one’s enemy, one must learn not only to accept but also to depend on the individuals in one’s unit, despite vast disparities in cultural, economic, religious, ethnic and political identities. The necessity of, in a way, hyper-humanizing one’s comrades often

3 Terry Presgrove, “Audiotaped letters sent by Terry Presgrove to his parents during his tour in Vietnam, August 1968 to July 1969,” Terry Presgrove Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2443AU2557, 1968-1969. 4 While US involvement in Vietnam stretches back to 1955 and ended officially with the fall of Saigon in 1975, the vast majority of my corpus was recorded between 1964 and 1972. 3 came down to sharing the experience of balancing a host of conflicting roles and allegiances— parent, soldier, citizen, child, sibling, disciple—and “making it work” in order to survive the next day. These connections were frequently made over shared correspondence; reading letters aloud, sharing pictures, baked goods, music, and, during Vietnam, listening to tapes from (others’) homes and being a part of your hoochmate’s recorded reply. By simply hearing a buddy’s kid describe flunking her math test, one is suddenly involved in not only the immediate precarity of the current situation and responsibility to one’s country, family, unit, and the lives of those one has been sent to protect, but also the realities of a neighborhood, a household, and a bedroom thousands of miles away.5

The skills involved in managing these multiple ways of relating are not unique to military life but, in many ways, the stakes of excelling or failing are exponentially higher. It is into these micro-level details of the emotional, psychological and embodied techniques of intersubjective

“work” that this project will delve. As I will argue, in adapting their epistolary performance to reel-to-reel—an unfamiliar and cumbersome but, most importantly, undiluted auditory medium— my interlocutors “opened the door” to both intentional and accidental incursions of what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “the real” (Kittler 1999).

Theoretical Introduction

Adapting Jacques Lacan’s tri-partite division of the intrapsychic formation of subjectivity during “the mirror stage”—the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary – to new forms of emergent

“media” at the turn of the 20th century, Kittler argues that when

[m]achines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in the past, merely those of muscles … with this differentiation—and not with

5 In a town they had never been to, nor likely heard of, given the disproportionately rural, working-class, “small town” constitution of military’s forces at the height of the draft (Appy 1993). 4

steam engines and railroads—a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic (16).

This division, occasioned by the introduction of audio recording and film, formed a new

“discourse network,” defined by Kittler as “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (1990, 14). In Gramophone,

Film, Typewriter (1999), Kittler draws (loose) parallels between society and self; the aforementioned division’s shattering of the semiotic bottleneck of the written word, whose hegemony had defined humanity’s “storable” knowledge up to this point, with the infant’s encounter with an image of their “whole self,” instigating a process of uniting into a conscious

“I” what had before been a collection of fragmentary, libidinal urges (Kittler 1999; Lacan 1949 in

Loos 2002). As Kittler argues first sound recording, and then film forced humanity to “face itself” anew, changing our baseline perception, and semiotic mediation, of the external world, primarily in the new accessibility of “the real” (1999).

In the Lacanian system, in contradiction to the accessible orders of the imaginary and symbolic,6 the real corresponds to “that which resists representation” in language or any other symbology and is thus fundamentally inaccessible by consciousness, and often framed as the source of uncontrollable “trauma” (Loos 2002). As defined by Lacan’s most trusted translator,

Jacques-Alain Miller, the real is “the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic” (280).

For Kittler, the real corresponds to sound recording which, in its indiscriminate capture, gave humanity access to “primal sound,” that which lies outside the realm of not only immediate attention, but also intelligibility and even the range of human hearing. As he states,

6 A fuller explanation of what is a dense, complicated and, at times, contradictory system theorized by Lacan himself (and many others) over the course of three decades, would require a violent oversimplification, and is outside the scope of this project. 5

the phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise (23).

Importantly, Kittler draws special attention to the “physiology of the voice” and attempts by the military to harness “the real” for strategic gain. In the first case, while discussing the irreducibly dialogic practice of psychoanalysis, Kittler highlights the communicative affordances, both interpersonal and intrapsychic, of “[m]echanization,” which “relieves people of their memories and permits a linguistic hodgepodge hitherto stifled by the monopoly of writing” (82,

86). In the latter, he examines the role of war in identifying the ineliminable, auditory dimensions of international conflict and military intelligence; and warfare’s arbiters subsequent honing of these new registers into strategies of surveillance, propaganda, and eventually combat itself

(1999). For my interlocutors, the residue of “the real” presented both communicative affordances and semiotic minefields. The same tape was capable of holding both the unmistakable, affective longing authenticating a declaration of love in its prosodic accompaniment, and the whistle, thud and explosion of nearby ordnance, the imminence of its threat difficult to ascertain for an inexperienced listener. However, no matter the content, these encounters with their own and their intimates’ affective aural traces encouraged further experimentation. Tactically employing a diverse array of performative modes inspired by popular culture, innovative means of creative consumption, and, in many cases, skill sets gained via military training, they developed myriad means, both playful and personal, of coping with the traumas of war through dialogic connection.

At the same time, they acquired a deeper understanding of themselves as part of an irreducibly intersubjective web, defined by a phenomenological sense of “enduring intimacy” (Maclaren

2014, 60).

Working with the phenomenological tools developed by his mentor, Edmund Husserl, most importantly, the “intentionality of consciousness” and the “lifeworld,” Martin Heidegger fused the bifurcated philosophical domains of the materialist and idealist with a new definition of human existence as “being-in-the-world” (2008 [1962]). The dominant theory of mind at the time

(and today) was Cartesian/Kantian, conceiving of the mind as the “pilot” of a body inherently detached from the world of things, interacting only with its own representations derived and constructed from sensory input. Husserl reconceived consciousness as irreducibly relational and intentionality not “as a property of the individual mind but the categorical framework in which mind and world become intelligible” (Deranty 2009, 7). In this conception, consciousness is always consciousness of something, and thus inseparable from perception, making humanity forever directly imbricated in the world. An individual’s “lifeworld” then consists of their constantly sedimenting and shifting ways-of-being “against which [their] everyday attitude towards [themselves], the objective world and others receive their ultimate justification” (Beyer

2016). This same intentionality, more importantly, is irreducibly embodied,7 and extends to other subjectivities, with whom, in our daily interactions, we are constantly, intersubjectively entwined.

For Kym Maclaren, this imbrication requires an inescapable “ontological intimacy,” combining Jean Paul Sartre’s primordial encounter with the other, i.e. “being-for-others,” and

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “coexistence” (Maclaren 2014, Sartre 1992 [1956], Merleau-Ponty

2002 [1962]). In Sartre’s “The Look,” he argues that our encounter with the “other” is defined first not by our perception of them as an object of our consciousness, but rather our alienating sensation of being noticed by them; a subjectivity that “even as we feel it upon us, escapes us”

7 This is akin to a combination of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptions of “habitus” – or “[a] structuring structure, which organises practices and the perception of practices” – produced through daily interaction with their “social field,” with an individual’s imagined understanding of the “rules” and “stakes” necessary for “playing the game” that is social interaction, what Bourdieu refers to as the “illusio” (Bourdieu 1984, 170; Bourdieu 2000). 7

(1956, 367). He states that “[i]n experiencing the look, in experiencing myself as an unrevealed object-ness, I experience the inapprehensible subjectivity of the other directly and with my being”

(361-362). Beyond confirming the existence of other subjectivities in a shared world, this experience is both fundamentally alienating—the recognition that this other can see one’s “own reality” in a way we cannot—but also motivating; engaging an essential desire to understand this perspective in order to fully understand ourselves, and the world we both inhabit (Maclaren 2014,

58).

Merleau-Ponty reminds us that this encounter is also fundamentally embodied; that what is being shared is not simply a perspectival consciousness but, a set of intentionalities and affordances, an orientation towards the world that he calls “the habit-body,” with which we coextensively “coexist”:

Everything happens as if the other person's intention inhabited my body, or as if my intentions inhabited his body. The gesture I witness sketches out the first signs of an intentional object. This object becomes present and is fully understood when the powers of my body adjust to it and fit over it. The gesture is in front of me like a question, it indicates to me specific sensible points in the world and invites me to join it there. Communication is accomplished when my behavior finds in this pathway its own pathway. I confirm the other person, and the other person confirms me (2002, 191).

This shared intercorporeality is a feature of all interaction but, is more immediately apparent in what Maclaren calls “momentary intimacies” (Maclaren 2014, 60). At their most extreme, in say, listening to a particularly engaging speaker, our own embodiment effortlessly extends to include them, “taking up” new ways of perceiving, organizing and constituting reality, ways that necessarily exceed our own in their particularity and can even become part of our ongoing comportment (Maclaren 2014; Merleau-Ponty 2002). This example also evinces the “strange spatiality” of ontological intimacy, the speaker’s way-of-being simultaneously “over there” and

“in here,” i.e. one’s immediate body (ibid. 55). Or, in another example on the opposite end of the affective spectrum, experiencing intense hatred for an intimate can make one feel “distant” or

“detached” from them, while they simultaneously occupy and color one’s every waking thought, making them impossible to get out of one’s head (ibid.). From a phenomenological perspective, our colloquial reference to physical distance when discussing interpersonal intimacy is not merely metaphorical. However, ontological intimacy does not necessarily entail the “feeling” of interpersonal intimacy typically referred to by my interlocutors.

For this feeling to develop, participants must build, through extended copresence, an enduring, shared, experiential world, that they carry with them, having incorporated the other into each other’s “body schema,” and through which they now habitually perceive the world, themselves, and their daily life (ibid.). Temporally, this entwined schema’s past is continually evoked in shared ways-of-being, the feeling of the other’s words in one’s mouth, for example, constituting and intimate intertextuality. Its present is invisible, “effacing itself” in its self-evident particularity, making “room for the conversation at hand” (ibid. 61). While its future is quietly sustained, or extravagantly conjured, in the continual co-constitution of a mutual promise to aid and anchor, but also allow for individual autonomy and room for growth and change. Echoing my grandmother’s closing words above, Maclaren defines “enduring intimacy” as,

the establishment of a shared life that is equally the institution of a new realization of the world and our identity within it - a world and identity that are inseparable from this other in her singular way of being. The experience of intimacy is in large part the experience of this other as a condition of meaning in the world (61).

Separated by crisis, in a country divided, and with little control over either, my interlocutors addressed the one world they could, buttressing their intercorporeal co-presence by transmitting their auditory lives, creating a shared lifeworld and imagined habit-body, in-between.

Corpus Collection & Methods

This project began with a family communication as humble and intimate as the bulk of this document’s primary sources. In 2010, my mother made an offhand comment about “sending a tape” to my grandfather in 1967 while he was serving as a pilot in Vietnam. Only nine years old at the time, she recalled struggling through a bumpy performance of “Edelweiss” on her child- sized guitar, a performance he nonetheless loved and cherished, a sentiment he verbally articulated in his “reply” the following week. As an avid “mixtaper,” I was immediately intrigued by what seemed a similarly amateur, creative practice of physical, sonic exchange that preceded the “cassette culture” of the mid-1980s by nearly two decades. After digging up and digitizing my grandparents’ small number of remaining reels, I conducted interviews with the primary

“performers,” Lt. Col. Jim & Joan Gunby, and the other surviving members of my maternal family. Blending phenomenological and anthropological methods, I analyzed this small corpus as a vehicle for sonic intimacies.8 This dissertation represents an extension of this project beyond my own “family folklore” (Stewart 2008) to examine this practice as a newly salient tool in the arsenal of military correspondents during the Vietnam War.

In the summer of 2015, I spent six weeks in Washington, D.C., conducting archival research in the holdings of Veterans History Project and the American Red Cross at the Library of

Congress, and at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Archive. The following year, I expanded my search to state-run and university archives, finding a particularly rich and varied repository at the

Texas Tech University Vietnam Center and Archive. Through these sources and subsequent internet searches, message board contacts, and personal snowball sampling, I eventually gained

8 I have presented versions of this work at the IU/OSU Graduate Folklore at Indiana Bloomington and The Ohio State University (Campbell 2012a, 2016), the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference at Oxford University (2012c), The American Folklore Society Annual Conference (2012b), and The Music and Diplomacy Conference, Tufts and Harvard Universities (Campbell 2013). 10 access to roughly 700 individual “audio letters,” comprising roughly sixty sets of wartime correspondence, that is collections of tapes organized around a central individual deployed to

Southeast Asia and their stateside network of relations.9 Although I draw individual examples from many of the above, as my project concerns the emergent construction of disparate, distanced intimacies, I focused my attention on collections containing tapes from both “ends” of the communicative chain, as well as those with a larger number of participants, reducing the quantity of directly relevant exchanges to roughly thirty.

As I will discuss in Chapter 4, the preponderance of extant exchanges deriving solely from Vietnam is due to a variety of factors, including the difficulty of maintaining personal items when deployed, the privileging of battle over “home-front” accounts in the historical record, and the auratic quality of artifacts from those who did not come home. In addition, the practical considerations of taping in “the bush” vs. intermediate staging areas means that more tapes were preserved from those spending at least some of their time in the rear echelon or “combat- adjacent” zones. Geographically, my resulting analysis includes tapes from service members all over the country, including the Pacific Northwest, New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southwest, and the West Coast, but the majority derive from Texas. Texas Tech University’s

Vietnam Archive is the largest in the world and, although they accept submissions from all over the country, they are also a state-run and locally-focused organization, giving a slightly disproportionate percentage of my corpus a Texas twang. Finally, some of my analysis is based on interviews conducted with surviving veterans over the past three years, including my grandparents. Nevertheless, the majority of my interlocutors’ tapes are only available to me

9 These exchanges range in size from one to seventy-five “turns,” with the average collection comprising six to twelve surviving tapes. 11 because they have already passed on, prompting their artifacts’ submission to the archives in which I found them and thus most of the “voices” in this dissertation are historically in situ.

Though a large percentage of my corpus is part of the public record or freely accessible, either through digital archive access, personal websites, or YouTube, the content, as well as my analytical focus on intimate discourse, is exceedingly personal. Postal privacy has been the law of the land since the Postal Act of 1792 but its popular construction as a sacrosanct space for individual confession, and interpersonal profession of intimate exchange is unparalleled in the

American media imaginary. I will, therefore, only refer to my interlocutors by name if I, or their materials’ affiliated archive, have received express (and enthusiastic) permission. However, many tapes contain the voices of relatives, children, and friends who may or may not have been given the option to consent to publication. In these cases, I have employed pseudonyms to obscure their identities.

In Chapter 1, I examine epistolarity as social practice, and the intersubjective affordances of the medium as a site for interpersonal worldbuilding. In particular, I focus on the means by which letter-writers compose imagined simulacra of presence for themselves and their readers, drawing on a diverse set of conventions and literary techniques in order to construct interstitial, dialogic spaces that trouble spatiotemporal and generic boundaries. The following chapter charts a history of military epistolarity in the United States, with an emphasis on the popular adoption and adaptation of new technologies of exchange in response to changing cultural needs, from mourning in absentia to institutional censorship. In each conflict, I highlight correspondents’ interpersonal negotiations with socio-political facticities that challenge pre-deployment worldviews, while maintaining my focus on the constructions of microlevel bulwarks against intersubjective collapse.

In the first half of Chapter 3, I present brief, contextualizing histories of “voice mail,” magnetic recording and the introduction, and ultimate commercial failure, of the reel-to-reel tape recorder. Despite the best efforts of inventors, manufacturers and marketers, recording practice rarely matched prescription, paving the way for myriad alternative avenues and practices. Many of these uses were explicitly communicative and, in the often complicated and conflicted lifeworld of wartime Vietnam, presented a panoply of interpellating voices, both institutional and personal, consumerist and pirated. With a new means of capturing this media menagerie, service members and their intimates focused their microphones on their newly manipulatable and salient experiential soundscapes, and especially, the embodied voice and popular culture, the dense layering of which constitutes the unique character of Vietnam-era audio epistolarity.

Chapter 4 constitutes my primary corpus analysis in which I will examine the unique affordances and generative gaps exposed in the “translation” of written epistolarirty into the auditory frame. In particular, I will argue that the incursion, reification, and playfully conscious deployment of the “auditory real,” from chortles to choppers, whispers to sirens, and print- through to jump-cuts, helped suture the ruptures in the intersubjective habit-bodies of intimate relations divided by the contingencies of war. An in-depth discursive analysis of prosody is outside the scope of this project (analyzing just one correspondence would be a project unto itself), so I will instead focus on the less semantic end of the semiotic spectrum, discussing the salience of paralinguistic vocalizations—laughing, crying, sighing—particularly emotive performances encouraged by the audio frame, and multigeneric performances that blur the boundary between “speech” and “song.” To do so, I will be employing some conventions of conversation analysis in my transcriptions, the notations for which can be found in the

Transcription Key above. In general, in order to retain the “feel” of natural speech central to my interlocutor’s experience of audio epistolarity, I have retained “dropped g’s,” colloquial

13 contractions (e.g. “whaddya”), word particles, repetitions, fillers and other elements of the linguistic “real” that are typically excised from written transcriptions. In the final, concluding chapter, I will jump ahead a decade and a half to examine the structural, but also aesthetic and affective, parallels between audio letters and “mixtapes.” Through creative consumption and sonic bricolage, both practices sought to unite individuals divided by circumstance, culture or geography through shared audition of personal curation, connecting them to larger intimate counterpublics of shared ideals and anxieties (Berlant 2008, Warner 2002).

In both academic and popular media, there is a rich history of work utilizing the epistolarium of the Vietnam War. These include dozens of edited volumes of letters, histories, journalistic anthologies, novels, memoirs, narrative films, and documentaries, each so plentiful and saturated, they comprise genres unto themselves. In a sense, this multimodal and multigeneric density is particularly appropriate for a conflict whose conduct, coverage, and critique blended popular culture and the US military industrial complex to an as yet unprecedented degree. What has received far less attention are the means by which these communications were constructed,10 the affective networks they created, and the innovative and improvisatory production and use of both unusual and “unofficial” channels, in an alternative discourse network defined by amateur experimentation. Although “tape art” movements had been occurring in sequestered art worlds in cultural hubs and universities, my interlocutors’ “intervention” represents the first mass-adoption and creative implementation of amateur communicative audio recording. While the techniques of tape art and epistolary recording are similar, it is their ethos of personally-constructed, intimate contact “at all costs” that is most relevant to the intimate counterpublics of the “American

Underground” of the 1980s. Generically and aesthetically promiscuous, the “indie” ethico-

10 The intricacies of “everyday epistolarity” and other mundane “documents of life” have only recently been addressed within academia (Plummer 2001; Stanley 2001, 2015). 14 aesthetic youth networks of the American Underground were primarily composed of subaltern voices, finding each other in the void of Reagan’s America through one-to-one exchange of DIY zines, posters, t-shirts, demos and mixtapes, much of it exchanged in the earlier years, through the post. Vietnam-era audio epistolarity represents a missing chapter in the history of semi-public, intimate social networks, and a different kind of affective, rather than purely technological, trickle down of military technology to the masses story than those typically told (Virilio 1989; Kittler

1999, xxxvi).

Chapter 1: Distanced Dialogue

Letters, as both objects and practice, “disturb binary distinctions”: between speaking and writing, private and public, here and there, then and now, presence and absence, genre and praxis, the authenticated “I” and the imagined “You,” giving the form an aura of absolute freedom, yet constrained by centuries of prescriptive convention (Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012, 209). In this this chapter, I will review the relevant literature regarding the “intimate” (“personal,”

“familiar,” “private,” etc.) letter—as opposed to other related forms, from “open” to “fictional,”

“business” to “news” (all of which have left their mark) —as it developed in the mid-19th century and became the dominant medium of the American epistolary imaginary. Along the way, I will distinguish epistolary correspondence from other forms of “life writing” (Jolly 2001) and the role of this practice in the larger ecosystem of “documents of life” (Plummer 2001). Following Liz

Stanley, I will dig down to the foundations that connect Cicero’s decrees to the Post-It grocery list, before building back up to establish five distinctive contours of the “intimate” letter not in terms of genre, form or style, but rather as social praxis and the fulfillment of an intersubjective contract. These sections will cover the emergent ethics of exchange, referred to as “the epistolary pact” (Altman 1982, 89); the form’s distinctive troubling of spatiotemporal boundaries; the letter as technology of self and the construction of an epistolary “simulacra of presence;” its irreducible materiality; and what Liz Stanley, Andrea Salter and Helen Dampier have termed “letterness”

(2012, 264), or the form’s voracious appetite in gobbling up any and all genres to satisfy its interlocutors’ desire for connection.

Closing out the chapter, I will briefly sketch the history of what David Henkin has called the “American Postal Revolution,” whose slow accretion of disparate practices contributed to the formation of a postal discourse network, distinguished by a newly accessible and interpellateable citizenry and its constituent imagined communities (a formation quickly ruptured/amended by emergent telecommunications technologies) and which laid the foundation for our contemporary understanding of “epistolary intimacy” (2006, 10). This discussion will then continue in Chapter

2, where I will delve into the history of the American military “epistolarium” (Stanley 2004), and the suite of technics, existential ethics, and technological assemblages that enabled the emergence of the short-lived “audio letter.”

Life Writing

Kenneth Plummer’s “documents of life” (1983, 2001) describes both an oft-ignored category of data and a critical humanist methodology for their analysis. Plummer’s original definition focused on self-created artifacts, such as letters, diaries, quilts and photographs, as well as the scholarly elicitations of oral historians and folklorists. But, as Stanley notes, scholars influenced by the “narrative turn” have since expanded the category to include other forms of

“naturally-occurring” evidence of individuals’ interpellation by their respective socio-cultural and politico-infrastructural milieus, from medical prescriptions and license plates, to receipts, scoresheets and computer keyboards (2013, 4). Once these documents are attended to, one begins to see the world as “crammed full … of these expressions of personal life … hurled out into the world” that are essential to knitting together “the fabric of everyday life” (Plummer 2001, 17;

Stanley 2013, 4). However, much of these everyday, textual ephemera are not simply records of actions but, like J. L. Austin’s (1975) performative utterances, constitute the actions themselves, performing a great deal of the essential “work” of social life, from directing traffic to conducting

17 relationships (Stanley 2013, 4). Humanistic scholars tackling this kind of data employ a variety of methods but most are unified by a central question—“how [do] such text[s] help organise lives and vice versa”?—and an analytical/ethical conviction that “people are active, competent interpreters and theorisers of their own lives and those of other people … fully and reflexively agents in the making of social life” (ibid. 5, 6). This perspective is “native,” as it were, to contemporary ethnographic discourse, but I cite it here to underscore the inherently historical, and thus temporally distanced and displaced nature of my project and corpus. Although ethnographic interviews and oral histories will enter into my analysis in Chapter 4, the majority of my interlocutors’ voices were not originally directed at me, let alone the vast, undifferentiated listening and reading public who now have access to what, for most, were deeply personal and private exchanges between intimates. While searching for intimate correspondence, I was surprised to find that much of the material housed in Vietnam-centered archives is comprised of such artifacts, from command patches to helmet graffiti, station assignments to death notifications, all of which contributed to the semiotic imaginary of those directly or tangentially involved with the United States military during the Vietnam-era. The simple fact of their survival—and eventual donation—points to the weight of the socio-cultural work with which they were associated, continually pulled to the “bottom” but rarely washed away, forming the relational sediment of an individual’s life stream.

Epistolarity

The transmission of inscribed messages to bridge the precarity and uncertainty of absence is likely as old as written communication itself (Jolly 2001; Standage 2014). It is also generically promiscuous to the point of forming, for Jacques Derrida, the ur-text of all textuality: “Mixture is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres, literature itself” (Derrida 1987, 17).

While epistolary writing is arguably the most voluminous source of humanity’s tangible discourse, until quite recently, in order to gain scholarly attention, a letter typically had to fall into one of three disciplinary categories. First, historical: as primary or secondary sources for reconstructing significant events, epistemes and/or biographical inner lives. Second, literary: as aesthetic tools for character development, narrative construction and authorial expression in the epistolary novel. And third: broadly “ancient,” as the foundational interpretive texts for hermeneutic and/or philosophical arguments regarding issues addressed by ancient thinkers, religious and secular. Within these scholarly spheres, dozens of criteria have been proposed with the goal of defining what exactly constitutes an epistolary object, with most definitions comprising a list of features that constitute, at their time of writing, a conventional consensus

(Gibson 2007, 3). One recent list from George Trapp provides a set of neither necessary nor sufficient, but rather an emergent accretion of “contextual and formal characteristics” that attempts to capture a “phenomenology” of the letter, rather than its conceptual essence, while avoiding definitional circularity (3). For Trapp, a traditional letter is a tangibly inscribed message,

“physically conveyed” from one party (or parties) to another party (or parties) due to a spatiotemporal distance negating the use of vocal or gestural interaction; bearing explicit, geographical origin and (intended) destination; opening and closing with conventionally appropriate “formulae of salutation (or some allusive variation on them),” while remaining

“relatively limited” in length (Trapp 2003; Gibson 2007, 3). Additional features encountered frequently in the literature include the general requirement that the message in question be “about something” (which, itself, often contains a request or desire); precise dates for sending and receiving; understandable grammar, syntax, spelling, etc.; the handwriting of the sender (with autographic signature); and finally, some form of official authentication, from postmarks to signet

19 ring wax seals, often from a mutually-recognized governing body (Stanley 2015, Decker 1998,

Henkin 2007, Dierks 2009, Gerber 2006).

For anyone raised in the American public-school system in the 20th century, this list is likely immediately familiar and, if so, calls to mind an additional litany of prescriptive “laws” regarding proper epistolary composition, from structural formulas and content constraints, to expressive clichés and book-end platitudes. While the communicative utility of self-presentation and relational maintenance at a distance is implicit, the societal strategies and interpersonal tactics required to make the practice intersubjectively functional have received less academic attention.

Reframing epistolarity as a social practice, recent scholarship can be grouped into three categories: the tropological particularities and social structures of asynchronous exchange, the affective, rhetorical and narrative mechanics of “postal presence,” and the 19th-century cultural and infrastructural production of the now commonplace ideology of “epistolary intimacy” as the primary goal, effect and “affordance” (Gibson 1979) of the American postal network.

The Epistolary Pact

Addressing recent hand-wringing articles decrying “the death of the letter,” Stanley argues that currently ascendant technologies and digital “languages”11 (from emoticons to text- speak) are providing unprecedented access to digitally distanced dialogue and a consequent explosion of epistolary production (Stanley 2015). For Stanley, when viewed as “cultural assemblage”12 —a Latourian (2007) conglomeration of actors, infrastructures, and ideologies, and

11 Recent work in “everyday literacies” has noted a number of contributing factors, including unprecedented worldwide literacy rates (as well as the continuing importance of textual interaction in most extant cultures, despite continuing anxiety over the primacy of the (moving) image and falling rates of “private reading”), changing standards regarding “proper” punctuation, grammar, etc. in SMS, personal/direct messaging contexts, and the semiotic potential of emoticons, GIFs, and the like (Stanley 2015). 12 Tony Bennet, "The Work of Culture," Cultural Sociology 1 no. 1 (2007): 31-47. 20 the social practices that unite them—rather than genre, “the letter” as traditionally conceived is just one of many forms of epistolarity,13 a category with only two essential fundaments:

“epistolary intent” and “letterness” (Stanley 2015, Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012). The former

“involves the intention to communicate, in writing or a cognate representational medium, to another person who is ‘not there’ because removed in time/space from the writer, and doing so with the hope or expectation of a response,” while the latter refers to “the porous character of the letter and its ability to morph into other forms” (242, 243). From these, all other relevant features of epistolarity can be derived. Stanley has also addressed the inherent difficulties in defining an epistolary corpus, within/against which all of its individual units must be considered. She defines this larger whole as an “epistolarium,” i.e. “the entirety of someone’s epistolary endeavor,” though the term has since been applied to networks broader than those united by a single individual (as I will do in relation to the US military in Chapter 2) (Stanley 2004, 204). As an analytical object, this kind of corpus is never (at least verifiably) complete, and thus, as Stanley notes, doubly paradoxical. Not only is the nature of epistolarity “quintessentially fragmentary and dispersed” plagued by gaps, unknown omissions, and “dead letters,”14 an exchange that persists long enough to become a correspondence, has, at the time of writing, no imaginable “end”15 and thus no narrative arc (as traditionally-defined) but instead a constantly moving horizon of possibilities. This makes it rare that the ontological “dimensions” of a given corpus is ever “fully realized by the writer,” much less by their many correspondents and even less by the late-arriving scholar (204, 205). Yet, in order to give any account of what remains, an overarching conception

13 And, at that, in Stanley’s estimation, a “fairly late arrival on the epistolary scene” (242). 14 See Peters 1999, Henkin 2006, and Derrida 1976 for insightful discussions of the philosophical implications of “dead letters” and their attendant, ritualistic treatment (e.g. as “remains” during annual “cremation” ceremonies). 15 Besides the “ultimate end” of the death of one end of the exchange, a central existential feature of 19th- century epistolarity (Decker 1998). 21 of a “whole that never existed” is necessary, for which Stanley offers three ontological guideposts. All epistolariums, as well as the “units within [this] unity,” are 1) dialogical, comprising a reciprocal exchange of “turns” by (at least) two16 parties; 2) perspectival, creating a unique mélange of interwoven worlds based in a “community of utterance” whose “structure and content changes according to the particular recipient and the passing of time”; and 3) emergent, displaying “their own preoccupations and conventions and indeed their own epistolary ethics”

(Altman 1982, 167; Stanley 2004, 203, 212). Returning to Stanley’s fundaments, and keeping these analytical planes/guideposts in mind, in this section I will discuss five interlocking features of epistolarity: its relational character, its spatiotemporal “slipperiness,” the construction of presence, the metonymy of materiality, and the generic porosity of “letterness.”

At its most basic level, “the letter”17 is a relational act in the Austinian sense, whose only ontological criteria—no matter the parties involved, the quality of the content included, nor the ultimate fate of the given sequence—is that it “figures successfully in an interpersonal relationship” (Decker 1998, 19). In this sense, there are as many forms of relation as there are letters to analyze but most serve to either 1) create a connection between previously unconnected parties, 2) end or halt a pre-existing exchange, 3) expand a network (i.e. by “brokering” or

“arrogating” a connection between a prior correspondent and a third party18), or 4) continue and facilitate an ongoing correspondence (Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012, 266; Poutsie 2010, 29-

30). These functions imply a foundational sense of epistolary reciprocity, what Janet Altman calls

16 Stanley is quick to note that not all letters are sent, citing Michael Roper’s 2001 article on the psychological implications of self-directed and unrequited epistolary practice. However, in assuming an epistolary mode, even in relation to a temporally-displaced “version” of oneself, even the “roughest drafts usually bear in their rhetorical structure a clear epistolary intent” (Stanley 2004, 214; Decker 1998, 22). 17 While privileging the textual, this is the most accessible and inclusive way to refer to an individual epistolary object, and the default term I employ for the remainder of this literature review. 18 See Poutsie 2010 (29-31) for a discussion of these features in the context of political networking in 19th- century feminist circles. 22

“the epistolary pact” (1982). In describing the “weight of the reader” in epistolary discourse,

Altman writes,

I insist upon the fact that the reader is ‘called upon’ to respond … [This is the] fundamental impulse behind all epistolary writing; if there is no desire for exchange, the writing does not differ significantly from a journal, even if it assumes the outward form of the letter. To a great extent, this is the epistolary pact—the response from a specific reader within the correspondent’s world (Altman 1982, 89 qtd. in Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012, 278).

Expanding upon and nuancing this notion, Stanley and others have called attention to the constantly shifting nature of the performative “I” and the imagined “You” in a given exchange.

Always already ambiguous, the writing “I” reflects and/or adopts various performative personas, with changing rhetorical “voices,” tones and attitudes tempered by their imaginative construction of their addressee, who, not merely a “mute audience” but a fellow “writing (self) in waiting,” is equally variable, depending on the social and contextual relationship the writer seeks to attend to

(Stanley 2004, 212). Each party’s name and signature acts as an “essential guarantor of authenticity” with regard to an essentialized identity, but also an implied, autobiographical grounding in the “real world,” and “community of utterance” both parties share in common

(Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012, 279; Stanley 2004, 208). Though clearly autobiographical, the ever-present, yet absent conversant and shared world, lends epistolary composition and interpretation a layered phenomenology of “I-to-and-from-You” (Stanley, Salter and Dampier

2012, 279).

In the case of the intimate letter, Altman’s “pact” also implies particular forms of reciprocity, referentiality and temporality (1982). Reciprocity in this sense involves “a tacit agreement about appropriate kinds and levels of epistolary engagement” (278). In exchanges lasting longer than a few “turns,” the development of a contextually-specific ethics is almost

23 inevitable. Once rhythms and norms are established, explicit or unacknowledged expectations regarding frequency, length, subject, generic slippage, etc. arise, and discussion of their violation and requests for their fulfillment become an endemic feature of epistolary exchange (Altman

1982; Stanley 2004; Henkin 2006; Decker 1998). In particular, William Decker has explored the central place of the ameliorating and introductory apology as a central feature of 19th-century epistolarity (a trend that has persisted up to the present) (1998). While Nicky Hallett, in charting the affective consequences of spatiotemporally asynchronous exchange, has argued for the fundamental role of anxiety at each stage of epistolary inscription and travel (2002). As implied by these studies, though assumed, desired and requested, a sense of epistolary equity is often difficult to achieve for correspondents whose daily life becomes increasingly cluttered with disparate and irreconcilable burdens the longer they are apart, their letters often functioning as their only outlet to both affectively address their issues, while also seeking help from their interlocutors. As Jennifer Adams argues, all personal letters are intrinsically rhetorical, “at the very least” phatically acting as “tactical requests for a reply and continuation of a dialogue and a relationship” on the writer’s terms (even if those terms constitute the cessation of contact, as in the ‘Dear John’ genre) (Adams 2001, 68). Discussing love letters in particular, Adams notes that the writer’s goal is to affectively influence, or even, “manipulate,” their reader to a particular end—from seduction to deception; exhortation to apology—while also establishing intimacy through references to shared experience, affective profusions, and assurances of continued fidelity and depth of feeling19 (Adams, 2001, 69). On a broader level, when their goals exceed the relationship itself—say convincing a reader to “Vote Yes,” stay clear of danger, or “deposit your paycheck”—the writer’s construction of self as “fellow citizen,“ “worried parent,” or

19 Roland Barthes convincingly argues in A Lover’s Discourse, that no matter the language employed, the ultimate goal of a lover is to convince their beloved that “I am thinking of you” (Barthes 2010 [1978], 157 qtd. in Adams 2001, 70). 24

“provider/dependent,” must adopt the appropriate, distinctive voice and rhetorical tone that reflects the relationship engaged.

Intimate letters are also defined by an “obstinate referentiality” to the realities of daily life, shot through with discursive allusions to the correspondents’ interpersonal imaginary, their larger social milieu, and the broader historical moment in their construction of a shared epistolary world (Stanley 2004; Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012). On the interpersonal level, these references could be intimate details of a relationship’s lifeworld (from new furniture to lost friends; dust storms to local elections) or “characteristic phrases,” pet names, “call backs,” and other utterances that help define the “extreme intertextuality”20 of a correspondence’s semiotic

“microculture”21 (Gordon 2009, 26; Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012, 209; Wuff 1988). This level also includes the larger social network of family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, neighbors, etc., that form the interlocking web of shared experience and, in their frequent discursive appearance in a given epistolary exchange, constitute a correspondence’s

“sociograph,” or an epistolarily-inscribed “social world” of correspondents, both “needed and wanted … an autobiography of the self with others, a citizen/denizen of relationships”22

(Stimpson 1984, 168 qtd. in Stanley 2004, 227). A correspondence’s cultural lifeworld comprises its epistolary “community of utterance,” “a social world known in common that is not delineated in detail and largely taken for granted” that manifests in references to contemporaneous popular culture, professional jargon, institutional hierarchies, and “engagement[s] with the ‘actual course

20 A phrase employed by Cynthia Gordon to refer to the densely-layered, hyper-repetitive and, to outside listeners, nearly opaque languaging of nuclear families, a topic I will return to in Chapter 4 (2009, 26). 21 Coined by Helena Wuff (1988) to refer to hyper-localized cultures—between a group of primary school friends, a romantic couple, etc.—that often employs its own, conventionalized, communicative argot. 22 Contrary to popular understandings of typical epistolary exchange as a “private” practice shared by (only) two correspondents, this “intimate ideal” is rare. Since their inception, letters are routinely shared; portions copied and re-sent; divided into sections for specific individuals with instructions to “pass along;” or, simply addressed to multiple readers. This is especially true when circumstance limits an author’s material or temporal resources, with no parallel reduction in expectant readers. I will discuss the role of “privacy” in constructions of epistolary intimacy at the end of this chapter. 25 of things’” (Broughton 2000, 241 qtd. in Stanley 2004, 212; Stanley 2004, 212). The letter’s porosity to not only conventions, style and genre, but also emergent “structures of feeling”

(Williams 1954) makes it an excellent “gauge of social changes,” especially over the course of an extended exchange.23 This is one of a few spatiotemporal particularities I will discuss in the next section (Stanley 2015, 241).

Spatiotemporality

Perhaps the most distinctively definitional feature of epistolarity is its reliance on asynchronous exchange. Even in the digital age of text-centered “instant” messaging via SMS24

(“short message service”), “time-space compression” (Harvey 1998) does not equal time-space

“dissolution,” no matter how rapid the rate of delivery and potential response (Stanley 2015,

243). Though nuanced by the emergence of emoticons, GIFs, animations, and other surrogates for the writer’s “affective envelope” (Rotman 2009) of gesturally signifying embodiment, epistolary channels also negate the possibility of corporeal copresence, requiring correspondents to resort to more discursive means.

In every letter, at least “[t]wo worlds are invoked: the here and now of the writer and the here and now of the reader,” but, at the same time, Stanley argues, all letters are always/already written “in the present tense,” lending the practice a distinctive and engaging “temporal

23 Like all technological behavior, a given epistolary exchange is also intimately tied to an historically- contingent assemblage of institutional and infrastructural affordances, influencing available materials (gum wrappers will do when stationery runs out and resupply is unlikely), attendant costs (pre-printed, military- issue “proof of life” postcards will do if one’s stamps have been soaked in the trench), active couriers (“mail planes” were not given the same wartime protections as, say, field hospitals or convoys of humanitarian aid), and other factors outside of a correspondent’s control. 24 Of course, in terms of form, content, innovations in “text speak,” etc., this “age” arguably began with the telegraph in the mid-19th century (Standage 1998). Even its infrastructure is marked by geographically, palimpsestic echoes, with many major cities’ “Telegraph Hills” now home to cell towers and wireless hubs (Standage 2014; Carey 1989). 26 slipperiness” (Barton and Hall 1999, 6; Stanley 2004, 208).25 In their composition, letters are deeply perspectival, “marked by the quotidian present” of their writer—evinced in details from overall mood to misspellings made in haste—as well as the state of their relationship with their recipient, and the present historical moment (Stanley 2004, 208). However, unless circumstance and subject are coextensive—e.g. recorded “live” in the context of battle, or tweeted-while- viewing—there is always a “temporal remove” between an event and its later description, allowing for post hoc interpretation and narrative schema to intervene (Stanley and Dampier

2006). No matter their inception, once sent, in a sense all letters are rendered “dead on arrival,” their present irrevocably divorced from that of the reader’s. In another, the letter’s temporal character is forever preserved, like “flies in amber.” As Stanley explains,

[l]etters … share some of the temporal complexities of photographs: they not only hold memory but also always represent the moment of their production … [their] ‘present tense’ … persists—the self that writes is in a sense always writing, even after the death of the writer and the addressee; and their addressee is ‘always reading’ (Stanley 2004, 208).

Of course, not all letters are composed in one, sustained sitting; a given example potentially comprising multiple sessions, evinced by material changes in handwriting and/or ink, corrections and “strike-throughs,” amendments, postscripts, from the original author, as well as all of the same from third-party readers further down the chain of conveyance (Stanley, Salter and Dampier

2012). But, when encountered by the reader (either the intended, or a later researcher), these gaps, elisions, and addendums engage our cognitive “narrative machine,” to phenomenologically knit together a satisfyingly cohesive sequence. As Adams notes, “the date on which a letter is written

25 It is precisely this affordance to immersion that makes the “ethnographic present” so alluring as a compositional technique but deeply problematic in its epistemological distancing (Hastrup 1990). 27 is bound-up in its content, and the letter retains an immediacy arguably not found in other written texts” (Adams 2001, 66).

In addition to the emergent ethics mentioned above, any persistent correspondence develops its own world, composed of ongoing narratives, idiomatic language, reinterpretations of received conventions, and an increasingly rich field for intertextual play. Temporally, the longer the interval between letters, the larger the range of “possible interpretations of the [last] letter’s content” (Adam, 2001, 66). As epistolary objects are also inherently tangible, and thus potentially

“re-readable,” the careful writer is also aware that whatever they send “will come under scrutiny in a way ordinary talk does not” (Stanley 2004, 226-227). This materiality, and the metonymy of one’s absent intimate—the distinctive curl of a handwritten “Q” standing in for the missing whole, as “the crown” for the queen—is also what gives letters their auratic quality. From the moment she drops the flag on her mailbox, Nicky Hallet argues, the writer begins to question everything she just consigned to paper, an anxiety only compounded by the need of the writer to adequately communicate an immediate mental state, and the reader’s expectation of receiving the same (2002). As I will return to below, this implicit “demand” for a writer to expressively represent (or, in reading, recreate) “the present,” thus drawing epistolary narratives closer to authentically unmediated evocations of self, is integral to the construction of disembodied

“presence.” Here, I will note that pre-20th-century writers, lacking other forms of communicative channels for clarification, developed a variety of techniques to minimize “misimpression” (Steele

2016, 99). These included “micro-narratives,” “miniature stories in which [the author] lingered over striking events or, in some cases, played the parts of imaginary characters,” efforts to descriptively “ground” oneself in recognizable spaces (e.g. “I’m sitting at the kitchen table”), and balancing self-expression with a generally interrogatory tone to maintain focus on the reader

(ibid.). Finally, as mentioned above, the ever-present phenomenology of the “I-to-and-from-You”

28 attitude mimics, for many, an on-going conversation, conducted as internal dialogue between one’s “focus” (the reader) and one’s “fringe” (the self), and, unless the letter in question is intended as one’s last, obtains a perpetual presentism that negates the possibility of

“completeness” (Ihde 2007). In a similar fashion,

[a]ny particular letter is part of a sequence in a correspondence; consequently, there are always things not present in any one letter, with an incremental and fragmented emplotment existing across a series concerning what happened before … leading to letters that are highly elliptical (Stanley 2004, 213).

“Letters represent a … tantalizing form of writing’s engagement with life” and, like life, “the end” is rarely in mind, giving way for endless invitations, asides, and diversions, that can always be (re)addressed in the future (Jolly and Stanley 2005, 1). Additionally, Stanley rightly cautions scholars embedded in their archives that correspondences, and the larger epistolariums of which they are a part, rarely have “a life of their own,” instead “exist[ing] in parallel with, rather than being an extension or echo of, face-to-face” meetings and other communicative channels with no exigent remains or in-letter allusions (Stanley 2004, 210). This openness, in both the individual holographic document, often filled to the edges with cacophonous and contradictory marginalia, and the disparate threads of the central, interpersonal “story,” make traditional narrative approaches difficult (despite our overwhelming desire to construct them). However, this ambiguity need not be a roadblock to gaining deeper insight into interpersonal mechanics within epistolary discourse.

Temporally speaking, openness, for Altman, is discursively definitional: a correspondence is fundamentally a “chain of actions and consequences … perceived as unending, the circuit of communication is never closed … [its] frames are constantly broken, and even closural gestures have inaugural implications” (Altman 1982, 163). For epistolary scholar Maria

Tamboukou, this points toward an anti-Aristotelian, analytical understanding of epistolary narrative as processual, related to directional desire, rather than coherence, “that keeps the dialogue open, the correspondence going and ultimately generates the narrative itself”

(Tamboukou 2011, 632). This phatic and non-linear approach produces what Tamboukou calls

“nomadic narratives” that not only provide “multiple perspectives on the same event” (or

“character,” relationship, genealogy, etc.) but also “revea[l] multiple layers of meaning and complex ‘regimes of truth’” (MacArthur 1990, 14 qtd. in Tamboukou 2011, 627-628; Foucault

1980).

Tamboukou later relates this Deleuzian understanding of “narrative as force” to Adriana

Cavarero’s conception of “the narratable self,” in which subjectivity is perceived as “the effect of desire to listen to one’s story within a reciprocal relation of interdependence,” and Michel

Foucault’s “care of the self” in the context of “self-writing” as a “technology of the self”

(Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Cavarero 2000; Tamboukou 2011, 630; Foucault 1997). Tamboukou notes that “the narratable self” is “not merely textual or performative” and in no sense fully

“reducible to the content of discourses of the story” (Tamboukou 2011, 630). However, the techniques by which writers present themselves to their correspondents “in the unfolding of everyday life,” both directly in descriptions of affect and action, but also metanarratively and meta-epistolarily, in problematizing their own capacities for adequate expression and reading comprehension, are particularly instructive for those in circumstances potentially threatening to the integrity of one’s (becoming) subjectivity (Tamboukou 2011, 630, 633; Foucault 1997, 218).

For Tamboukou, “[n]arratability revolves around the I/you relationship, which is also central in the epistolary relation,” making these perspectives helpful in analyzing the author/artist Gwen

John’s side of an epistolary relationship with her master/lover Rodin as a site for the constitution

30 of a fin de siècle “female self in art,” and in particular the letter as “the medium par excellence” for dissecting one’s own introspective processes (Tamboukou 2011, 630, 631, 633).

Beyond the poetically attractive, martial metaphor of “narrative force,” many of John’s techniques in struggling with “becoming” are relevant to the epistolary lives of military families

(and, in particular, lovers). Partially engaged in conducting a long distance amorous discourse,

John frequently found herself insufficiently eloquent to adequately express her love in its proper degree and specificity, butting up against Julia Kristeva’s characterization of love as “solitary because incommunicable” and thus the love letter as “‘that innocently perverse attempt to revive or subdue the game [when] too much engulfed in the immediate fire’ to say anything about what is at stake between the lovers” (Kristeva 1987, 3 qtd. in Tamboukou 2011, 631).26 Elaborating later, Tamboukou writes,

[i]nterwoven in a narrative fabric in which presence and absence trigger strong emotions and affects, John’s letters carry traces of how she experiments with Eros as force, disrupting the order of the present, a process of living through what can only be experienced in fractured moments of being—the moment of writing. As tales of love these letters further create an assemblage of episodic, fragmented and incoherent narratives to unfold (Tamboukou 2011, 638).

So described, the phenomenological parallel to war and, in particular, combat—often described as endless boredom punctuated by moments of visceral violence, resulting in “flashbulb” memories, linked by little to no connective narrative tissue—is hard to ignore.

John’s letters were also highly diaristic, frequently incorporating “micro-narratives” concerning minor events, whose descriptions focused on “bodily states and practices” as opposed

26 Barthes offers a similar prognosis in A Lover’s Discourse (1976). This phenomenology of inexpressibility is similar to Elaine Scarry’s (1985) conceptualization of pain as fundamentally antithetical to language, as well as Judith Becker’s (2004, 43) discussion of trance as occasioning the “cessation of inner languaging.” 31 to “thoughts or emotions,” before pausing to reflect on the relative, narrative success of her portrayals (632-633). Like her frequent slides into self-critique, John also frequently “switched codes” based on the topic at hand, as well as calling attention to the “taleworld” surrounding her current “storyrealm” (Young 1987). These tactics enabled her to share the intricate banality of her daily life’s rhythmic character—an essential component of romantic intimacy at a distance—but also a space in which to “practice” prosodic evocations of the quotidian for use in later writing

(and dialogue), as well as the linguistic facility and emotional distance to negotiate her own constantly shifting attitudes toward Rodin, herself, and her writing (632). For military correspondents, “sharing time” becomes increasingly important when engaged with an institution plagued by indeterminacy and unexpected breaks. However, these gaps also allow individuals engaged in combat to prepare “appropriate” narratives in dialogue with “those who were actually there,” before relating portions of these events in later letters, especially when, faced with little time, one was required to write one letter to address several expectant readers, somehow satisfying disparate, and often contradictory, roles and obligations. More broadly, John’s frequent

“oscillations, ambiguities, and regrets” with regard to her capacity to wield the pen, were often her least guarded (633). As I will discuss in Chapter 4, these techniques and others were afforded greater depth and range, the epistolary “frame” proving far more tenuous, and thus porous to forms of in-the-moment forms of self-reflexivity that, for many, proved to be the tapes’ most intimate moments.

I will discuss the character and construction of spatial presence in depth in the following section but, I should mention here some of the distinctive enhancements, as opposed to deficiencies, afforded to intimate epistolarity by bodily distance. Absence, as Esther Milne describes, can open “a discursive space in which desires and subjectivities that might not otherwise be articulated can be explored” (Milne 2006, 167). Most obvious are interactions that

32 would be impossible in any other context. Stanley describes the “creatively generative” space of

“penfriend” (or “penpal”) relationships, whose express purpose—whether conducted between students on separate continents, death-row inmates and concerned citizens, or fans and celebrities27—is to create a shared lifeworld in which, lacking any prior interpersonal baggage, or even necessarily a well-understood community of utterance, “textuality is all” (Stanley 2004,

208). Decker, in discussing 19th-century American forms of epistolary courtship, notes the passion with which correspondents seemed to imbue the letter with the capacity to all-but-conjure the embodied presence of an absent beloved “as if speaking with them directly,” while engaging in effusive expressions of love (and even lust) that would have been forbidden outside its edges.

Describing this sentiment as expressed by one etiquette manual, he writes: “[e]ver aware of the degree to which correspondence may proceed from the libido, [the manual’s author] suggests that the autograph may invoke a platonic if emphatically physical presence and foster a celibate if nevertheless eroticized relationship” (Decker 1998, 247). In a Victorian atmosphere of heightened awareness, yet adamant refusal of, the eroticized body, the “love letter” took on greater metonymic weight, while forms of intimacy developed epistolarily might continue in parallel with married life, long after a couple’s betrothal (248).28 Similarly, Hallet describes the occasional longing for absence from a loved one, creating a space in which new, imaginative perspectives, unclouded by pre-existing perceptual schemas, can emerge (Hallet 2001, 108).29

The paradoxical space/time configurations developed over the course of a correspondence and in relation with its encompassing community of utterance can be helpfully

27 See Carrie Brownstein’s recent memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, for a fascinating examination of world building in epistolary fandom (2015). 28 Milne describes the case of Emily and Robert Browning and the latter’s reluctance to “close the epistolary element of the relationship … [d]espite their impending cohabitation … fearful of a life without” Emily’s letters (Milne 2011, 2). 29 She also describes the pleasure in, say, seeing a place through another’s eyes; articulating this delight in a letter allows one to see their experience as constructed through the eyes of a constructed other, closing the symbolic interactionist loop without the actual presence of the other (108; Mead 1967 [1934]). 33 conceived as an “epistolary chronotopia” (Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012). Roland Barthes captures this tension, noting the “preposterous situation” of the sustained “discourse of the beloved absence”—“the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. This singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you)” (Barthes 2010 [1976], 15 qtd. in Adams 2002, 67). I turn next to this paradoxical negotiation, in which absence creates the need for presence while the creation of presence is predicated on the actuality of absence.

Simulacra of Presence

Many scholars, most notably William Decker, have argued that the “propelling factor of absence” (Stanley 2015, 242) is not only definitional but a necessary precondition for all epistolary exchange. Others, including Liz Stanley (2011, 2012, 2015), Sarah Poutsie (2010), and

David Henkin (2005), in expanding the inclusivity of epistolarity, have since nuanced this picture, calling attention to finer “gradations” of “interrupted presence,” i.e. correspondents who are only

“transitorily apart,” which could include everything from a three month expedition to “the West,” to a parent leaving an encouraging message in their child’s lunch bag. However, as the minimum projected separation for the majority of my corpus’ interlocutors was nine to twelve months, with the only possibility of an interruption being a one to two week leave in Hawaii, I will focus on the mechanics of extended absence.

In several works over the last ten years, Esther Milne has focused the lens of current psychological research in “presence”—a topic most widely covered in relation to digital

34 technology30—on the 19th century and, more specifically, on the “problem” of the “intimacy of absence” in epistolary communication (Milne 2011, 2). Milne explains that “[e]pistolary discourse is enabled by the tension between absence and presence: writing a letter signals the absence of the recipient and, simultaneously, aims to bridge the gap between writer and recipient”

(1). As French literary scholar Mireille Bossis notes, “Such letters allow two people to share a dream both have woven, as the words bring about the exact coincidence of two fantasy worlds.

Strange paradox indeed where the real—that is, the fact of writing, of sending the missive, of receiving it—guarantees the illusion!” (Bossis 1986, 9 qtd. in Milne 2011, 1).31 As a directly dialogical medium, sender and reader must collaboratively create a world, simultaneously performative and interpretive, in which both are able to enjoy the “solitary pleasures” of

“summon[ing] up images of each other, without the need for visible presence of the other, and then react joyfully to their own creations” (Perry 1980, 101 qtd. in Milne 2006, 163). Milne defines this imaginative “presence” as “the degree to which geographically dispersed agents experience a sense of physical and/or psychological proximity through the use of particular communicative technologies” (162).

The phenomenological character and historical understanding of this phenomenon is of course highly contingent, dependent on the participants’ media ideological environment, available technologies (both physical and rhetorical), and these facets’ concatenation into a period’s distinctive discourse network. For Milne, the ideology of epistolary presence, as constructed in the 19th century, is dependent on (and in part created by), a complex set of interconnected assumptions and rhetorical strategies, including “intimacy, immediacy, spontaneity, and

30 For example, see Donati & Prado 2001 for cyberspace artworlds and Murphy 2000 on webcams as “cybervisuality.” 31 A similar, poetic evocation of this paradox from Decker reads: “exchange of letter sheet thus articulates and substantiates the central paradox of epistolary discourse: that the exchange of personally inscribed texts confirms even as it would mitigate separation” (Decker 1998, 46-7). 35 disembodiment” (165). In the first case, Milne argues, the emergence of postal “intimacy,” especially as a conduit for “social richness” (defined by Matthew Lombard and Teresa Ditton as comfortably “sociable, warm, sensitive [and] personal”), was contingent on the concomitant construction of the post as an “incontrovertibly private” channel of communication (1997 qtd. in

Milne 2011, 1). I will return to this topic below in my discussion of the rise of the “personal letter” as the iconic genre of epistolarity but here I will note Milne’s understanding of privacy “as an effect of particular socio-material technologies of communication rather than existing as an empirically verifiable, static fact” (4). In its idealized form, this intimacy/privacy matrix was always/already dyadic (despite the frequent presence of third- party readers), constructing a concomitantly binding sense of exclusivity and a space in which “only we two sympathise with each other in an otherwise unsympathetic world” (MacCarthy 1998, 8 qtd. in Milne 2011, 4).

“Immediacy” and “spontaneity” are similarly intertwined, referring to both the rhetorical means by which epistolary users facilitated their construction of “epistolary bodies,” and their expectations with regard to the affordances and realities of infrastructural and technological conveyance (Milne 2006, 2008, 2011). In the former case, letters are littered with detailed descriptions of the “scene of writing” (Milne 2006). Decker dissects the most common opening in

19th-century letters—namely, some variation on “I take this opportunity to pick up my pen and write you this message on [this date], in [this place] to let you know I am well, and wish the same for you”—noting that, while every feature is inherently redundant (the envelope addressed and time-stamped, the ink dried, the temporality required, the sentiment obvious, etc.), each is rooted in an existential uncertainty endemic to pre-electronic epistolarity: the ever-present specter of death and the overwhelming desire for an unmediated, “soul-to-soul” connection (1998). This convention is often followed by similarly formulaic references to weather, health, local events, etc., and, while potentially read as cliché and perfunctory, all serve to ground the reader in the

36 specificities of the writer’s immediate “here and now” (Milne 2006; 2011). This process of

“placing” oneself—at one’s window/table/desk,32 in one’s kitchen/bedroom/favorite café, in a state of vigor/distress/excitement—is paramount in affording the reader a lattice on which to build a “fantasied body,” a believable corpor-reality, that will reciprocally grow and change over time, “filled out” by an every-increasing catalogue of distinctive utterances.33

These “scenes”34 are often temporally inscribed as well; the writer “taking a moment before/after/between X and Y responsibility” or interrupted by calls/visitors/meals; events more of less expertly paced within the proceedings to give their reader an opportunity to “tune in,” sharing “another’s flux of experience in inner time” (Schutz, 1964). The more intimate the writer's relationship with the recipient, the more time the writer spends describing their own desirous imaginations of their loved one’s body, either “placing” them in spaces mutually- known/constructed, or “with” them, in the writer’s, previously solitary, space.35 As always, these bodies are reciprocally constructed; as Cynthia Lowenthal describes it, “[T]he letter writer first establishes his or her sometimes idealized but always constructed particularity in the transaction; as the relationship grows, such repeatable particularity authenticates the performance”

(Lowenthal 1994, 22 qtd. in Milne 2011, 3). But, over time, this process creates a specifically- epistolary actuality that can be transposable to other interactive spaces.

Less evocative, but for many equally comforting and/or compelling, are detailed scenes of “reading” the other’s received letters, predictions on arrival time, difficulties with local service, and other references to the users’ “networked systems of support” (Milne 2011, 2). These

32 Only phenomenologists have a similar fascination with their desks and writing utensils. 33 As described by Vimala Herman, the construction of epistolary place/space can be accomplished by the simplest of “gestures,” even those typically reserved for face-to-face interaction such as narratively-driven deictic projection (Herman 1999). In their closer approximation to “conversation,” taped letters use far more of this than do written exchanges. 34 I will address the “presentational” affordances of similar scenes, sonically, rather than textually, inscribed, in Chapter 4. 35 See Decker (1998), Milne (2006, 2010, 2011), Gerber (2006), Henkin (2012) for other examples. 37

“moves” indexically link the reality, reliability, and authenticity of their exchange to their shared, infrastructural framework, both physical and relational. This link becomes particularly important when military service provides users unprecedented access to the inner workings of its system, but the system is simultaneously plagued by unanticipated ruptures, often due to events that would violate strict security laws if shared. Misunderstandings of these systems have similarly dire affective consequences, as described in one segment of Dear America: Letters Home from

Vietnam, in which a father, just told of his son’s death, showed the notifiers a letter, received just that day, insisting that “there must be some mistake.” The notifiers calmly and compassionately explained the occasional, necessary delays between mailing and receipt but their explanation fell on deaf ears (Edelman 1986). However, simply mentioning these details is not enough. They must be imbued with a relational specificity, while also balancing 1) the desire for relating one’s moment—i.e. the writer’s “here and now”—with allusions to the reader’s “there and then,” without shattering the illusion of an epistolary collapse of space and time; 2) a “conversational” immediacy and spontaneity with the aesthetic requirements of affectively poetic expression; 3) the seductive desire to construct an overly idealized “fantasied” body/personae (either due to personal insecurity or a perceived desire on the part of the reader) that may “conflict” with impending reality; and 4) the need to discuss the difficulties of epistolary expression without calling too much distracting attention to the medium itself (Milne 2011).

This last concern returns us to this section’s inciting paradox, i.e. the potential for the epistolary object to sever the intended connection being forged. When “done well” (a metric only meaningful in the context of a given correspondence, and on which at least two opinions might obtain), “expressions of intimacy and immediacy help to eclipse the materiality of the medium …

[allowing] correspondents [to] overlook the mediated nature of the exchange thereby producing a strong sense of propinquity” (Milne 2011, 2). For the “fantasied” body to arise, and adequately

38 function as an icon of imagined presence, Milne argues, the corporeal body must fade, from

“figure” to “ground” (or, to use Don Ihde’s auditorily-inspired terms, “focus” to “fringe”) (ibid.,

Ihde 2007),36 at least until one’s reading is completed. Then the recipient is left with a document; an object with a “physical presence in the world as … artifact,” shot through with metonymic traces of the bod(ies) that produced it, and thus imaginative toeholds for future interactions with those whose absence has now been partially, and temporarily, waylaid (Adams 2001, 58).

Materiality

All letters, no matter how seemingly divorced from traditionally-defined physicality, are intrinsically material. Digital media, though “seemingly ephemeral,” are actually “more durable than their material predecessors. Unlike written letters whose writers, fearing future intrusion, frequently contained post-scripts instructing the recipient to “burn after reading,” digital

“messages may be deleted” but, this “does not mean they are necessarily obliterated or destroyed”

(Stanley 2015, 245). Stanley continues, noting that the sheer tonnage of personal computers, servers, fiberoptic cable, etc. that houses the majority of contemporary epistolary output would, if compared to the extant paper remains of earlier eras, easily dwarf the latter (245). But this is only the barest and least intersubjectively interesting feature of epistolary materiality. For many recipients, when they have finished reading a letter from a distant intimate, they file it away rather than disposing of it. Initially, this might be a prelude to passing it along, re-reading, copying, or otherwise sharing its contents, either with (an)other in one’s relational network or one’s future

36 Like the body itself, which is both ever-present as the “third term” in perception, a presence “tacitly understood against the double horizon of external and bodily space” but also in “constant recession” from “its own apprehension,” this capacity is the “indispensable condition of all possible communication” but, in order to facilitate an intersubjective descent into another’s “flow of experience,” does not “enter the communicative process and is not capable of being grasped by it” (Leder in Feld and Basso 1996, 92; Schutz 1964, 160). 39 self. But many letters are kept far longer, added to growing collections, shown to later generations, and/or donated to relevant archives, their aura of singular authenticity and metonymic connection to their author occasionally developing into fetishization.37

In the 19th century, the most remarked upon facets of material metonymy were autographic traces. As Decker notes, not only was “handwriting” considered as identifiably unique as the fingerprint,38 “the bodily trace of a correspondent stood before one on the sheet, so that the state of a partner’s health might be read in the steadiness of his or her inscription”

(Decker 1998, 41). Was the writing hasty or calm? Grammatically pristine or riddled with errors?39 Expertly sanded or blotchy with tear-stains?40 All could be interpreted as affirmation of stated emotions, or clues to topics or affects left “unspoken” (Barthes, 2010, 31). Barthes has famously likened the “tear blot” to a “certification of the lover’s sorrow” (ibid.). More broadly, one’s choice of “sheet” (“recycled” newsprint or printed stationery?), its condition upon arrival

(tinted and/or scented, unadorned, or accidentally blotted by blood, sweat, grease, coffee, etc.?), its relative privacy (encased in doubled-envelope or a post-card?), and other factors said a great deal about the affective intentions of the sender, their facility with “proper” epistolary discourse

(and thus social hierarchy), and their active place within Latourian assemblages of institutional interpellation (2007).

Above all else, “[l]etters provided identification of author and audience, and in the earliest period were delivered by personal messenger of the authoritative person, who were said

37 See Katz 2010, Eisenberg 2005, and Levin 2010 for discussions of the fetishization of physical instantiations of music, voicemail, and sound inscriptions more generally. 38 Once the “gold standard” of corporeal indexicality, finger-printing’s status as irrefutable evidence of physical touch has only recently challenged in forensic science circles. 39 Recent research in computational linguistics has shed light on the emerging dementia of authors long dead, most famously Agatha Christie, based on the linguistic “plasticity” and range of their later works (Day 2016). 40 For an interesting, self-reflexive examination of materiality in historical anthropology, see Halldorsdottir 2010. 40 to carry the very presence or projection (‘parousia’) of the sender”41 (Bazerman 2000, 17-18 qtd. in Adams 67-68). This seal of authenticity, making each a letter a “simultaneously poor substitute for” but also “important embodiment of” those absent, has lent them totemic status not only in popular literature but also in the lived experience of immigrants, pioneers, soldiers, and long- distance lovers (Gerber 2006, 12). Treated as surrogates to be unfolded and reread, touched, stroked, kissed, or placed beneath one’s pillow, letters have acted as a salve against pain, loneliness, homesickness, and grief. In the heightened danger of conflict (or fantasies thereof), in addition to more obvious sensory links—such as a lingering scent of home, a recognizable watermark, etc.—these items, and the tangible reality of their mere presence and provenance, afforded their transformation into physical extensions of an individual’s intimates. So strong was this visceral presence that many soldiers during the Civil War would clutch letters, tintypes, and other aide-mémoires, to their faces or chests as they lay dying on the battlefield, often the only identifying document they’d carried, ensuring they’d not “die alone,” nor be the last in the chain to receive it (Faust 2008).

Letterness

Though nearly any message, inscribed in any medium, and bridging any degree of

“absence” can be called “epistolary,” the clichés, formulae, and structure, but also communicative potential and auratic quality of the “intimate letter” as popularly conceived, have remained

“highly resilient” (Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012, 264). How much one “strays” from the norms of one’s community of utterance, depends on one’s expressive needs, but, rather than proving limiting, the conventions of a given age often serve as “flexible space[s] or

41 A contributory factor in the still extant “aura” surrounding postal workers and their near universal respect (despite their diminishing role in the US postal imaginary). 41 framework[s]” with built-in “points of potential resistance” available for individual subversion

(Stanley 2004, 217). Use of these “points” often call attention to compositional innovation, in ways conducive to encoding particularity, rather than limiting communicative functionality

(Stanley 2015, 276-277). As a dialogic form, letters are, like all linguistic expression, irreducibly polyglossic, indexing diverse eras, identities, ideologies, and ways of being (Bahktin 2010). They are also irreducibly intertextual in a relational sense, constantly indexing prior utterances to build an intimate epistolary lifeworld (Kristeva 1986). Many also reference and “remediate” other forms, through which correspondents “speak” in ways they are unable to otherwise, sometimes articulating desires via quotations from song, poem, and prose that provide them both new expressive range and, when necessary, emotional distance (Bolter and Grusin 1999).

Perhaps the most common “mode” with which letters are associated is face-to-face conversation. Indeed, as Henkin, Decker and others describe, there is an attendant tension within

19th-century epistolarity. While it is framed as the most accessible of genres (at least for the literate), it carries excessive, socio-cultural baggage, demanding both an immediacy and spontaneity of expression—as if one were in the room—while “the best” writer was also expected to achieve heights of poetic force only matched in epistolary novels (Henkin 2012, Decker 1998,

Stanley, Salter and Dampier 2012). For many, this “conversational ideal” formed a constantly receding horizon that still seemed achievable due, in part, to what John Durham Peters has called the ideology of “angelogical” communication (Peters 1999). Supported by an atmosphere in which belief in an intangible, immortal soul, the acceleration of the first “instant” communications systems, such as the telegraph, and then “wireless,” buoyed a long-held “longing for transcendental or telepathic contact—mind speaking to mind without the intermediary of paper and ink … [c]onsciously projecting an impossible ideal, the letter writer’s fantasy of unmediated converse proposes an intersubjective accord beyond the complications of time and

42 space, spoken and written language” (Decker 1998, 37). As Milne notes, with each new reconfiguration of phenomenological time/space distance, the medium of exchange becomes easier to occlude and may occasion an “intense, quasi-spiritual sense of presence” (Milne 2010,

4). Manifesting as compositional motif, epistemologically organizing principle, and intersubjective raison d’etre, epistolarity-as-conversation is the bedrock of “epistolary intimacy” as we understand it today. Before turning to the emergence of the “intimate letter,” I would repeat

Stanley, Salter and Dampier’s corrective categorization of epistolarity as “proximate,” rather than approximate to “talk,” contributing to “sociality in its own right and not [as] a proxy for anything else” (2012, 281-282). For my purposes, this conceptual co-extensivity of the two domains will figure prominently in my interlocutors’ negotiations with audio composition.

The American Postal Revolution

With the establishment of the first intercolonial mail service in 1693,42 the post has contributed significantly to the physical and psychical binding of the American Union. As the

United States wrested colonial control from Britain, expanded across North America and

“welcomed” immigrants from around the world to settle new regions and expand existing cities, the correspondence needs of the country changed dramatically. (In all of these conflicts, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, enemy postal exchange was one of the primary early targets, beginning with

America’s first revolutionaries’ attacks on the intercolonial system.) According to Paul Shulman,

“Americans had long considered their postal system socially transformative,” even

“revolutionary” in its potential for achieving utopic visions of international unity and peace

42 This system was founded in Pennsylvania by Thomas Neale of the British Postal Authority to connect this proprietary colony with New Hampshire, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts (Adams 2002; Fuller 1972). 43

(2015). As Konstantin Dierks notes, during the 18th century, the growing US postal system was instrumental in expanding the power of the country’s centralized government, strengthening diasporic populations both within the United States and across international borders (2009).

At the same time, Henkin and others credit the growing culture of prescriptive epistolary communication with delineating and cementing new social classes based on literacy, education, and socio-economic status, becoming a marker of distinction and contributing to the rise of the new American bourgeoisie. For the first half of the 19th century, America’s utopic postal imaginings were “directed outward,” with the invention of “mail steamers” and the reduction of international postal rates marking important technological achievements that connected the burgeoning country with the world (Babal 2017; Shulman 2015). This outward-facing, “public” ontology of the post is in stark contrast to contemporary understandings of the post as a space for confidential correspondence. However, as Milne notes, the notion of “privacy” via correspondence is a relatively new construction—achieved via capitulations to business culture, loosening Sabbath restrictions, new legal and technological developments that assured secrecy, most notably, the envelope, the postage stamp, and the mail box—all of which occluded the potentially prying eyes of letter carriers (2012). Interestingly, long before these inventions assured a certain level of postal discretion, the 19th-century epistolary media ideology was defined by “a tension between, on the one hand, the desire for an exclusive, private one-to-one conversation and, on the other hand, the correspondents’ realization that their missives may be read by a third party” (Milne 2012, 3). While the intimate correspondences of friendship, courtship and familial love were predicated on a “feeling of privacy” as a “central requirement for intimacy, immediacy and simultaneity to emerge,” it was “common practice during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for letters to circulate without their author’s explicit agreement” (3). This paradoxical ideology, according to Thomas McCarthy, produces a privacy-in-public feeling of

“isolation and concomitant sense of exclusiveness between correspondents,” a strikingly familiar tone for users of contemporary social media (McCarthy 1997, 89 qtd. in Milne 2012, 3).

David Henkin begins his iconoclastic monograph, The Postal Age, by taking the temperature of contemporary media histories:

[i]t has become commonplace—almost to the point of being unfashionable—to describe electronic mail, faxes … and other communications media of recent vintage as agents in a millennial refashioning of current sensibility and subjectivity … alter[ing] our experiences of time and space and unsettle[ing] the boundaries separating persons, communities, and nations (2007, ix).

Lacking both a precise historical “turning point” or a “shiny new technology,” Henkin’s genealogy of the modern postal media ideology nonetheless charts a similarly dramatic “rupture” in Americans’ discourse with and about distant, “absent parties” (Henkin 2006, 7). Over the course of roughly fifty years, Americans’ understanding of their postal system shifted, via

“popular reappropriations and adaptations,” from an exclusively business-class conduit for economic exchange and national news to a freely accessible and reliable network for the transfer of private, intimate epistles (9). This shift occasioned new conceptions of filial and romantic intimacy, access to government services and public figures, and citizens’ interpellation by the state (most tangibly represented by a personal, nationally recognized, permanent address). As

Henkin describes it, the “novel experience of being accessed and addressed by a system of mass communication” precipitated, within a few decades, “new patterns and forms of intimacy while simultaneously promoting and institutionalizing diverse and dizzying possibilities of anonymous exchange,” from Valentines to junk mail (x-xi). Several practical measures facilitated the expansion and “democratization” of postal service; among them, massive reductions in postage costs in 1845 and 1851, the advent of “free home delivery” (at least in sufficiently-sized

45 metropolitan areas), the construction of postal roads, offices, and vehicles (coaches, single-rider horses, trains and, eventually, via the Panama Canal, “steamers”) (ibid.; Milne 2011). The new temporal regularity of pick-up and delivery schedules, spatial permanence of post offices, and bureaucratic anonymization of mail carriers recalibrated Americans’ “perceptions of connectedness” (Carey 1989). This created affectively rhythmic cycles of anticipation and release, public rituals of communion with absent intimates, and their metonymic embodiment in the sounds of hoof beats, the sight of a steamer from one’s widow’s walk, the embossed texture of a many-times-stamped envelope (Lefebvre 2017 [2004]). While individually private, these displays, elaborated and romanticized in both literary and “everyday” discourse, cemented the post as a “fundamental feature of modern life,” its individual users as part of a complex, integrated “network in the modern sense,” and personal letters as the default “instrument” for participating in “everyday sociality” for ordinary people (Henkin 2006, 93; Carey 1989, 21). As

Henkin notes,

Posted letters were not simply individual utterances sent through a specifically appointed messenger; they were the content of a continuous stream of messages passing through a network of communication channels that ran whether or not any particular person had something to say (4).

These epistolary utterances were the same vehicles through which the new ideology of epistolary intimacy was spread but, not where it started.

Americans had a long-standing belief in the privacy of the post, based in part on an inherited right to “confidential correspondence” enshrined in English law (Henkin 2006, 99).43

But, mostly, Henkin explains, letters were private because their contents were intimate (ibid.).

43 This precedent was adopted by the first formation of the inter-colonial postal system, primarily as an injunction against “government intrusion” into private (business) matters and has remained to this day (with a short break in the mid-19th century regarding Abolitionist literature in South leading up to the Civil War) (Henkin 2006, 189). 46

Based on the models of 17th-century epistolary novels, letters were considered “windows into the soul,” individual instances described by contemporary writers as “cœur-espondence” and “soul prints” (ibid.). For the new American bourgeoisie, epistolary communication offered a prescriptive channel for poetic, unmediated, self-expression “unsullied by the distortions of other forms of social interaction” (100). The epistolary space was simultaneously constructed as a

“postal confession booth” in which to honestly bare one’s soul, but also indexically linked with

Victorian fears of unbridled sexuality in its metonymic associations with female bodies (99,

100).44

When the post became accessible to all, this tension between the paradoxical ideals of conversational immediacy and learned, poetic rhetoric, stymied many, leading to a flurry of mass market letter manuals whose “collective insistence … that a letter is (or ought to be) a spontaneous effusion of sincere feeling from one person to another accomplished much the of the cultural work that went into producing the modern personal letter” (Henkin 2006, 109). Providing repeatable, conventional structures to aid “anyone” in proper epistolary composition, formulas

“explicitly framed the intimacy of a personal letter as a particular instance of a popular practice subject to norms and conventions” (117). Initially, employing these proffered clichés marked one as either knowledgeable of proper etiquette or hopelessly unoriginal, to one’s own small corner of the world but, with massive expansion of postal use and the twin, migratory upheavals of the

Gold Rush and the Civil War, “the stakes” became much higher. As Henkin explains, once these

codes entered the everyday experience of large numbers of Americans who expected to maintain some of their most important relationships through the post … [t]he structural conditions of epistolary practice … [became] … the structuring facts of everyday sociability (117).

44 The majority of these novel’s authors were women and their male protagonists’ desires frequently fixated on the female form and its epistolary “bodily traces” (Henkin 2006, 99). 47

“By the 1870s,” he continues, “most Americans,” not just those separated by crisis or circumstance, “recognized the personal letter as [the] vehicle for everyday expressions of intimacy and everyday performances of the individual self,” the letters themselves, recursively elaborating, reinforcing, and circulating “the principal themes of the ideology of epistolary intimacy,” while exhibiting for all they touched “a new definition of family intimacy in a mobile society” (109, 117, 118).

Conclusion

Most theories of epistolarity, especially the role of letters in the formation of counterpublics and other subaltern networks of alternative agency, highlight the letter form’s generic porosity and promiscuity, and the utility of this feature’s affordance for “unruly acts” of self-making, intentionality and intersubjective relation (Malone 1997). This irreducible, formal contingency and freedom, in which the only compositional constraints are the terms of a correspondence’s epistolary pact, are amplified when translated into an auditory medium, and it is precisely this incursion of the unruly “real” that Kittler identifies in Gramophone, Typewriter,

Film (1990). The metonymic traces of the body, formerly inscribed in the idiosyncrasies of monographic handwriting, the sorrow, longing, despair or passion, implied by a tear stain, lipstick kiss, perfumed stationery, a stamp’s saliva, finger oil, etc., are often still present in the cardboard packaging and/or included stationery. But on top of this tangible materiality, the “grain” of the voice, which viscerally identifies the sender, acts as a powerful concatenation of presence, materiality, and authenticity. Recordable audio media also open the floodgates to a variety of different forms of content—from “remediated” music, film, and radio chatter (Bolter and Grusin

1992), to the “belliphonic” sounds of war (Daughtry 2015), the domestic soundscape, and myriad, layered voices from disparate corners of a correspondence’s community of utterance.

At the same time, without the formal constraints of traditional epistolarity, including narrative’s linearity and forward momentum, the spatial restrictions of a single page (as opposed to the surprising breadth of an eight-minute expanse of undifferentiated time), and decades of formal and informal instruction, the “noise” of a conventional “audio letter”—against and over which one’s personal identity could melismatically stretch, dilate and contract—could render one’s individuality diffuse, and even incoherent, as it struggled to rise above the din of combat. In the following chapter, I will discuss the epistolarily martial “techniques of self” as they have been manifested in each major conflict in which the United States participated and improvisationally adapted to changing paradigmatic mediums. Though 20th-century military epistolarity often comprises writing in an age of reliable and rapid postal systems, as well as alternative means of telecommunication, the missives of wartime correspondents more closely resemble those of their

19th-century counterparts, suffused with worries, or suppressed anxieties, borne of the ever- present specters of death, deployment and existential despair that trouble the “reciprocal sense of locality and somethingness” that enables a “viable correspondence” (Decker 1998, 38). At each technological juncture, users have developed innovative tactics to navigate institutionally strategic restrictions to make themselves “whole” and “heard,” in some cases, even after death.

Chapter 2: The American Military Epistolarium

In this chapter, I offer a cultural history of military epistolarity, focusing especially on socio-cultural adaption and adjustment in the face of new wartime challenges and progressive technological change. In preparation for my analysis of audio epistolarity in Chapter 4, I discuss changes in medium, form and content, each in interaction with the cultural milieu, and military necessities that produced them. In the following sections, I trace two parallel histories; the first being the official, infrastructural, and practical implementation of military communication in the

United States of America. Working chronologically, I discuss each major conflict, focusing on the technological innovations precipitated by each, as well as these innovations’ contribution to the development of new forms of epistolary subjectivity and social relation. My second history focuses on the changing cultural “work” accomplished by each new development in relation to emerging cultural needs. These range from the practical—distant fronts, culture shock, extended engagements, etc.—to the personal—new norms of familial and romantic interaction, the changing “face” of multicultural identity45 in the United States, and the expanding ethics and expectations of media production and reception with each new addition to the epistolary arsenal of average correspondents.

As my project focuses on the American military, and more specifically its members’ communication with home while serving at the front, I only discuss correspondence practices in the context of military conflicts in which the United States participated extensively In this

45 Or, rather, identities, via voluntary immigration, the slave trade, new international economic ties, new geographic expansion (both on the continent and off), intra-colonial creolization, etc. 50 chapter, my history begins with the official founding of the nation in 1775 and end with World

War II.46 For each conflict, I discuss the dominant modes of correspondence, as well as the interactive development of new communication technologies and changing cultural landscapes. In

Section I (“The Formation of a Nation”), I build on my discussion of the particularly American inflection of “The Postal Age” (Henkin 2006) and its central role in establishing the ideological framework for a 19th-century “American” identity in Chapter 1 by charting the slow expansion of official postal channels in the 18th century. In Section II (“The Civil War”), I will cover the emergence of the “consolation letter” and “epistolary song” as prosthetics of sentimentality in the face of the largest internal migration in the nation’s history. During “The Great War,” covered in

Section III, I will discuss the new necessity, rather than supplementarity, of “care packages” in war-torn Europe and the Pacific, as well as the advent of large-scale, frontline censorship and correspondents’ creative evasions of these expressive restrictions. By the middle of the century, new media and massive deployments created both complications and communicative affordances.

In Section IV, I will discuss the epistolary survival techniques of POWs as well as their inadvertent “rebroadcast” by a new, amateur radio network, as well as the advent of epistolary film in the form of Calling Blighty, an important precursor of more deliberately large-scale and sponsored forms of televisual epistolary exchange.

46 In many ways, the Korean War represents a direct antecedent of the Vietnam War in terms of bad faith policy, sociocultural misunderstanding, troop disillusionment, and bungled military strategy and misinformation (Cummings 2011). However, its historical proximity to WWII meant its epistolary output and technologies functioned much the same way. The Cold War, and especially the role of sound recording in espionage, and countercultural movements, is its own fascinating topic, and outside the scope of this project.See Daughtry 2009, Bijsterveld 2013, Coates 2015 for three illustrative examples of this growing sub-field. For an example of cross-Curtain, familial epistolarity, see Kurvet-Käosaar 2015. For a recent, compelling example in popular culture, see dramatic, television series, The Americans, and, in particular, Elizabeth/Nadezhda’s tape communications with her dying mother (FX 2013-2019). Unable to employ Russia’s vast communications network to speak directly for fear of interception by US counterintelligence, audio tapes, spirited between mother and child by a trusted intermediary, are Elizabeth’s only conversational channel with home during her US service for the KGB (Arkin 2013, FX). 51

Section I: The Formation of a Nation

Epistolary communication has been an indispensable resource in “American” life (writ continentally large) since the establishment of navigable trade routes between Western Europe and the eastern Pan American seaboard in the 15th century.47 Undertaken for economic as much as exploratory aims, reliable communication between first conquistadors, then colonists, and their

European sponsors regarding the fruits of the formers’ labor, and its ripening into an adequate return on the latters’ investments, was critical for both ends of the transatlantic equation. Given the “New World’s” exoticism in terms of culture and climate, terrain and topography, and flora and fauna from the writers’ perspective, their tone is unsurprisingly exuberant, ecstatic (and exaggerated). Their poetic imagery, suffused with Edenic evocations of a beautiful and bountiful

“paradise,” is fixated on the conditions and materials most relevant to post-Reformation,

Renaissance Europe’s values and prerogatives, including the abundance of gold, peregrine spices and comestibles, as well as friendly and/or malleable natives, “yearn[ing] for conversion to

Christianity” (Burke 2013). The letters of Amerigo Vespucci, in particular, made “manifest” the reality and opportunity, of a “heretofore unknown” continent in the wilds of the west, spurring future investment and permanent colonization (ibid.). Attracting religious refugees, entrepreneurs, and pioneers, the eastern seaboard proliferated with dozens of colonies, born of vastly different ideological, demographic and cultural origins and dispersed so widely geographically that intercolonial post was initially rare, even between groups connected to the same mother/fatherland

(ibid.). For most, bringing one’s immediate—let alone extended—family was economically

47 The first recorded letter dispatched from the Americas was sent by Christopher Columbus in the form of a “message in a [barrel]” in early 1493. Fearing for his life (and posterity) following a particularly vicious storm, Columbus composed the missive detailing his discoveries and imploring any who found it to “carry it to the Sovereigns” (Ferdinand and Isabella), sealed it in wax cloth, enclosed it in a barrel and had it thrown over the side of the ship (Decker 1998, 63). Of course, the recently excavated Newfoundland settlement of Thorfinn and Gudrid Karlsefni and their son Snorri (likely the first second-generation, “American baby”) leaves open the possibility of written messages having traveled from North America to Iceland 500 years earlier (Linden 2004). 52 untenable, and thus, each party inked its own transatlantic lines to epistolarily connect “long distance” families. Letters provided their only means of sharing the details of their unexpected hardships and challenges of a completely unfamiliar and unforgiving New (Life)World. As more colonists, trappers, soldiers, and other permanent or temporary “immigrants” arrived in North

America, international ports became way-stations for early letters but, unless secured in the hands of a trusted (or handsomely paid) messenger, most took months to arrive (or never did at all), requiring multiple attempts and/or duplication to make sure one’s message was received.

As each British colony developed its own resource and trade specializations, reliable inter-colonial contact on the continent became a priority. In 1693, the Internal Colonial Postal

Union (ICP) was formed, primarily to facilitate intergovernmental exchange and foster valuable trade (which, in most cases, involved the same wealthy merchant classes, who would remain the primary “customers” of the US postal unions until the middle of the 19th century) (Burke 2013).

Seeing their letters as a “continuation of conversations they would like to be having in person,” and thus writing several a day, intercolonial business operators became completely dependent on the mail, quickly outpacing the capacities of the ICP or individual couriers. This led to the creation of the British Colonial Post in 1753, designed by Benjamin Franklin and William Hunter

(ibid.).

But, as the revolutionary tide rose, and politically-minded colonists began to think of themselves as a separate entity, the necessity of coordinating military actions, conducting (secret) elections, and delivering intelligence reports required epistolary alternatives to official channels.

Enter the American Colonies’ first spies, whose contributions to espionage, on both sides, often included the theft, doctoring and fabrication of “private letters” by prominent revolutionary and/or colonial figures (Castronovo 2014). The publication and widespread dissemination of, for example, the infamous “Washington Letters,” containing unsubstantiated and salacious details of

53 an unverified affair but, seemingly written in the first president’s hand, would form a significant part of early America’s propagandistic epistolarium (ibid.). The importance of “open letters,” either intentional or stolen, to early American efforts at revolutionary uprising, counter- revolutionary rhetoric and post-revolutionary autopoiesis,48 cannot be understated. The other primary use of the early postal system was as a delivery network for “news” in the form of pamphlets or broadsheets. By the late 18th century, the modern “newspaper” had begun to develop, its contents often largely derived from letters—either written by or to prominent members of the community served by the particular press, or submitted as (often anonymous) ruminations on local events—from which the present-day term “news correspondent” derives

(Burke 2013).

In the first half of the 19th century, many Americans were drawn to the west, including

Christian missionaries, homesteaders, urban transplants, and railroad architects, many of whom also acted as “pioneers” in early forms of the personal letter, and in setting up physical networks, including mountain trails, clipper ships from Astoria to Boston (which, before the construction of the Panama Canal, required rounding Cape Horn), riverboat routes, rail lines, and the first post offices in the “new territories” (ibid.). As many had little chance of returning to their points of origin, their letters mirrored those of international immigrants, often combining several life-cycle events into single missives, or writing dozens of letters a month, formed into larger “diaries” and delivered as quasi-autobiographical, codex-esque packages. In the mid-late 1840s, several events, including the discovery of gold in California, the US annexation of the Republic of Texas and,

48 One of the first popular “columns,” entitled, “What Is An American?,” was written by a self-proclaimed “American of mixed descent” (though in reality a “full-blooded” Frenchman, J Hector St. John de Crevecoeur). 54 finally, the Civil War, escalated what up to that point had been a steady but slow process of

“settling the west.”

Section II: The Civil War

The intermingling ideologies of American exceptionalism, romantic nationalism, and the teleological certainty of “manifest destiny,” coupled with stories of gold in California, fecund soil in Oklahoma, economic opportunity in Oregon, and glory in Texas (along with countless other temptations to itinerancy) proliferated by the increasingly reliable and popular mass media news and postal network, encouraged the steady tide of westward expansion through the first half of the

19th century. It was the Civil War, however, that would precipitate the largest internal displacement of US citizens in the nation’s then just-shy-of-a-century history, dramatically changing the role of the post in American life, both military and civilian.

Forty years before the “Great Migrations” of the 20th century,49 the Civil War called, or pressed, nearly three million Americans into service and its aftermath created a refugee crisis in the South whose reverberations still echo today. While westward and urban migration, most commonly deriving from rural homesteads, had prepared some families for the experiential weight of familial separation, the war’s seemingly relentless appetite forced younger and younger men and women away from home, many for the first time in their lives (Burke 2013, Gates 2003).

This required a variety of new epistolary techniques to “access the imagination and emotion” of distant readers and further burdened the only-recently-codified “intimate letter” with additional cultural work (Burke 2013; Statham 2017, 127). In this section, I cover two new epistolary genres/techniques precipitated by the massive disruptions of the Civil War and the post-bellum

49 Most importantly, the Southern Diasporic migrations to the north, following institution of Jim Crow, and west in search of WWII economic opportunity. For more, see Boehm 2009, Wilkerson 2010, Gregory 2005, and Rutkoff and Scott 2010. 55

19th century: the “condolence,” or “consolation,” letter and epistolary song. Both were employed as prosthetics of sentimentality; printed extensions of intersubjective relations which were intended to replace the actual presence thought necessary to deepen, or end, intimate bonds. Both are also examples of “bottom-up,” popular communicative strategies that were eventually coopted by commercial and/or governmental entities and codified into formal procedures and professions.

In the roughly seventy five years since its (first) parting with England, the United States had been involved in dozens of significant military conflicts, from localized engagements with individual Native American tribes and hostile militias (the Cherokee-American War (1776-1795),

Shay’s Rebellion (1786-87), etc.) to lengthy, international conflicts involving multiple European powers, their local colonies and proxies, and large intertribal, Native American alliances (e.g. the

War of 1812). But for most Americans—an identity still very much in flux and, within any subgroup, often riddled with conflicting allegiances—these conflicts occurred on the fringes of even their most inclusive national “fields” (Bourdieu 2000), of which they knew little (and cared less), giving them little preparation for the scale, and proximity, of the slaughter that the Civil

War would become. In 1861, the general political consensus held that the Civil War, if not simply averted through diplomatic action, would last little more than a few months. Following the First

Battle of Bull Run, casualties of which numbered 4,878, pacifists’ hopes were dashed. By the end of active conflict, the war had claimed more than 620,000 lives—still the largest death toll in US military history—inaugurating a new continental order, and drastically altering Americans’ relationship with death (Faust 2008). In addition, for the first time in its history, the military was not comprised of a standing army derived from a noble “warrior class” or mercenary labor but instead, due to organization on a state militia level and massive influx of volunteers and draftees,

56 a “mass ‘amateur’ army” (Jolly 2001). For the majority of the latter, joining the fight was also their first experience away from home.

Thanks to unprecedented literacy rates and the ubiquity of “letter manuals” in childhood education, even those with little prior, real world experience with epistolary writing had models to draw on. The polite, decorous and platitudinous strictures of Victorian sociality built in to these models proved sufficient for the early, exciting days of camaraderie in training and the anticipated “glory” and masculine valor of the imagined battlefield. However, the soldierly reality of the alternating boredom of encampment and the horrors of combat, injury and death quickly taxed the expressive capabilities of the average soldier, leading to the birth of the modern “war letter” as a demonstrable, epistolary genre, defined in part, by its subject matter’s incommunicability.50 This pattern/coupling of anticipatory (male) glory, followed by almost- immediate disenchantment, is one that would repeat itself in every conflict discussed in this chapter (and one that, while challenged by Vietnam, is still evinced in present-day correspondence). However, difficulty “finding the right words” to convey the embodied experience and intercorporeal details of disciplined/dismembered bodies—the “cessation of inner-languaging” imposed by one’s personal and imagined pain only exacerbated by the sensory overload of violent combat51 (let alone the affective consequences of establishing their presence in textual form) —did nothing to decrease the volume of mail flowing to and from the battlefield, forcing adaptations on both the institutional and personal level. The former—i.e. the Union government in Washington, DC, the Confederate government (eventually seated) in Richmond,

50 For more on wartime epistolarity, see Jolly 2001 and Jolly and Stanley 2005 on the definitional difficulties of “genre” in the context of life writing. 51 See Scarry 1985 on pain and language; Becker 2004 on “inner-languaging” in the context of heightened sensory experiences; and Daughtry 2015 on the irreducible, phenomenological imbrication of sound and violence in wartime audition. 57

VA, and their armies, navies, signal corps, etc.—were presented with the unique difficulties of having to cripple (now inter)national communications networks.

In 1861, the North and South independently severed telegraph lines linking the Union and seceding states, while in the North, the postmaster general ended mail delivery to the South and ordered all mail from the region (appropriately) redirected to the Dead Letter Office. In a series of swift directives and actions that also included the “demonetizing” of Southern stamps, redirecting

“rail mail,” and the South’s naming its own postmaster general to organize its now similarly stifled post offices, “[t]he system instituted to unify the country through the dissemination of information was instead used to solidify the break.”52 These measures obviously hindered diplomatic talks, as well as contact between government leaders and their generals, but it was considered necessary to control the flow of (mis)information (Burke 2013, Carey 2009,

Maddalena and Packer 2015). For the combatants, support staff, and the friends and family making up the “home front,”53 the formerly detached and atemporal personal letter took on new weight and urgency.

As explained in Chapter 1, the relative inefficiencies and high cost of early-to-mid 19th- century US postal communication—involving average delivery delays of weeks or months, even between rural and urban centers in the same state, and exorbitant costs based more on distance than mass—meant most Americans sent or received, on average, only one letter a year, usually commemorating particularly important life-cycle rituals or events, described in florid detail, but with no expectation of immediate receipt or reply (Burke 2013, Decker 1998, Henkin 2006,

52 “A Nation Divided,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibits/current/binding-the-nation/a-nation-divided/index.html. 53 An anachronistic term, as it was not coined until WWI, but appropriate to the Civil War case given the ways in which the civilian sector was “deployed” in both industrial and affective labor. 58

Turner 1967). In 1861, Americans had had only a decade to adapt to affordable postage54 but, when suddenly wrenched away from home or kin, quickly developed expectations similar to those of the 1840s merchant class, whose frequent use of the post was considered essential and integral to daily operations55 and whose financial investments supported nearly the entirety of the system (Henkin 2006). Just before the Civil War, then, communication with one’s absent intimates on a daily basis seemed not only a requirement, but a right.

At the intersection of these two domains were the harsh realities of war in one’s

(frequently divided) backyard. The incessant movement of troops to avoid enemy detection/surprise (forcing field-bound letters to crisscross several state lines before reaching their recipient), the necessary supplanting of mail by military supplies, troops, or even homebound corpses56 on railways, epistolary censorship and disinformation in the (postal and telegraph) news media, and the shortages of paper, ink, cotton (for mail bags), and other necessary materials, are just a few examples (ibid; Burke 2013, Kielbowicz 1994). All of these disruptions felt particularly surreal and galling when families were forced to quarter allies, assist occupiers or captors, or witness the degradation of one’s enemies—and imagine the same for one’s kin—in POW camps on one’s family’s farmland. Eventually, generals on both sides recognized the importance of mail exchange to troop morale and effectiveness (its role in boosting home-front productivity was not fully acknowledged and exploited until WWII). Over the next four years, the militaries classified writing materials as “standard issue” for every rank, organized neutral coastal “flag-of-truce”

54 The Postal Act of 1851 established a basic rate of 5ȼ per half ounce and in 1856 began requiring pre- payment, rather than payment upon receipt, both of which were intended to “enhance” the American “public sphere” by making the mass delivery of newspaper, pamphlets and broadsheets easier and more geographically inclusive (Henkin 2006, 22). 55 Without it, confirmation of receipt of payment and/or product would have been next to impossible. 56 One of the more macabre, and thus rarely discussed, technological “advancements” of the Civil War was the normalization of embalming. Dr. Thomas Holmes was commissioned by Lincoln to develop methods for transporting the dead. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the practice was almost exclusively employed on officers, some estimates suggesting up to 4000 by the end of the war (Troyer 2007). 59 ships, landside “runners,” and developed “dual envelope”57 censorship practices for POW letter delivery (Burke 2013, Kaufmann 2009). In addition, the Civil War saw the organization of the first “mail call” rituals in the US military, the most ubiquitous and performative feature of the

“military correspondence” popular imaginary.58 This period also saw the establishment of the

Military Postal Service, which would become the primary provider and policy arbiter of official military correspondence practice until its reabsorption into the United States Postal Service in the mid-1970s.59

Iconically mirroring the division of the country itself were the families split by borders and/or Emancipation itself. In the former case, romanticized imagery of the Civil War pitting

“brother against brother” were in many cases quite literal and, outside of meeting one’s kin on the battlefield, there were few resources for contacting anyone across mail blockages outside of enlisting personal couriers. When messages did get through, politics were nearly impossible to avoid, resulting in some famously publicized feuds that spilled over into the popular press. Most

Americans viewed the war in existential terms, both personally and politically, but for African

Americans, the conflict represented a national referendum regarding their personhood, identity, and individual rights. Escaped, freed or born free in the North, many African Americans joined the Union Army, or had a family member who joined. For many of these soldiers and family members, writing to their loved ones exercised a new right to interpersonal and public expression.

Kathryn Burke cites Spotswood Rice, who wrote to his former owner, demanding the release of his family members remaining in bondage, and Hannah Johnson, who entreated President Lincoln

57 Most POW mail was required to be left unsealed but paid or stamped, and then encased in an outer envelope that would be opened by the censor before forwarding the letter on (Kaufmann 2009). 58 Within Civil War re-enactment circles, “mail call” scenes are a central means of establishing “realism” in camp-side performances. 59 A segment of the MPS lives on in the Military Postal Service Agency, which provides secure, internal mail services to employees of the Department of Defense, stationed at home or abroad. 60 himself to end discriminatory practices in the Union Army, including reduced pay; insufficient rations, clothing, and other supplies; and most distressingly, the common reluctance of white doctors to treat black soldiers, resulting in a casualty rate double that of their white comrades

(Burke 2013).

Many groups also utilized the post in the mid-to-late 19th century as a form of organizational autopoiesis. Christopher Hager describes the unprecedented “union” of the rights to assembly and literacy for freed black soldiers in the Union Army, in which cultural forms— including “deaconing,” dance, song, and story-telling—cross-pollinated between campfire communities, to fueling forms of group identity that coalesced first in epistolary communications with home and government (Hager 2016, 24-26).60 Liz Stanley and Margaret Jolly describe similar processes in the literary “awakening” of interstate feminists (Stanley and Jolly 2005). For

POWs, describing inhumane conditions and maltreatment in letters “addressed” to the president but with no hope of actual delivery, served as personal “testaments,” the imagined dialogue, as opposed to more traditionally diaristic self-address, serving its own cathartic purpose (Burke

2013).

In addition to connecting with similarly-minded but dispersed subgroups, wartime letter- writing in the 19th and 20th Centuries served a variety of individual and interpersonal needs. Of course, the most salient and necessary was forging contact with absent intimates, regardless of these connections’ contents (or even veracity).61 However, putting pen to paper could also allow a writer to manage their immediate emotional lifeworld. Though frequently glossed as “relieving

60 For more on the epistolary experiences of African American soldiers during the Civil War, see Redkey 1992, Smith 2002 and Gooding 1991. 61 So desperate for their intimate’s return, dumbfounded by the damage mere months in combat could wreak on mind and body, and, due to endemic errors and deficiencies in casualty reports, genuinely in the dark about the ultimate fate of their son/father/brother, many grieving families were successfully targeted by con men who claimed their intimates’ identities to alleviate their own disenfranchisement. Alluringly melodramatic but also and relatively apolitical critique of the “hearthside” ravages of war, assumed identity has since become a popular narrative motif in wartime dramas. 61 boredom,” occupying one’s mind can help stave off depressive rumination62 (a particularly acute hazard for soldiers, who arguably have less personal agency in their professional decisions that almost all other vocations), anxiety, fear, loneliness, etc.; relieve the malaise, unease and discomfort associated with homesickness, lust, longing, and a host of other contingently maladaptive “ways of being” by one’s self; or cathartically express pent-up thoughts or images, instantiating the other threads of one’s inner-languaging to quiet, expel, or simply record them.

Through narrative immersion, aesthetic transcendence and/or imaginative engagement, readers used letters to similarly distract them from the outside world, “fill in” mental blanks with answers to previously floated questions and details left out of earlier descriptions, and add another chapter, utterance, or response to their ongoing “conversation.” Both ends of the chain were able to call into being absent presences and intersensorial spaces, aided by the physical, tangible extensions of their loved ones; their bodily traces evident in handwriting, wrinkled creases, licked seals, and kissed salutations. In the absence of contrary data, both writer and reader were both required and able (despite their better judgement), to assume the safety of their intended recipient or sender for the duration of their reading/writing. As mentioned in Chapter 1, so powerful is this physicality, the letter can act as a metonymic totem, ensuring the safety of one’s absent other by its mere presence (Edelman 1986). As Stephen Gates notes, the lives of most young men serving in the Civil War had always been “centered on the experience in one community … separation remained an event for which they were especially unprepared” (Gates

2003, 14). At the time, for both soldiers63 and their families “[n]o mechanism within the culture”

62 I am using “rumination” in the clinical sense as a “mode of responding to distress that involves repetitively and passively focusing on symptoms of distress and on the possible causes and consequences of these symptoms” (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, and Lyubomirsky 2008, 400). 63 In this chapter, which focuses almost exclusively on military personnel engaged directly in combat, or exposed to its ravages, I will use the term “soldier.” In my corpus analysis in Chapter 4, many of my interlocutors served in support roles, necessitating a more inclusive (and non-gendered term), for which I will follow J. Martin Daughtry in referring to any of those serving in the United States military as “service members.” 62 aside from frequent letter writing “existed for coping with their initial anxiety over their separation” (ibid.).

In the same way that the Civil War “set the stage” for lasting structural relations between soldier and state, its epistolary culture established many of the structures of future later US wartime epistolariums. As described in countless letters in countless collections, the default experience of the average American soldier, North or South, was waiting, punctuated by hurried, disciplined and/or frenetic action, either marching, fighting, training or setting up/breaking down camp (Hanna 2007, Burke 2013). For those farther from the fighting or in no immediate danger of attack or imminent deployment, letters were typically written in the “margins” of one’s duty: after

“lights out,” in camp on days too hot, cold, or wet to train, and when relieved from watch. Unless one was an officer, one rarely knew what one was waiting for and, with nothing to imminently anticipate, were “allowed” to let one’s mind wander, lending some of these letters an air of geographic, temporal and even emotional detachment and a careful, controlled, penmanship

(Burke 2013). All of which made the seemingly sudden transitions between graphic descriptions of battles, and daydreams of picnics at home, particularly jarring for readers not used to military life (ibid).

If a writer was, instead, marching off to, recently returned from, or healing in hospital after battle, their letters’ tone, delivery and content was often far more grounded in immediate events, and stripped of the colloquial greetings and salutations, evocations of the writers’ immediate surroundings and physical health, and “epistolary present-tense” (i.e. “I am writing to you now from … ), all of which, Gates argues, helped immediately reassure the reader of their loved one’s safety (Gates 2013). The latter were also generally shorter, terse, hurriedly written and, if heading to combat, often contained hyperbolic promises, salutations, instructions to share and spread information across a broader social network (that the writer may not have another

63 chance to address), and, in extreme cases, last wills and testaments. It is this last category, often penned by comrades, nurses, chaplains and other “witnesses,” for the purpose of reassuring a family of their loved one’s spiritual, rather than physical safety, that, in a sense, expanded the personal letter’s ideological scope. Probing deeper, inside an individual’s “heart,” and broader, celestially expanding to contain both the spatial and temporal beyond, following the soul of the letter’s subject. The Civil War required of epistolary communication, for the first time, the capacity to satisfactorily “unmake” soldiers in death, while remaking them in the image of God, without the presence of immediate kin. This genre came to be known as the “consolation,” or

“condolence” letter.

Condolence Letters: The Intimacy of the “Good Death”

Of the uses of the epistolary medium during wartime, none is perhaps more memorable and infamous than the “casualty notice.” Due to the rapid acceleration of a conflict (which neither side anticipated lasting more than a few weeks) there was no institutional apparatus for notifying families of their kin’s death or injury in any official capacity. Though individual battles were vividly covered in newspaper reports—the “on-the-ground” details often drawn from first-person epistolary accounts—casualties were rarely reported unless the injured/deceased was a high- ranking officer (Faust 2008). However, this journalistic distance did little to insulate even those far from the fighting from the specter of death.

In the first half of 19th century, disease, childbirth, the accidents of industrial expansion

(from mine explosions and tunnel collapses to dangerous infections from minor wounds), violent clashes between invading “pioneers” and the region’s original occupiers, etc., took many lives, and offered one of the few excuses to pay the still exorbitant costs to send a letter. As David

Henkin notes, one of the impediments to early adoption of the post as a normal part of “everyday

64 sociability,” even after the reduction in cost, was a lasting association of mortal dread with letter receipt (Henkin 2006, 93). For the average American, on the rare occasion they received word from distant family, the news was rarely good, and often involved a sudden64 or, emotionally (as well as economically) devastating death, for which the sender required not only sympathy, but also financial aid (ibid.). By contrast, the Civil War inaugurated an era in which “death ‘reigned with universal sway,’ ruling homes and lives, demanding attention and response” (Faust 2008, xiii). If direct combat did not affect one’s family, several other factors often did, including the massive movement of troops or refugees, requiring temporary encampment, forcing inter-regional contact, and the relinquishment (or intentional destruction) of foods stores, clothing, property, housing, and thousands of acres of farmland, all of which contributed to rampant outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, measles, and pneumonia, as well as widespread casualties from hunger and exposure. As historian Drew Gilpin Faust argues in The Republic of Suffering, the war’s overriding experiential “texture, its warp and woof, was the presence of death” (xiii).

“Death,” Faust writes, “created the modern American union—not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments,” forging a national identity in which “[s]acrifice and the state became inextricably linked” (ibid.).

Influenced by nationalist movements on the other side of the pond but rooted in distinctly

American ideologies of patriotic exceptionalism, the Protestant work ethic, and property-based capitalism, this intertwining of individual and national defense formed a sacrificial “structure of feeling” (Williams 1954) that would persist through the next century of American military engagement, only faltering with the institution of the draft lottery in 1967. Institutionally and militarily, these commitments took the form of a new sense of obligation between the state and its

64 Death due to a prolonged illness was rarely cause for immediate contact until postal costs fell; this news was usually included, as a matter of course, in a single annual note, similar to today’s “state-of-the-family” holiday letters (Henkin 2006, Banks et al 2000). 65 soldiers, beginning with the reduction of state’s rights in favor of massive centralization. By the end of the 19th century, universal aid to veterans and their dependents had been instituted nationwide (originally spotty in Northern states and next to nil in the South), the national postal service had expanded to include all 3,000 lateral miles of the country, and the first monuments commemorating war dead were being erected, most importantly in Gettysburg, PA. On a personal level, “[d]eath was no longer encountered individually;” Faust continues, “[its] threat, proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war’s experiences,” shattering previously held assumptions regarding the purpose, place, and manner of human loss and its attendant spiritual transitions (xiii). In the midst of continental Europe’s burgeoning existential struggle with absolutist, externally-sourced moralities,65 American military families, who either directly or through mediated means were privy to the barbarity, scale, senselessness and abusive anonymity of the war’s violence and death, were forced to reckon with the rending of traditionally sacrosanct and inviolable unions between name, flesh, soul, earth and afterlife. As Faust explains, “the integral relationship between the body and the human self it housed was as shattered as the wounded man,” whose injury became both condition and action, continuing this breakage with each subsequent social interaction,66 fundamentally altering the American notions of the “Good

Death,” and the religious, philosophical and physiological means of achieving it (xxi).

While it is the particular lot of human beings to conceptualize their own mortality, soldiers’ lifeworlds require frequent imaginative and discursive (re)appraisals of one’s physical, psychological, economical, spiritual, and socio-cultural preparedness for life’s end; in a phrase,

65 The central, proto-existential writings of Kierkegaard (especially 1843’s Fear and Trembling and 1849’s The Sickness Unto Death), and Nietzsche (i.e. The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886)) were written two decades before, and two decades after the conflict (respectively). 66 The wounded Civil War soldier, espousing macabre or cynical aphorisms, became a common archetype in fictional depictions of the Civil War (e.g. Frazer 2006, Jakes 1982, Gurganus 2001, Brooks 2006). 66

“to worry about how to die” (xxii). Am I ready, willing, and able to die for this cause? Am I willing to kill? Is my government, president, or commander right in their estimation of its importance and righteous in the means or ends they intend to employ and meet? A soldier’s spouse, family, community, and nation must also ponder the same questions. Are we ready to endure, carry, understand, and explain this conflict’s gains and losses? Are we prepared to assume the new identities of widow(er) or orphan? Sacrificed or survivor? Victim or veteran?

Winner or loser? Oppressed or oppressor? Hero or criminal? Spirit or memory? These intersubjective and phenomenological calculations are, for Faust, the “work of death” (ibid.).

(The tangible tasks of cataloguing, preserving, transporting, interring and ritually relinquishing corporeal remains, along with their attendant infrastructural spaces and apparatuses—i.e. “cities”

(cemeteries), “factories” (crematoriums), “housing” (mausoleums), etc.—argues Thomas Laqueur

(2016), is the “work of the dead”).

In the overwhelmingly Christian environment of 19th century America, the ideology of

“sacrifice” was central to a soldier’s moral training and regimen. Above and beyond the glory of routing the enemy or preserving the union, the “business” of a soldier was to die (Faust 2008). As

Faust explains,

Focusing on dying rather than on killing enabled soldiers to mitigate their terrible responsibility for the slaughter of others ... [as they] saw themselves mirrored in the faces of those expiring around them … [d]ying assumed clear preeminence over killing in the soldier’s construction of his emotional and moral universe (6).

While a soldier might feel ready for his passing, the dominant performative rituals of death in this period required a particular set of prescriptive actions including co-presence with one’s immediate family to insure the proper, spiritual readiness of the departing’s eternal condition. In

1651, the publication of Jeremy Taylor’s “The Rule Exercise of Holy Dying,” which adapted the

Catholic ars moriendi to Protestant practice, began to reshape the American “art of dying,” and particularly, how to “give up one’s soul” (6). By the 18th century, this set of Christian rituals had been both naturalized and secularized; inseparable from middle-class, Victorian values of domesticity and moral living; and the hors mori, or “hour of death,” not merely an epilogue, but the “final chapter” of one’s earthly existence, a spiritual denouement without which the

“narrative” of one’s life “could only be considered incomplete” and the eternal character of one’s soul forever in doubt (10-11). In this sense, “[t]he dying were not losing their essential selves, but rather defining them for eternity” (ibid.)

Like any “performance” (Bauman 1984 [1975]), the ars moriendi required a competent performer—“the moribund”—with the highest degree of responsibility and accountability to their audience; an evaluative audience—“the witnesses,” in this case, immediate family and closest confidants; and a “stage”—the domestic deathbed67—on which to focus the heighted awareness and spiritual immersion of not only those involved, but also the final, and most important judge, the Creator/Savior (ibid). A “competent” and satisfying performance would leave an audience with certainty that the dying “had given up their soul ‘gladly and willfully,’” resisting temptation, doubt, and resentment and relinquishing “worldly attachments,” as well as sincere, confessional proclamations, divinely-sourced wisdom, and warm wishes, insuring their own legacy, an idealized memory for their loved ones to carry forth, and valuable insight to guide their remaining time apart before their eventual reunification in the afterlife (6, 23). “Special scrutiny” in the hors mori by intimate attendants was thus considered crucial to a “Good Death,” allowing family to assess and assist in their relatives’ readiness, insure the family’s future, spiritual reunion, impart and receive didactic lessons, and create a lasting link between living and dead vouchsafed by the

67 Deaths in hospitals were comparatively rare, accounting for only 15% of American deaths in the 1910s, partially due to the facilities’ associations with the “indigent” and “unrespectable” segments of the population (Faust 2008, 9). 68 veracity of “last words”68 (Bauman 1984 [1975]; Faust 2008, 19; Laqueur 2016). These assurances and assumptions were not merely challenged but shattered by the contingencies of the

Civil War. Not only were thousands of men dying far from home, many of these deaths occurred in the chaos of battle, passing unwitnessed (or worse, witnessed only by the enemy) or instantaneous (leaving the dying no opportunity to ready themselves), and bodies rendered unrecognizable or obliterated, thus denied witness, burial, and even their name (Faust 2008, 17-

26). As Faust argues, the existential imbrication of one’s “name” and “soul,” as evinced in Peter’s

Book, is still resonant today in the erection of monuments to “Unknown Soldiers” all over the world (ibid.).

Out of the horror of this potentially multi-sited death of one’s body, soul, memory and even identity rose the “consolation letter.” As mentioned above, with no formal system in place to notify next of kin of casualty, injury or disappearance, fellow soldiers, support staff, and average citizens—some close to the deceased, others strangers—as well as the individuals themselves, adapted and improvised battlefield and hospital approximations of the “Good Death,” acting as witnesses, proxies, coaches, scribes and messengers, to deliver inheritances and backpay but, most importantly, details of a soldier’s last moments. As Faust describes it, the consolation letter quickly resolved into a surprisingly consistent set of prescriptive utterances; “it is as if their authors had a checklist in mind” including answers to all of the questions “the bereaved would have sought had they been present at the hour of death” (17). These included a clear, undiluted consciousness of their imminent death and acceptance of their fate; evidence of “sanctified behavior,” faith in God and their own salvation; and last words (ibid.). In the first case, relevant quotations from the moment of death were obviously the most effective but, in their absence,

68 The absolute credibility of “last words” is still enshrined in US law with a “special evidentiary status excepting them from legal rules excluding hearsay” (Faust 2008,10). 69 writers interpreted and reported prior utterances, including premonitions of impending death

(foreknowledge of one’s demise implying both control and time to mentally prepare) and

“professions of faith and Christian conviction” (17, 20). When no such utterances were available, writers sought signs “to make silence speak” including facial expressions and dying bodily comportment (21). As Faust explains, many believed the “last life-expression of the countenance” was somehow “stereotyped by the death blow,” and [should be] preserved for later scrutiny and analysis” (21).69 Expressions and postures of calm, peace, and ease were often interpreted as evidence of acceptance and, perhaps, a personal glimpse of the beyond. In the second case, and especially regarding those prone to licentious behavior,70 reports of recent changes in lifestyle, professions of moral adjustment, anxieties over past behavior were common, as friends “worked hard to transform the deceased into a plausible candidate for salvation” (23). With regard to final words, soldiers risked life and limb to pull out a pencil and jot down the utterances of the dying, while many nurses, doctors, and chaplains exhorted men to express what they could and dutifully transcribed and edited what was said.

Faust notes that consolation letters, perhaps due to their tangentially spiritual origin, were surprisingly frank, describing in great detail their subject’s mortal wounds, recognizing that for most families, any information they would have witnessed was welcome (33). Either due to lack of evidence or active unbelief, many writers “checked” the same boxes, replacing spiritual reassurance with military courage, patriotism, and idealized performances of masculinity as surrogates for spiritual reassurance, creating a “hierarchy of solace”71 (25). Equating the

69 This belief is primarily responsible for the prevalent use of new photographic technology for “preserving” the dead in the late 19th century ( see Ruby 1995 for more). 70 For more on the affordances of “vice” and extramarital love during the Civil War, see Bjornson 2013, Lowry 2009. 71 For more on the role of the Civil War in forming contemporary forms of American masculinity, see Balcerski & Baptist 2014 and Bui 2016. 70 sacrificial blood of Christ with spilling blood for one’s country was considered sacrilegious by many clergy but despite their objections, “the boundary between duty to God and duty to country blurred, and dying bravely and manfully became an important part of dying well … [as] …

[p]atriotism and piety converged in what was at once a newly religious conception of the nation and a newly worldly understanding of faith” (25-26). The identity of “the Christian soldier” with patriotism, popularized in the post-bellum “Third Great Awakening,”72 would form the core of the Salvation Army’s recruiting literature for the next fifty years.

Many combatants and home-front spouses, parents, siblings, composed “last letters” and wills, enlisting friends or comrades to send or deliver them in the event of their deaths. In addition to “settling one’s worldly affairs” by dividing up one’s property, responsibilities, and the like, these letters also implicitly highlighted the importance of properly ending one’s social obligations, or, put another way, seeing to the lasting health of intimate relations, even from beyond the grave. As Thomas Lacqueur emphasizes in the The Work of the Dead, there are very few human cultures in which surviving relatives stop “interacting with someone just because they die” (2016, 13).

From the battlefield, some men composed hurried missives, often found blood-stained and crumpled in clawed hands (Burns 1990, Cozer 2006). Others surrounded themselves with multimedia representations of absent kin, digging ambrotypes, tintypes, handkerchiefs, lockets, locks of hair and all other manner of metonymic memento mori out of their pockets and satchels, tightly clutching them or pressing them to their faces, occluding all other sensory input to render

72 Theorized by William G. McLoughlin (1959), this proposed periodization comprises the years between 1850 and 1920, during which, McLoughlin argues, new evangelical denominations, from Christian Scientists to Jehovah’s Witnesses, adopted the tenets of the “Social Gospel” as a central part of their teaching. This doctrine emphasizes the understanding that Christ’s Second Coming is predicated on humanity’s morally “preparing” the Earth for his arrival. These dominations also developed a new appreciation for social science methodologies, and focused their efforts on social welfare programs, notably, Abolitionism and poverty (ibid.). 71 their absent lover the only available presence. Many were found in these positions, their intimate ephemera their only identifying link to aid in others’ consolation letters about them. In caring for casualties or identifying the dead, nurses, chaplains, and volunteers also used garnered information from these mementos in order to aid soldiers in composing letters and constructing narratives of piety, passion, pride and praise to console and inspire those making do at home.

While all of the examples above have analogues in my corpus of letters-on-tape, it is this final, improvisatory intersubjective collaboration that typifies the kinds of affective and communicative adaptations that allowed the written letter to become the aural.

Many soldiers, especially the younger and thus less educated recruits who joined later in the war, felt they had insufficient skills to compose their own letters and sought the aid of literate support staff. While the practice of employing one’s local pastor, doctor, or other “lettered” representative to read received letters and collaborate on proper replies was relatively common, especially in rural areas, in the 19th century, it was the Civil War that accelerated the practice and led to this skill becoming an official duty of aid organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation

Army, and lent letter-writing-as-war-effort a distinctly female gendered association that would last for the next seventy-five years (Litoff and Smith 1992, 1995). The most “rest” a soldier typically received was in his convalescence and, if gravely injured, garned him extra attention. To encourage hope and offer psychological as well as spiritual aid in addition to their physiological work, doctors, nurses, chaplains and citizen volunteers “played the role of instructors” in the ars moriendi, attempting to elicit final words and wishes, taking dictation, and coaching their patients into more informative and articulate messages (Faust 2008, 15). Nurses, who implicitly reminded many men of their absent female relatives would often “cooperate in the search for substitute kin, permitting delirious soldiers to think their mothers, wives, or sisters stood nearby” (12). Some willingly “acted” the part, slipping into maternal, platonic or romantic speech genres and dialogic

72 rhythms, to soothe, cajole of calm their patients (ibid.). Others, like Clara Barton, the eventual founder of the American Red Cross, felt uncomfortable “lying,” so merely stood just out of eyesight or reserved their “deceit” for patients too far gone to engage them, which Barton rationalized thusly, “the act had done the falsehood the lips refused to speak” (Barton qtd. in

Faust 2008, 14). Chaplains sought to “narrow theological and denominational differences” through adaptations of cross-religious formations of “last rites,” while surgeons wrote shorthand

“wills” for the dying while sanding the floor for the next amputation (16, 12).

This network of epistolary aids expanded with each successive conflict and their attendant technological advances. On the recipient’s end, despite their generic designation as

“personal letters,” in first half of the 19th century, epistles with only one intended recipient were generally in the minority (Henkin 2006). Letters divided into multiple sections for different sets of eyes, containing appeals to deliver “well wishes,” requests for contact, or time-sensitive information to other common relatives, friends, and community leaders, or instructions to “pass along to any you might deem interested” were relatively common and designated the primary recipient as the central node and mediator in a broader social network of the writer’s own making

(Decker 1998, Burke 2013). When blessed with ample time, soldiers spent a great deal of their leisure writing to every imaginable interlocutor but, just as often, their time and supplies were distressingly short, and urgency required they impart and extend as much of themselves as possible. Another means of efficiently optimizing one’s affective communication was the use of other genres and mediums, brimming with meaning difficult to contain in linguistic means alone.

Epistolary Song

Before the advent and/or popularization of more recognizably multimedia epistolary forms—e.g. photography and the postcard, the telegraph and voice in the “singing telegram,”

73 vinyl phonograms and early “voice mails”—writers drew on narrative, poetry, and fiction, as well a host of non-linguistic symbols, to elicit multimodal associations (Statham 2017, 126).73

Particularly relevant for my purposes was the new popularity of “epistolary song.”

Like the personal letter itself, the mid-century explosion of sharing musical scores in epistolary form grew out a uniquely American assemblage of Victorian values, advances in mass media printing technologies, and Romantic ideologies of “art” (and particularly music) as inherently apolitical and cross-culturally universal, producing a self-replicating imbrication of popular song, “public intimacy,” and wartime subjectivities, that would find expression in WWI,

WWII, and especially Vietnam. The American appropriation and adaptation of Victorian values and Western European cosmopolitanism produced an urban, middle-class, bourgeoisie in the 19th century that effectively sequestered its own form of amateur musicality, re-centering

“respectable” musical sociality in the domestic parlor rather than the local pub.74 Increasingly affordable pianos and a booming sheet music industry fueled a similar rise in musical literacy, cementing a cultural connection between “creative consumption”75 of popular fare and in-family

“musicking” (Small 1999), providing a new, affectively rich resource for interpersonal discourse

(Statham 2017; Paul 1998; Negus 1995). Combined with new access to daily newspapers, pamphlets, letters, and other artistic forms, the Victorian practice of “reusing found textual

73 Some examples include military insignia, wax stamps, dark-tinted “mourning” stationery, pictorial envelopes. For more on Civil War-era semiotics and symbology in interpersonal communication, see Samuels 2004 and Hutchison 2012. 74 Conflicts between the domestic “space” and those outside it, especially the public sidewalk and street, where busking, merchant barking, labor song, and other forms of public musicality still flourished, would produce some of the first urban noise ordinances. See Stiegler 2017; Sakakeeny 2010; Hegarty 2007; Schafer 1993; Schwartz 2011. 75 This phrase refers to a recalibration of earlier media reception theories, refocusing academic attention on consumers’ agentic deployment of popular media, from the banal (e.g. mood regulation) to the innovatively productive (e.g. mash-up culture). I will return to this topic in the closing section of Chapter 4 and in my Conclusion. 74 material to create new works with new meaning” "naturally” extended to the intimate letter76

(Statham 2017, 128, 129). Whether copied or included as cuttings, these quilt-like collages of disparate sources, including lyrics and scores, were never “cited”; the assumption of appropriation for personal expression validating signing one’s own name, and strengthening the highly specific emotional bond intended by their inclusion through multivocal, intertextual association (ibid.,130; Bahktin 2010). Epistolary songs took two primary forms: commercial and hand-written. In the first commercial form, pictorial envelopes and “half sheets,” the proffered melody or lyric would often wind around or frame patriotic or nostalgic, metonymic, emblematic or iconic images, including Lady Liberty, pastoral scenes, or sketches of a conquered building (a practice that resurfaced during WWI) (ibid., 129). When sold as stationery, publishers would often leave some text spaces empty, allowing the author to “personalize” the letter with their own regiment number, dedication, greeting, etc. In the case of lyrical blank spaces, writers were able to “quite literally become the subject of the song, taking 19th-century sentimentalism beyond the act of associating with the text and giving it a precise biographical reference” (ibid.). 77

Before sound recording, letters were one of the few means of sharing songs, outside of sitting someone down in your parlor or taking them to a show. In the wake of unprecedented, interstate migration, and frequent exposure to new musical ways-of-being, the practice of quickly

“jotting down” a tune or verse one had heard while out of town or on duty (or asking a musician or composer to aid one in doing so) became increasingly common (Statham 2017). However, most hand-written songs, either transcribed or copied from originals, were known to both

76 In addition to family folk song, other popular forms included scrapbooks or copybooks to create memorials, multimedia depictions of historical events, or “simply a pleasing collection of literature,” personally curated for one’s family’s future use (ibid.). 77 When employed as a consolation letter, one could, and many did, include the name, unit and location of the deceased as well (Statham 2017). 75 parties,78 often calling on a shared family song-book to communicate an intricately layered and nuanced affective world.79 Songs heard together at weddings, funerals, farewell parties, and other important life-cycle events could summon specific associations. In the generally hyperbolic sentimentality of the typical ballad, writers were offered the “freedom” to indulge in emotional extremes that might prove embarrassing in person. For particularly musical families, Statham notes, it wasn’t unusual for prose to “laps[e] into meter” (ibid.). This could lend the writer’s

“voice,” when reconjured by the recipient, an immersive depth in its fluid blending of conversational and aesthetic modes of delivery, more closely mimicking the densely intertextual, and poetic utterances of everyday speech (ibid;).

In contrast, proposals of marriage, dramatizations of combat death, declarations of victory, and other exceptional excursions from the everyday were also expressed through appropriately bombastic epistolary choices (ibid.). Of course, this same sentimentalism generally reinforced existing gender disparities, “womens’ songs” typically emphasizing hearth and home, fidelity, and financial dependence; while “soldier’s songs” glorified other “duties,” including patriotic sacrifice and comradeship in the face of existential threat.80 For extreme situations, i.e. the death of a child, parent, sibling or spouse, however, cliché selections from the growing national repertoire, could—like the comfortable platitudes of epistolary convention discussed in

Chapter 1—offer easy simplifications of universal feelings too difficult to express by more direct

78 A contemporary practice, born largely of text-messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and other social-networking platforms that place a premium on pithiness, is the meme-ish exchange of decontextualized lines from songs, meant to impart a particular sentiment, or garner a reply with “the next line” in a continuing conversation. 79 For an interesting recent example, a recent Here & Now segment discussed the legacy of Jane Austen’s song books, containing her own hand-copied versions of her and her family’s favorite songs of the period, as well as original compositions (Here & Now, 2018). For more on the role of these practices in the formation of pre-20th-century, socio-political “musical transatlanticisms,” see Goodman 2012. 80 Statham does not discuss musical style beyond the preeminence of balladry but, I would be curious to see whether home-front vs. battle-front-focused arrangements employed different musical topoi, from hunting horn figures to courtly dance meters, to indexically excite similar, cultural associations. 76 means. The dual nature of popular song as “commercial construction” on the one hand and a

“vehicle for intimate personal expression” on the other is not unique to the 19th century but, as

Statham notes, “Victorian Americans … had a much more active engagement with written texts than we do today,” blurring the line between “sung compositions” and “unsung works” delivered in “homespun” quilts of intertextual meaning (140). In this context, the musicological distinction between original score and individual performance is similarly blurred, as is the “written” and

“spoken” voice in audio epistolarity. In an attempt to speak dialogically, without the guiding structure of an immediately responsive conversant, my interlocutors were immediately confronted with what Thomas Levin has called the “latent mellifluousness” of everyday speech, their untethered voice darting in and out song, casual alliteration, rhythmic parallelisms, and exaggerated accents in reported speech, all in the space of a two-minute attempt to wish an intimate a “happy birthday” (Levin 2016). Arguably, the intended “message”—Barthes’ “I am thinking of you” – could have been more simply and straightforwardly imparted with a greeting card, the auditory version obscuring its directness in a sea of paralinguistic noise. But, as I will show in Chapter 4, this window into an intimate’s real-time, improvisatory composition of an utterance, “says” far more than Hallmark could ever hope to.

Section III: The Great War

In the consciousness of many Americans today, “The Great War” is dimly remembered, eclipsed by the victories (and sacrifices) of its “sequel” twenty years later. Although during

World War I the United States was involved in direct combat only for the final eighteen months of the four-year conflict, this war drastically altered US military culture. Two new laws allowed the military to dramatically expand its ranks: the Selective Service Act—colloquially known as

“The Draft”—and the Jones Act, which for the first time recognized the citizenship of Puerto

Ricans (largely, critics say, to encourage their participation in the war effort). Both helped instigate the largest international mass emigration in the nation’s history, with nearly two million

US soldiers shipped overseas by the end of hostilities in November 1918. This period also saw the first massive systematic economic reorganization and utilization of “the home front.” Steeped in a Progressivist ideology of efficiency and self-determination, the latter ultimately generated millions of tons of food, munitions, and other supplies. It was spurred on by reams of propogandist literature and inescapable posters covering every available surface, the founding and eager recruitment of thousands of relief agencies, as well as good old-fashioned patriotism. At the time, the citizenry was viscerally divided, torn between a hegemonically isolationist administration (though one still secretly committing millions in resources to the Allied forces) and a rapidly expanding immigrant population who were horrified at the plight of their extended families and the destruction of their homelands. Once the United States had entered the war, the majority of Americans turned their attention to supporting their recently deployed intimates, if not the war itself. 81 For most, even those with minimal literacy skills or financial resources, this support took the form of letters, postcards and parcels. Due to the United States’ comparatively limited involvement, the majority of the primary literature on WWI epistolary practices focuses on Europe; but, as all of the genres and innovations were eventually adopted by US forces, the insights offered in this literature are equally relevant to my history.

Since the Civil War, frequent contact between the battle and home fronts has been considered the most important factor in buoying morale (and, by extension, military success) on both ends of the epistolary chain. For combatants and commanders in World War I, this truism

81 Of course, organized opposition to the war did not cease; if anything, it intensified. Continued involvement by anti-war protesters bolsterted and spawned dozens of disparate organizations, including the Women’s Social and Political Union, the American Temperance Society, and the Industrial Workers of the World, all of whom would come to shape the political milieu of the inter-war years. For more on these movements, see Cole & Struthers & Zimmers 2017, Dubrovsky 1969, Jorgensen-Earp 1997. 78 took on considerably more weight. To start, following the imaginative spatiotemporal compression precipitated by the “Postal Revolution” and the foundation of the modern telecommunications infrastructure, all parties involved left home or said goodbye to their loved ones harboring much higher expectations for the accessibility and rapidity of epistolary contact.

As noted in Chapter 1, early 20th century norms of familial interaction were now intimately tied up with epistolary conventions and ethics and thus, most Americans were “inculcated” to the proper “cultural practice and presumptions of family correspondence,” which required frequent and heartfelt interchange to appropriately maintain distant bonds (Hanna 2014, 4). Fifty years before, similar expectations had strained the then-nascent rail system, spurring postal innovations, but also inviting destruction: with postal materials increasingly monopolizing carriage capacity, supply chain raids and sabotage became ever more strategically enticing. With the recent completion of the Panama Canal, the incursion of a sea between the average American correspondent and their intended recipient seemed less insurmountable but, for military strategists, this presented a daunting task. It has been estimated that the average soldier on either side of the conflict wrote six letters a week and shipped roughly half as many packages (ibid.).

Postal exchange during the “Great War” fell into three large categories: parcels, postcards, and letters, each supplying and supplementing different forms of emotional and physiological needs many saw as insufficiently met by official military means alone.

Liebsgaben

By far the most voluminous and varied were parcels which, by the first Christmas of the war in 1914,82 had already overwhelmed the capacities of the British, French, and Belgian

82 From France, 200,000 items were sent per day, from Britain 60,000 a day and, over the course of the next four years, the numbers only increased. Even when heavy rationing was instituted by both the Allied and Central Powers, it was the weight, as opposed to the number, of packages that went down (Hanna 2014). 79 military postal systems, requiring massive expansions in freight capacities and strict regulations regarding contents and weight (Hanna 2014, 5). As Hanna notes, however, the near-universal injunctions against sending liquids, food stuffs and any other perishable items were among the

“few regulations … most consistently ignored for the duration of the war” (ibid.). The most common (and appreciated) items enclosed were also the most prosaic, including home-knitted warm clothing—from balaclavas to sweaters, gloves and socks—pen, ink, pencils and stationery, tobacco, hometown newspapers and periodicals, and food, both prepared and raw, the variety

(and fragility) of which might surprise contemporary readers. On the menu were baked goods of all kinds, cured meats, cheeses, fruit, preserves, paté, and dozens of other delicacies, along with lard, raw meat, eggs, milk and other ingredients that rarely made the trip intact (ibid.). Even when contents arrived spoiled, stale or crushed, they were greatly appreciated, as evinced by countless letters of gratitude. As Wildred Cove exclaimed (after systematically “grading” each item),

“But the eggs! Oh! The eggs!!! Before I’d taken off the canvas cover I detected "something." I put on a pipe and carefully extracted the noisome articles and promptly immersed them into the water in a shell hole before they exploded. It is a pity they went bad, for apart from the expense they are a great treat” (Liddle Collection 1917 qtd. in Hanna 2016, 5-6).

Most nations reduced postage rates for parcels destined for the front at some point during the war.

Despite their exultant gratitude—and for some, naked need—for their contents, the financial burden of acquiring, preparing and shipping extravagant cornucopias of goods weighed heavy on the minds of those on the front line. In their letters, enlisted and/or working-class men complained about the disparity between theirs and their officers’ postage rates and expressed concern over the strain such “luxuries” might press on their loved ones, frequently indexing their unease with having become dependent on their wives as providers (ibid., 7; Gerber 2006,

Makepeace 2013). Of course, families were not alone in this effort. On both sides of the conflict

(and both sides of the pond), women-led relief agencies, schools and other non-governmental, philanthropic organizations assembled and shipped millions of packages (called Liebsgaben, or

“love gifts” in Germany) to local servicemen. Though short on opportunities for “shopping,” many of those on the front line endeavored to send something of what came to hand for holidays and special occasions, from a pocketknife looted from an enemy corpse to much-needed cooking supplies pilfered from captured stockpiles (Hanna 2014, 7).

Like letters, parcels’ addressees and receivers were rarely singular, their arrival marking another opportunity for to enlisted men to share their “temporary bounty,” commune with fellow combatants, and pepper their gifts with stories of their senders (Hanna 2014, 7). So common was this practice that shortly after the beginning of the war, most senders included enough to share with their recipient’s entire unit, even heeding requests for unit favorites.83 Among officers in the

British Army, the sharing of gifts had been standard practice for decades, their “regimental wives” going so far as to arrange for “the distribution of packages to the men under their husband’s command,” and, in the event of one’s death, to his widow and children (6). This was doubly true for prisoners-of-war who, especially in German labor camps, were often unable to get word to their home countries or register their locations with the International Red Cross, making the receipt of desperately needed food parcels next to impossible and the charity of their fellow prisoners that much more important (ibid.).84 This issue was compounded following the German offensives in early 1918. The capture of POWs quadrupled, the labor camps ballooned and, consequently, many prisoners were moved constantly while their camp “address” was left unchanged. This forced their parcels to be routed through Germany’s beleaguered cities, where

83 For whatever reason, this practice was not common among the Central Powers during WWII, leading to widespread dissension between rural and urban soldiers, the former of whom continued to receive food from home well into the famine facing the capitols in the later stages of the war (Hanna 2016). 84 See Jones 2011 for more on the treatment of WWI POWs in German labor camps. 81 they were often looted by starving citizens (Jones 2011, 192-4). For most recipients, “care packages” were not merely supplementary but essential to their mental and physical health, their tactile—not to mention gustatory, olfactory, and auditory—materiality conjured in an instant the most intimate details of one’s grandmother’s kitchen, wife’s vanity, father’s tobacco pouch, or corner newsstand. The narratives associated with these items could become the seed for a moment of trench camaraderie. For POWs, these connections were all the more important in the face of limitless time with little distraction. I will return to the topic of POW correspondence in the following section on WWII.

Postcards: Picture, Silk and Field

In its modern incarnation as a (relatively) inexpensive, multimedia, souvenir and/or vehicle for casual correspondence, the postcard had already been established since the early

1870s in Western Europe and the United States. As a resource and medium for wartime correspondence during WWI, there were three major types: the standard “picture postcard,” the embroidered silk postcard, and the official military “field” postcard, printed and available from most nations’ armies during the conflict. Each presented its own affordances, associations and hindrances.

Little distinguished wartime from peacetime uses of the readily available, pre-posted

(and, in some cases, pre-written) picture postcard. Just like for most individuals “traveling” abroad,85 a postcard was intended to address the recipient, first pictorially, with a carefully chosen image to amuse, arouse, titillate, inspire, embarrass, or reference shared memory or narrative, and, most importantly, give the addressee an impression of the addresser’s current location. Due

85 As in contemporary use, people rarely sent postcards from “home,” though the advent of smartphone photography has allowed unprecedented, asynchronous exchange of borrowed as well as user-created images. 82 to strict censorship laws, revealing a location was obviously problematic, but this risk did not stop many from sending cards “offering scenes of devastated villages within the battle zone” they currently occupied (Hanna 2014, 4). Given the soldiering life, the ease, affordability, and immediate aesthetic appeal of postcards is easy to understand, and local photographers mass- produced similar scenes by the millions. Well before the age of instant photography, sending a postcard to one’s pre-reading child also presented a way for both ends of the communication chain to share the same experience.

Also popular in the pre-war years (especially in France and Austria) was the silk- embroidered postcard, which was quickly adapted to wartime use by local and immigrant crafters to appeal to a new and suddenly immense captive audience. Roughly the same size but far more elaborate than the above, the silk postcard consisted of an embossed paper “surround” glued in place to a pre-embroidered piece of silk in its center (Read 2017). The embroidery was produced as “out work” by Belgian immigrants, and then, war refugees, living in France and Britain.

Before the war, their cards generally featured flowers, insects, bird plumage, rainbows, sentimental scenes, and historical sites (Tomczyszyn 2000). With the influx of foreign militaries, cap badges for specific British, French, Russian and other regiments and national flags were blended with the former imagery (sometimes blending several flags or badges into large

“bouquets” or alarmingly patriotic butterflies) (ibid.). With the advent of machine embroidery in the mid-1930s, scenes of bombed-out buildings (eerily reminiscent of the postcard photography described above) became popular when foreign GIs again descended on France during WWII.

Most cards also contained embroidered messages—some banal and intentionally vague, like

“Merry Xmas” or “To My Dear Sweetheart”—others more specific, including proper names,86

86 As merchants did not make cards on order, its likely they simply produced the most common names, based on the forces in their areas (akin to truck stops’ racks of souvenir, “personalized” license plates). 83 names of battles, and song lyrics (ibid.). The tone was always either sentimental or patriotic, with more specific messaging saved for the interior of the card or an attached letter. As the cards were fragile (and expensive) they were meant as keepsakes, often accompanied by perfume (for amorous affects) or part of a larger parcel for familial readers (and especially children). The form remained popular well into the 1960s.

Far less popular {even held in contempt} were the official postcards mass-produced and distributed by most militaries during the war. Consisting of a monochromatic, single-sided card with a “pre-printed menu of options” (each more anodyne and ambiguous than the last), these

“field” postcards were “roundly despised as impersonal and almost completely uninformative”

(Hanna 2014, 3-4). Typical messages included “I am quite well,” and “I am being sent down to the base” for the British Army and, in the “multilingual Hapsburg Monarchy” forces, simply, “I am well” in all the official languages of the empire (4). These were obviously popular with the military as there was no need to cycle them through a censor; adding anything, from additional text to simple drawings, would result in the card’s immediate destruction (ibid.). Also quite light and regular in size, this form was adopted by US forces upon entering the war and stayed “in rotation” until the end of overt military censorship after WWII. Most soldiers employed them only as a “last resort,” when all other options were impossible, to at the very least send “proof of life” assurance to their loved ones before deploying. 87 Ironically, one of the most common uses was for men who had recently returned “home” but had been immediately sequestered in a homeland base for debriefing, quarantine, or recovery when they were not yet allowed to communicate with their loved ones, sometimes only an hour’s train ride away.88

87 Some other examples include, during postal embargos preceding large-scale troop movements or battles, when passing through a port with a post office but no material to write with, or when whisked off to a hospital ship for recovery (from which the post was a more difficult proposition in WWI). 88 For more on silk postcards, including a large gallery of color images, see Tomczyszyn 2000, 2004, and Read 2017. 84

Letters: Laments, Green Envelopes and Censorship

Coming into World War I, even with the invention and proliferation of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and half a dozen other short-lived long-distance mediums, the “intimate letter” remained the model of distanced communication for the majority of the Western world. While parcels may have outweighed them, letters were the primary form of interaction between the home front and the front line. As one scholar evocatively describes it, “If stacked one above another, the weekly outflow would have formed a pile of about 20 miles in height” (Englander

1994, 304). As described in Chapter 1, these letters conformed to the by-now natural form dictated by public school curriculums and the inescapable letter-writing manual on the shelves of every bourgeois family (and all those who aspired to be) right next to Berliner’s stair-step classical discs (Katz 2010). Their content was determined by the exigencies of the intimacy of everyday temporality and their ethics of reciprocity heightened by the anxieties and ruptures of wartime. Where they differ is the constant specter of censorship and state-sponsored propaganda and the evident tension between writing in a manner that is “honest, informative … and confiding” while also being “sufficiently anodyne, vague, and politically inoffensive” so as to not incur the ire of those watching (Hanna 2014, 9). Indeed, with regard to its effect on maintaining intimate connections during wartime, the military’s epistolary surveillance apparatus might be the most consequential technological innovation of the conflict.

As much a surreptitious survey method as a Foucaultian effort at panoptic control and biopolitical information gathering, every military in the Allied and Central Powers’ censorship programs had three primary aims: 1) protect sensitive information from leaking to the enemy, 2) detect and avert subversive political action and organization in the ranks, and 3) to “take the temperature” of the troops with regard to morale, health, and mental well-being (Foucault 1998,

1995; Hanna 2014, 9). For the British and Germans, this took the form of “frontline” censorship, in which officers—primarily junior ones—were tasked with reading, editing and reporting on the entirety of the correspondence produced by the men under their command (ibid.). Unsurprisingly, while many soldiers chafed at, yet still understood, the need for such scrutiny, the proximity (and occasional churlishness89) of their “editors” was difficult to endure (ibid.). The penalties for expressing anything contradicting the party-line of heroic self-sacrifice were steep (up to and including court martial) (ibid.). For soldiers, this amounted to any discussion of the horror/carnage of war, the lack of basic necessities, dissatisfaction with their superiors, or any indication of their location (an inordinately important detail when attempting to maintain intimacy) (Knopf 2014). For civilians, and especially women, their “job” was made abundantly clear by inescapable propaganda, which muddied the waters between agency and complicity

(Litoff and Smith 1992, 1995). The state placed women in a nearly impossible bind, urging them to “stay strong” regarding the hardships of home and remain quiet about their struggles in their letters (Action 1999). The state enjoined them to urge their men to charge into battle for God and country but to frame this mandate in terms of their own protection of home (ibid.). Women at home were supposed to provide for their men’s “safety,” through material and emotional support, even as the state often failed to protect and provide for them (Litoff and Smith 1992, 1995; Acton

1999). Some responded to these injunctions by restricting themselves to banalities, literally writing about little more than the weather (Hanna 2014, 9). However, many others, officers and enlisted alike, found ways around the system—from civilian mail systems and private couriers to codes and ciphers, e.g. employing “dots” beneath characters to spell out the names of landmarks

89 As historian Desmond Morton notes, contributing to “a soldier’s humiliation was the knowledge that his officers read every word of his personal letters and, as mess waiters knew, sometimes joked about them with brother officers” (Morton 1993, 238). 86 or cities (Action 1999). As historian James Goulty describes, some means of skirting the system involved ingenious improvisation with existing tools:

To try and counter censorship some soldiers developed their own methods for alerting loved ones at home as to their movements. Wartime artillery officer Sir Robin Dunn explained ... 'We each had an identical map ... When I wished to tell her where I was I would write a particular sentence in my letter, put the map over the corner of the note paper and stick a pin through the place where I was.' Back in Britain his wife would then place his letter over her map, and stick a pin through the hole so that it pierced the map and indicated her husband's location (Goulty 2015, 90).

Many others, however, simply ignored the regulations. Though they may have self-censored to save their parents or children from worry, they still “engaged” their civilian selves by discussing everyday money matters, scholastic challenges, and schoolyard bullies. Most soldiers also had at least one “wartime” confidant, with whom they shared vivid descriptions of combat, the “blasted landscape” of war-torn cities and their “near misses with death” (Hanna 2014, 12). Civilians— and again, especially those women closest to men at the front—sought a similar balance. They described the intricacies of their home-front work, while involving their spouses, siblings, parents in the “miseries” of their everyday, seeking both consolation and understanding, while helping to psychically stitch together their absent intimates’ disparate identities as soldier and husband, father, uncle or son. For many European (and especially German) home-front women struggling with near famine and constant bombing, expressing their anxieties rather than mutely “endur[ing] with stoic resignation the tribulations of war,” this challenge to the state earned them a codified genre: the “lamenting letter” (ibid.,15, Hammerle 1999). This “genre” formed one pillar of Kaiser

Wilhem’s subsequent claim that dissension from within led to Germany’s defeat in WWI and its suppression would aid their victory in the fight (Acton 1999).

In the first large-scale international conflict of the modern era, men and women from all sectors of society90 were on or near the front lines. Some were conscripted or drawn to the fray by a sense of religious or civic duty, others experienced a bildungsroman-like quest for enlightenment and adventure. All present as witnesses—either proximate or mediated—to incomprehensible brutality and carnage. From the works of the journalists, novelists, poets, memoirists and visual artists among them, was crafted the still-dominant narrative of the isolated, autonomous, shell-shocked soldier whose ties to society and kin were irrevocably severed by the fire of combat and its inexpressibility to anyone “who wasn’t there.” Recent critical scholarship has sought to nuance this picture and the false dichotomies it supports and perpetuates, i.e. combatant/non-combatant, man/woman, front/home, censored/unmediated. These negotiations can be read as a suite of epistolary “techniques of self” (Tamboukou 2011) that nuance the prevailing picture of the First World War, creating a narrative stream that challenges the traditional picture of a bifurcated world, torn asunder by violence, but also divided by gender, class, and age.

Section II: World War II

World War II has been described as the “last golden age of letter-writing” if not in creative diversity, then certainly in its volume and cultural ubiquity (Hartley 1999, 183). Though many other forms of contact between separated intimates were possible—including scheduled leave, phone calls, and telegrams—many of these were either logistically difficult, economically

90 WWI was the first American conflict in which women were allowed to enlist in the Marines (as reservists, mostly in clerical positions), Navy (“yeomannettes”) and Coast Guard. In the Army, women were prevented from joining officially, but over 20,000 were employed as nurses, many near the front lines. Many more worked for non-governmental aid organizations, including the American Red Cross (ARC). While there was certainly a socio-economic split – working-class women joining the military or filling vacated positions in the home-front manufacturing sector, while those with more means/connections dedicated their time to fund-raising, political organization, and recruitment – all classes served in some capacity. 88 prohibitive, discouraged, rationed or outright barred by the military, giving the traditional letter one last day in the sun before its eventual eclipse by digital telemedia in the late 20th century.

Understood since the Civil War (in the US) and WWI (in the UK) as essential to “good morale,” newly modern postal services were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the military’s postal needs,91 from shortages in paper, ink, lead, and adhesives, to the enormous cargo space and plane fuel needed to transport hundreds of tons of paper to and from overseas fronts. Military engineers responded with several new mediums, most importantly, V(ictory)-Mail (or “airgraph” in the UK) and the “green envelope” system.

V-Mail and the “Green Envelope”

Invented in the United Kingdom in the mid-1930s to cut down on postal weight, the

“airgraph” was the first “hybrid” postal system—i.e. employing both textual and photographic methods—and dubbed “Victory Mail” (more commonly, “V-Mail”) upon US adoption and further development at the beginning of their involvement in the war. Using light-weight, pre- posted “letter sheets” which were designed to be both stationery and envelope, the soldier or civilian drafted their letter in the provided space (roughly half a page of standard 8 x 11 by today’s measure), folded and sealed it and then handed it to their commander or mail carrier.

Upon reaching either the base or state-side postal center, the letter was unsealed, censored, photographed and converted to microfilm measuring only 5 x 3 centimeters. The individual frames were then packed together in small tubes, shipped overseas and “reproduced” as printed letters, measuring roughly ¼ their original size but preserving its holographic detail (Rhoades

2008). This reduction in weight created a concomitant reduction in shipping costs, one of the

91 It has been estimated that many billions of letters were sent and received just to and from the United States and the United Kingdom between 1939-1945. 89 most exorbitant and onerous expenses for mid-century militaries (ibid.). According to the

Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, a pre-V-Mail flight would carry upwards of 37 bags of traditional mail, weighing roughly 2,500 lbs. With V-Mail, the same amount could be shipped as only one bag, weighing no more than 40-50 lbs.92 Both the airgraph and V-Mail were relentlessly advertised by UK and US military officials, leading to a spike in popularly in 1943, during which millions of letters were sent and converted in this fashion.93 However, these forms introduced their own restrictions and complications. Necessitating (at least) two technicians to reduce and the reproduce the “original,” not to mention the staff tasked with opening, preparing, and resealing their contents, V-Mail and “the airgraph” were perceived by many as only marginally less invasive than prior forms of censorship. At the same time, the mediums provided far less writing space and precluded the possibility of enclosing other items, such as photographs, money, or cuttings. Complaints regarding inadequate space abounded (ibid.) but, like Twitter today, users developed their own methods for working around these restrictions, including relationship- specific short-hand, codes, and, for the more artistically savvy, drawings and sketches, which, unless explicitly (and negatively) political, were difficult for censors to evaluate. In addition, the

¼ size reduction limited the physical, “totemic” materiality of correspondence, lessening the extent to which individual letters could tangibly function as icons of the distanced relationships themselves.94

The “green envelope” was originally developed by Allied Forces, during WWI but, due to the United States’ later entry into the war, was not adopted by US forces until WWII.

92 “V-Mail,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibits/past/the-art-of- cards-and-letters/mail-call/v-mail.html. 93 For examples of poster advertising, see Sarah Sundin, “Victory Mail in World War II,” Sarah’s Blog, June 15, 2017, http://www.sarahsundin.com/love-letters-and-victory-mail/. 94 This diminution was not just in relation to bulk. With holographic script traditionally acting as an important metonymic presence, its reduction to readable, but miniscule size lessens its corporeal connection to a specific body. One could technically wear a miniaturized “wedding ring” on a chain but its inability to actually grace a finger makes it more symbol than totem. 90

Responding to calls for officially sanctioned, uncensored means of communication, the “green envelope” provided a way for soldiers specifically to send any/all material to their confidants, sealing the proffered envelope with a “pledge” line, promising that no sensitive information was contained therein and permission for the envelope’s contents to be searched randomly before leaving the continent (Goulty 2016). For UK forces accustomed to frontline, regimental-level censorship, the green envelopes were more popular. For US forces, they were tentatively blessed by officers, who welcomed the boost to morale but, due to the even harsher penalties for censorship violations—rescinding one’s green envelope privileges or even general mail privileges

—most US soldiers continued to use censored, first class mail (Hanna 2014).

Despite these restrictions, both of these forms, as well as postcards, form letters, and other mixed-media, “fill-in-the-blank” templates, distributed by both militaries and relief agencies, became popular as missives from the front lines. A variety of reasons have been suggested for this preference. Most obviously, constantly on the move and severely limited in access to adequate materials, soldiers had far fewer opportunities to write at all, let alone produce the long, expressive, and nuanced performances their recipients craved. In addition, the desire to touristically share the visual details of their foreign locales, their reluctance to burden their intimates with the inherent anxieties of combat stories,95 and, as trauma mounted upon trauma, steadily decreasing capacity to articulate their experiences at all made the brevity and the pre- scripted nature of these truncated epistolary forms appealing.

Women, on the other hand, while bogged down by dozens of new responsibilities, were also exhorted by their government and their fellow “wartime wives” in the WWII-Era “intimate

95 During WWII, combat occupied the majority of a soldier’s time and defined the dominant contour of their wartime lifeworlds. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, this is in stark contrast to service members in Vietnam, most of whom never saw combat, and those who did, spent the much of their time anticipating it rather than directly engaging in it. This temporality created its own distinctive affective consequences. 91 public” into which they’d been interpellated to remind “their fighting men” precisely what it was they were fighting for; namely, them (Jolly 2011; Berlant 2008). This required a complicated range of expressive modes, from concerned mother to coping widow, fragile wife to wayward daughter, performances that Jenny Hartley argues necessitated narrative techniques more in line with contemporaneous novel composition (1999). As opposed to the colloquial understanding of personal letters as “artless and transparent acts of self-expression,” Hartley argues that especially mother’s letters to their battlefront offspring “can be read as masterpieces of simulated conversation and character creation, fictions of spontaneity” (ibid.). These include constructing detailed depictions of shared, domestic spaces, creating stand-alone, anecdotal “short stories” that helped immerse the reader in their absent, local culture(s), and specificity in colloquial and interpersonal address, drawing on the linguistic details of a given relationship’s “familylect”

(183; Gordon 2009).

The predominance of the personal letter in the mid-20th-century, wartime Euro-American media ideology is underscored by the use of epistolary forms in a variety of public entertainment and diplomatic media. The personal letter was immediately recognizable and understandable genre and, since the mid-19th century, associated chiefly with filial love, intimacy, affective warmth, and privacy/confidentiality. It was viewed as a privileged source for authentic, unfiltered self-expression (Milne 2011, Hartley 1999). Some examples of new “venues” for remediated epistolarity include ambassadorial exchanges, government films, radio plays, celebrity-hosted radio broadcasts from maternity wards, books (including the ever-popular epistolary novel), newspaper and magazine columns, and even polemical essays (Hartley 1999, 184). Addressing the question of the mass appeal of individualized and individually-targeted forms, singer Vera

Lynn described her maternity broadcasts writing, “it was also good … and reassuring for those

92 who didn’t get chosen, because they’d know that contact was there … it had the effect of reducing distances between people” (Lynn 1975, 98 qtd. in Hartley 1999, 184). As Hartley writes,

“The letter guarantees and authenticates—or seems to—sincerity and intimacy. In wartime the status of the individual is fragile and vulnerable: sent among strangers, regimented, uniformed and facing danger and perhaps death. In these circumstances the ‘warm’ genre is particularly welcome” (Hartley 1999, 185).

In Chapters 3 and 4, I will discuss the influence of episotlarity on the new communicative media of the 1960s and 70s and its effect on their uses as correspondence in terms of composition, content and distribution.

POWs and Found Transmissions

As discussed above, the First and Second World Wars forced militaries on both sides to manage unprecedented numbers of prisoners-of-war (a central topic in Geneva Convention debates during the inter-war years), though, for the United States, the treatment of POWs largely an abstract issue until 1941.96 As Clare Makepeace notes, an astonishing 1/397 of those involved in active conflict were held captive at some point during WWII, roughly half for periods of longer than a year, and half again of that, for four years or more (ibid.). Treatment, rations, labor practices and the like were covered in the Geneva Convention rules or worked out in individual treaties.98 The Convention rules about correspondence were vague and variably enforced. The unreliability of correspondence lent camp life and the POW experience, a necropolitical,

96 Thousands of US military personnel were captured and held in German labor camps, especially following the last-gasp German offensives in early 1918. During the same period, the United States hosted its first German prisoners-of-war on US soil. Numbering about400 (though this is a conservative estimate), they were mostly housed in Georgia and Utah. WWII’s numbers, however, dwarfed these. 97 This percentage refers to all troops on both sides of the conflict. Although many Americans were captured, Russians and Germans made up the majority of the POW population during WWII. 98 For example, the 1915 accord between Germany and Britain regarding the supplement of “bread rations” for British POWs via non-governmental aid organizations. 93 existential unpredictability, akin to Agamben’s “bare life,” in which the “sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived”99 (Agamben 2017 [1998]). On average, the exchange times and volume for prison camps amounted to two to three parcels and four to seven letters, every two to three weeks, roughly a third the amount enjoyed by the average frontline soldier, amplifying the auratic and totemic experience of correspondence discussed in Chapter 1

(Makepeace 2013).

The correspondence of war prisoners has received a great deal of attention in both popular culture—i.e. the classic “escape film,” including The Great Escape (1963), Stalag 17

(1953), The Colditz Story (1955), and dozens of others—as well as in scholarly circles. Much of this material plays on the assumption that prisoners were ensconced in a “barbed-wire vacuum,” forming “microcosmic” communities of shared experience defined by isolation and fragile psychological autonomy (Makepeace 158). However, as recent scholarship based on diaries, letters and smuggled messages argues, both the physical and imaginative division between home and front as portrayed in prior literatures and art is “more a construct than a reality” (Jolly 1997,

109).

The realities of resource scarcity, neglect, and abuse-by-deprivation meant that many prisoners were constantly on the edge of starvation and that parcels from home were not only welcome distractions but often necessary for survival. This phenomenology of bare subsistence,

Makepeace argues, lent letters and pictures a similar ontological weight, often described in physiological terms of nutrition and physical sustenance, including bellies “full with hope,” or

“breaths of hope and home” (Makepeace 2013, 163, 174). This more-than-metaphorical conception of a message from home underscores the extent to which POWs were forced to adjust

99 “bare life,” Oxford Reference, A Dictionary of Critical Theory, Oxford University Press, 2019, http://www.oxfordreference.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095446660. 94 to a new reality in which they were essentially helpless. Locked away, they were no longer able to aid their fellow combatants, support or protect their family (if at a distance), nor keep abreast of “current events” (which at least would have afforded them the capacity to know how “their side” was faring). In addition, especially compared to civilians in fire-bombed and blitz-ravaged cities, but also working-class families in the United States facing ruin due to rationing, many soldiers were profoundly uncomfortable with the fact that they were ironically “safer” than their distant intimates (177). This relative security led to a feeling of infantilization, one exacerbated by, especially, mothers who, in adopting a tone of parental concern, were often interpreted as unintentionally condescending (Roper 2009). However, regardless of their occasional ambivalence regarding tone, the materiality of letters and pictures as “physical tokens of the absent other” were essentially constitutive of prisoners’ imagined selves and served as necessary links between the “damnation of imprisonment” and their post-captivity (162, 172). As Susan

Sontag has noted, a photograph is “not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real” (Sontag 2001 [1977], 154).

Many prisoners used photographs to “write to,” essential aids in grounding their writing in “real” rather than abstracted experience (Makepeace 2013).

Diaries were also used as epistolary “techniques of self,” allowing prisoners to rigorously keep track of time in an environment that actively discouraged time-keeping due to its effect on morale and discontent.100 Diaries took many forms, including bookkeeping one’s correspondence—from copying every letter into a central book, to recording the exact days and times of receipt, on both ends of the epistolarly chain. Prisoners also “mapped” their temporal

100 As many of the films mentioned above depict, there is frequently a “last straw” or upcoming, external event, that finally convinces the prisoners to fight back or escape. Depriving them of watches, calendars, or other means of tracking their captivity, diminishes their agency by “flattening” time, replacing “befores” and “afters” with demoralizing abject ritual and expanses of days with no discernible edges. 95 experiences in pictorial and numerical form to track intimate life-cycle events, as well as restorative (and depreciating) details of health, movement and comportment (e.g. counting the new holes on one’s belt as supplies dwindled). Finally, many also wrote detailed and vivid

“accounts” of “home-coming” scenarios, which Makepeace describes as imaginative out-of-body experiences (163; Knopf 2014). So profound and essential was this latter category that army psychologists101 operationalized these diaristic episodes as “garden gate fantasies,” and instructed the families of returning POWs—who frequently tried to meet them at the airport—to instead save their first meetings for the front yard or living room so as to more closely match the traumatized imaginaries of their loved ones (Makepeace 2013, 171). Much has been written about the deleterious effects of indefinite captivity (Goffman 2007 [1961]) but, in contrast to the assumed narrative of prisoners’ aimless inability to predict their release, let alone injury or movement, Makepeace’s analysis of POW diaries shows a generally optimistic temporal appraisal by prisoners, in which “indefinite [usually] meant imminent” (Makepeace 2013, 174). Though disheartened by each passing anticipated-but-failed-release, prisoners were far more pained by the fear that they’d given their families false hope, terror they were often forced to sit with for days or weeks while waiting for another opportunity to write (ibid.).

Interestingly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, most imagined releases coincided with holidays and special occasions, i.e. “Here’s a song we can sing this Christmas when I’m home,” indicating an effort by prisoners of “synchronizing” their imaginative experience (Makepeace

2013). This could take the simple form of imagining one’s family, all gathered in one place and

101 Ironically, these recommendations generally drew on the same censor board reports mentioned above that most soldiers found invasive and most deemed unnecessary at best, and insulting at worst, the implication that they might divulge sensitive information challenging both their devotion and their competence. 96 thus more likely to be “wondering aloud how I’m doing” (174). More elaborately, some requested that their intimates

“’Think of me at 8:30, 12:30, 16:00 and 19:00 hrs’, for these were ‘the most disappointing moments’,” in effort to derive comfort from “just knowing that, at those times of the day, his wife’s thoughts would be dwelling on” them (Unnamed soldier qtd. in Makepeace,166).

However, many soldiers were, for various reasons, unable to notify their superiors (or families) as to their whereabouts or health. For some of these men, a cadre of civilian volunteers came to the rescue in a surprising way.

World War II saw the rise in importance of covert intelligence sharing, especially the use of cypher-derived codes broadcast over public—or, at least, hackable—channels. The most famous and well-researched of these stories regards the Axis’ Enigma Machine, Alan Turing, and the invention of the modern computer. However, similar cypher-based communication had obviously existed for decades. With the expansion of amateur “ham” radio bands in the first half of 20th century, the need for codes became increasingly important for individual radio practitioners, some of whom, while trying to connect to other operators around the world—the raison d'être of avid “DXpeditioners”—inadvertently got involved in efforts to locate missing

Allied soldiers.

In 2007, psychologist Lisa Spahr published a history/memoir entitled World War II Radio

Heroes: Letters of Compassion documenting her discovery of letters written to her grandmother from anonymous short-wave radio operators. In them, Spahr was surprised to find letters, ranging from casual, to earnest and patriotic, relaying quotations from grandmother’s husband, Robert

Spahr, read by Axis radio operators in Japan, Germany and elsewhere and, often including precise prison camp addresses. Spahr soon discovered that, unbeknownst to the Allied militaries

(or the Axis announcers), amateur “hams” had discovered what were intended to be inter-Axis

97 message and propaganda bands, relaying details about detainees, both for recording-keeping purposes and as inciting “ammunition” for listening Axis soldiers102 (Spahr 2007, 13). The content of the messages was usually banal, amounting to little more than the “I am well” messages expressed on the “field” postcards discussed above; however, for civilians unsure about the fate of their sons, fathers, or brothers, it was invaluable (ibid.). Against the express wishes of the US Army and Navy (who were not keen on civilians listening in on, let alone sharing, covert enemy intelligence sources103), POWMs, or “Prisoner of War Monitors” formed unofficial groups, covering the known bands at all hours (and working to find more), transcribing transmissions, creating mail chains, and directly notifying stateside (and European Allied) kin about the health, location and often explicit parcel requests of captured soldiers (ibid.). This informal communications system is an important precursor to later amateur “social networks,” that would form around both radio and tape during the Vietnam Conflict, both of which would also be coopted by official sources. But radio was not the only means of remediating epistolary forms. In the final section, I will discuss another WWII progenitor of a key alternative medium, the filmed newsreel.

Calling Blighty and the Managed, On-The-Street Missive

The British military’s forward-thinking use of film technology did not end with the airgraph (later adapted into the American “V-Mail”). In the late stages of the war, the Directorate for Army Welfare, with the help of the Bombay-based Army Kinematograph Service (Hawley

2015, 134), produced roughly four hundred films, ten to twelve minutes in length, collectively

102 The increasing number of detainees, their hopelessness or plaintive missives to home, encouraging Axis soldiers of their side’s strategic supremacy and dominance. 103 Eventually, the FBI got involved, monitoring the monitors and reporting on them to military intelligence arms of each branch (Capt. George Duffy, “Honoring Those Who Listened,” Last updated May 5, 1999, http://www.usmm.org/duffyhonoring.html) 98 grouped under the title Calling Blighty, of which roughly fifty to sixty survive104 (Farmer 2016).

“Blighty” is thought to have originated as a pidginization of the Hindi word “vilayati,” meaning

“foreigner,” “British,” or “Whitey,” during the British occupation of India in the 19th century. It was later coopted by British soldiers serving abroad in South Africa as a sentimental term of endearment for “home,” and popularized during WWI by a series of amateur and professional periodicals, alternative papers, and radio shows. By WWII, the term had become the British equivalent of “the world,” the term used by Vietnam service members to refer to the United

States. In each episode of the WWII televisual iteration of the show, a series of service personnel would first approach and then speak directly into the camera, relaying personal messages to wives, children, and other kin who, they’d been told, would be watching at home.105 After all present had been given roughly one to two minutes of screen time, some films closed with group

“performances” ranging from skits to songs (Farmer 2016, 233). Though seemingly simple, a great deal of effort and expense went into each officially-sanctioned “issue.”

After almost four years of continuous deployment for many serving in the “The Far

Eastern Theatre” (more officially, the South East Asia Command, or SEAC), the War Office sent the Earl of Munster to evaluate unit morale and suggest means of addressing the increasingly worrisome problem of poor welfare among “The Forgotten Army” and their kin. The films, referred to as “issues” after the similarly structured Pathé Gazette newsreels of the era, were produced by British/Indian production teams consisting of paired film crews106 and fell into two broad categories: “in-studio” and “on-location.” The former were filmed on constructed sets or borrowed soundstages,107 while the latter were produced at various locations across India, Burma

104 Obviously, estimates vary depending on the source. See Sargent 1992 for the most complete accounting. 105 This structure had been employed by the BBC in radio broadcasts in years prior (Farmer 2016). 106 These were comprised of two directors, camera operators, sound recordists, production assistants. 107 For example, Shree Studios, employed by the Indian Army Training Film Centre in Bombay. 99 and Malaysia. For the in-studio shoots, the crews constructed mock Navy, Army and Air Force

Institute service canteens, in which participants could be seen boisterously chatting, smoking, and playing darts, wrenching themselves away from these activities only to address the camera

(Hawley 2015, Calling Blighty no. 41). In an effort to paint a “rosy picture” of their troops’ facilities and high spirits, the sets constructed were far more elaborate, comfortable and stocked than those normally afforded. In addition, many films were accompanied by music—though it is difficult to discern if its presence is meant to be interpreted as diegetic or non-diegetic. The was camera positioned, and the focus set, to create maximum depth of field in the middle and long ranges, thus keeping the anterior “action” perceptible and giving each film a contemporaneous

“bar scene” aesthetic.108 Of course, most participants did not hesitate to immediately shatter this illusion in their subsequent letters home, though not without expressing their gratitude for the opportunity to live in this hyperreal world, if only a little while (Farmer 2016, 234).

Similar efforts were made for on-location shoots, including costuming, treats, and staging in front of recognizable, “exotic” landmarks. However, perhaps due to the contrast between this constructed opulence of indoor shoots and the comparative sincerity of the halting and stilted messages conveyed therein, indoor shoots, though less “real,” were more emotionally affecting for viewers.

Accompanying each crew was a welfare officer whose job consisted in recruiting servicemen (and the occasional woman) in each location, dividing them into groups based on their home regions, and lightly coaching them on appropriate content and comportment. The regions selected, including Liverpool, Aberdeen, Southampton, East London, Brighton and

108 In watching Issue No. 41, I was immediately reminded of a harshly-lit “Rick's Café Américain” from Casablanca. As a viewer without a personal connection to the speakers occupying the foreground, I found there was ample activity occurring behind them, presumably to capture a similarly (subject)positioned viewer in 1944. 100 several others, though relatively large in area to accommodate multiple servicemen, were also culturally and linguistically distinct, producing medleys of delivery “thick with regional accents, slang, and terms of affection and, on occasion, locally specific songs” (Farmer 2016, 225).

However, the messages themselves, though described as “banal” (Hawley, 134), “inarticulate” and “simple” (Farmer, 233), were united by affectively moving modes of delivery—including halting, tentative cadences, restrained, understated emotional expressions, and nervous gestures— were disarmingly real (Farmer 2016, Hawley 2015, Gaulty 2016). Scholar and Southampton historian Steve Hawley describes this disjunction:

There is something moving about these testimonies spoken in a light Hampshire burr, on the surface stilted and light, yet belied by the sometimes haunted expressions of the men, some of whom had not been home for several years. ‘Hello Jean, do you recognise me? It won’t be long now before we’ve got that home in the country we’ve been waiting for’ … Already the servicemen were looking forward to the end of the war, to a future currently clouded by separation and conflict. In their eyes, the shape, the meaning of Southampton as home is revealed, to the people and places left behind. Mothers, wives, children, pubs and friends are all wayposts to their identity and that of the city (Hawley, 136).

Given the medium (and production value), the directness and specificity of the utterances, including questions, greetings, and invocations, is surprising. Some examples include: “‘Hope

Dad’s orchards coming up this year just fine’. ‘Have you got Mary there this afternoon? If you have, give a big kiss from me, one of these’ (kisses back of hand). ‘When you’re across the

Baddesley Arms once again, have two on me not one.’ ‘Hope 1944 is treating you better than

1943 did’” (Hawley 2015, 134-135). In the context of film script, these “lines” would seem absurd, as well as temporally inappropriate, the speaker’s interlocutor thousands of miles (and hours) away but, they would fit effortlessly into the center of a letter, a turn on a party line, or short telegram, all of which index the epistolary expectation of a response and the everyday

101 temporality of interpersonal intimacy and emotional authenticity these domains entail. But who was receiving these messages?

Along with the negatives of the finished “issues,” the welfare officer also included a list of relatives to be invited to the showing.109 These showings were occasionally scheduled alongside other feature length films, but most of the time the showing was private, the theater reserved for designated kin and, in many cases, the city’s major and other “civic dignitaries”

(Farmer 2016, 225). As film historian Richard Farmer notes, the “immediacy of the moving image created a sense of excitement and spectacle” and was especially affecting for children

(ibid.). Imagine the positive contrastive valence of seeing a long-absent father/brother/uncle, not only miraculously “present” but amplified, towering over the viewer at several times life-size;110 the absent intimates’ “familiar fac[e] on the screen more usually occupied by Gary Cooper, Roy

Rogers or James Mason—and sometimes even as part of the same programme” (ibid. 225).

Farmer goes on to quote a Yorkshire Post article covering its local screening: “From all parts of the cinema could be heard children’s exultant voices recognizing father or elder brothers and many were the shouts of “That’s my daddy” from excited youngsters” (ibid.). In many cases, children were present who may not have remembered, nor even met, the male relative they had been officially invited to see. For these children, Farmer asserts, “the Calling Blighty films made them real in a way a letter or a photograph never could” (ibid: 226).

An especially telling example of the spatiotemporal fungibility enabled by these kinds of audiovisual encounters was recorded by the South Daily Echo on May 1, 1944. Drawing on the

Echo’s reporting, Farmer describes the scene: “[W]hilst calling Blighty [Gunner George Kneller]

109 Presumably, process meant the welfare officer was obliged to take the participant’s relative hometown representation into account in determining the possibly of their participation. 110 Many attendees were given “frame enlargements” of the relatives upon leaving the theatre (Farmer 2016). 102 asked for his son, ‘Hello Bobby, can you see me?’ Bobby, who was watching the film at

Southhampton’s Classic Cinema, jumped from his seat ‘in a twinkle’ and said ‘Yes Daddy, I can see you.’ Others at the screening found the film so ‘very exciting and deeply touching that they could not contain their emotions’” (234).111

Blending the “authentic” aura of epistolary communication as private, unmediated, and immediate with the larger-than-life, yet constrained, controlled and censorable spectacle of

Golden Age cinema created a potent affective mixture that satisfied both the War Office and the relatives of ‘The Forgotten Army.’ By extending the “starring role” to the “nervous,” East

Midland “khaki-clad first-time film star who haltingly sent his regards to his family before making a reference to the fact that, like Kipling’s old trooper, he found himself on the road to

Mandalay” and then closing with a rousing out-of-tune rendition of “We Are The Leicester

Boys,” the British military was able to simultaneously boost hometown morale while further romanticizing the service for which they desperately needed to recruit (ibid: 225, 233). So successful was the series that its contract was extended two years beyond the end of hostilities and it was emulated in a sister program for the BBC, entitled Cairo Calling, which provided the same forms of public, yet intimately-directed, messages from (lightly coached) soldiers to their families (but also the vast listening audience of the station broadcasting back home).

Conclusion

Though the imbrication of the post and American, familial sociality had been largely established by the beginning of the Civil War, it still took the First Battle of Bull Run, at that point the largest casualty rate in US military history, to convince the government(s) of the

111 As I will discuss in Chapter 4, very similar “conversations” were frequent in the context of reel-to-reel group listening. 103 strategic utility of epistolary contact to frontline morale. Horrified by the unprecedented loss of life and limb, the brutality of the carnage (aided by recent advancements in artillery technology), and the realization that hostilities were unlikely to end anytime soon, huge numbers of survivors, who had as yet made only minimal or no use of the post, inundated the already overtaxed system(s) with thousands of letters. Made acutely aware of their own mortality—the equation of

“life” with “liberty” no longer an abstract calculation—and the very real possibility of their perishing away from home, without having said all they needed to, soldiers began spending an inordinate amount of their time writing, the products of which required hundreds of new miles of track, new divisions devoted expressly to mail carriage and the requisitioning of as many pens/pencils as muskets and rifles.

To officers and their generals, it became clear that, even in the most noble and morally unambiguous of conflicts (depending on one’s perspective), the utility in linking the abstractions of patriotic duty, comradeship, and religious devotion, to the individual networks of intersubjective intimacy that constitute their practical actuality was essential to maintaining genuine troop confidence, if not enthusiasm. As discussed in the Introduction, the irreducible entwinement of interpersonal intimacy is contingent on extended copresence, the longer one’s

“habit-body” is divorced from its constituting relations, the greater the dissolution of one’s subjectivity’s integrity; eventually, leaving little in the way of identity with which to connect any supra-individual ideal beyond survival. Famously, even as the Confederate government began to collapse, its postmaster general, John Henniger Reagan, stayed at his post, so essential was the mail considered to maintaining any kind of military discipline. But, shortly thereafter, as supplies dwindled and desertions rose to epidemic proportions, even he eventually halted its operations, recognizing that letters from desperate, starving families were doing more harm than good, the saliency of one’s proximate reality eclipsing the symbol of “national” family.

104

With each subsequent conflict, the military has had to adjust its practices and policies to reflect its members’ shifting hierarchies of devotion to God, family, country, ideals, and politics.

Balancing homefront efficiency with the catharsis of relaying battlefront trauma; proof of life with leaked intelligence; recruitment with reality; morale with morality. In the following chapter,

I will examine the massive lateral expansion of communicative channels available to service members in Vietnam, from front to home, but also headquarters to the bush. With every new official avenue, service members produced twice as many unofficial offshoots in a conflict whose ethical foundation crumbled far sooner than its need for committed bodies. When the contextualizing mission is no longer the primary organizing principle, servicer members’ connections with more intimate entwinements reoriented the “compass towards home” (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019).

105

Chapter 3: Scene-Setting & Methods

“Voice Mail” is as old as sound recording itself, envisioned by Edison as the most obviously useful, historically salient, and communicatively democratizing function of his new

“talking machine” (Edison 1878), but it failed to become a widespread social phenomenon until well into the 1980s with the transition from active, human operators to passive, analog

“answering machines;” and only attained social ubiquity after the global proliferation of cellular/mobile phones in the early-to-mid-2000s. The first three sections of this chapter set the stage for my analysis of a brief explosion of audio epistolarity during the Vietnam-era that, unlike those forms preceding and following it, employed the auditory frame for far more than greeting card sentimentalities and phatic arrangements for future dialogues. In the first, I trace the early, conceptual history of asynchronous vocal exchange through the invention of sound recording, and its eventual deployment in the form of novelty correspondence. In the second, I discuss the rocky commercial emergence of reel-to-reel as the first mass-market audio playback and recording technology since the phonograph, and in the third, I chart the peri-epistolary practices of amateur recordists, whose methods laid the groundwork for future correspondence practices. In adapting written epistolarity to audio form, “recordists”—the term I will employ to refer to audio correspondents—developed a keen awareness of, and reflexively engaged, the comparatively unruly “excesses” of sound compared to written epistolarity to craft intersubjectively salient missives, responsive to the existential ruptures of wartime. Building on the philosophical and methodological grounding regarding epistolarity outlined in Chapter 1, the remainder of this

106 chapter will provide a brief overview of three newly relevant conceptual domains to which I will be attending in Chapter 4: soundscapes, vocal identity and embodiment, and popular culture.

Section I: Histories and Environments

Pre-Digital “Voice Mail”

The conceptual, if not physical, invention of magnetic recording and data storage by New

Jersey engineer Oberlin Smith occurred less than a year after Edison’s patenting of the phonograph in August 12, 1877 (Levin 2010, 18). Directly inspired by Edison’s earliest tinfoil cylinder model, Smith theorized that a similar effect could be achieved by variably magnetizing different regions on the surface of a steel wire in a pattern physically analogous to the desired signal (EHTW, 2016).112 Occupied by other projects, Smith shared his design in Electrical World.

It was eventually picked up by Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen, whose “telegraphone” tied this apparatus directly to the recently ascendant telephone (ibid.). Patented in 1899, this device was the first true “answering machine,” and its recordings are currently believed to be the first instances of “voice mail” (Levin 2010, 18). 113 For media archeologist and founder of the

Princeton “Phono-Post Project,” Thomas Levin, this

marks an important shift in the voice mail paradigm, belonging to a technological episteme in which the voice itself travels per telephone … the sending, the epistellein of the epistle, the materiality of the transmission, appears to have been dramatically transformed, having become as rapid as the act of recording (Levin 2018, 19-20).

112 After discs became the preferred method of audio data storage, Smith invented both the automatic record changer and the earliest “jukebox,” contributing significantly to future modes of the public consumption of acousmatic music, most of which he did not live to see/hear (ETHW, 2017). 113 These recordings might soon be unseated as the “ur-chapter” in the “history of audio epistolary” by Thomas Levin, whose current and as yet unpublished work concerns extremely fragile audio post-cards produced and exchanged at the turn of the 20th century (Princeton, 2019). 107

This dematerialization and then immediate “remote transcription” of the voice was part of a larger epistemic encounter with the acousmatique more generally but, more importantly for my purposes, the average citizen’s first brush with an other’s (or their own) disembodied voice and an “initiation into the media culture of modernity” (Schaeffer 1966; ibid.; Levin 2016).

Tracing the topological history of “proto-voice mail fantasy” back more than three hundred years, Levin describes a variety of proposed methods for “capturing sound as mass”

(Levin 2010, 23). These range from Chiang Shunsin’s “thousand mile speaker” (essentially a wooden cylinder, spoken into and then sealed), and Johann Joachim Beecher’s “stentrophonium”

(a spiral wire encased in glass); both of which conceptualized sound as vibratory pockets of air

(and structurally pre-figure cylinder and spiral as “pre-gramophonic” models); to an anonymous, ethnographic description of indigenous Australians employing portable sea sponges to “soak up” linguistic sound (requiring only a “light press” by its recipient to release its words) (ibid.). Lastly, and perhaps most famously, Levin describes Rabelais’ account of Pantagruel’s encounter with the aftermath of a winter war, its sounds, from quips to cannon fire, frozen in amplitudinally analogous chunks of ice, their cacophonous materiality released upon melting (ibid.). For Levin, the crucial epistemological shift that set us on the path to audio epistolarity begins with Georg

Christoph Lichtenberg and Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni’s visualizations of electrical charge and acoustic waves respectively, inaugurating the era of sound writing/drawing itself (24).

For the next hundred years, developments in acoustical recording took it as axiomatic that

“sound writing” lay at the center of translating sound into storable media in the form of “script- like ur-images” with a necessarily indexical relation to the sounds they represented (ibid.).

Photography provided the scaffolding for the next conceptual leap, offering a popular model for

“restoration or reproduction,” with Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (AKA, “Nadar”) famously

108 proposing the daguerreotype acoustique, and finally photographer Charles Cros’ combination of

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, with a “sensitive,” rather than inert, medium

(the wax cylinder) in April 1877114 (24-26).115

In his earliest articles promoting, theorizing and philosophizing about his latest invention,

Edison famously undersold what would become its most ubiquitous application, music, instead focusing on the phonograph’s recording and reproductive capacities in the home and office. For

Edison, “[a]mong the most important” uses for his device were “letter-writing, and other forms of dictation, books, education, reader … and family record” (Edison 1878, 531). Expounding on the latter, he argued that “[f]or the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of dying members of the family—as of great men—the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph” (533-4).116 Edison’s focus on the speaking voice is unsurprising when his comments are grounded in the coincident emergence of modern, American (inter)national business culture, the rise of the urban, white-collar “clerical class,”117 and education reform and literacy campaigns, all of which required fast, accessible, and affordable means of distanced vocal interchange (Henkin 2006; Dierks 2009; Levin 2010, 27).

114 These discoveries were followed almost immediately by Menlo Park’s infamous usurping of this historic moment, just a few months later (ibid). 115 For a similar cultural genealogy of sound recording in general, outlining the necessary theoretical paradigm shifts in medicine, psychology, acoustics, and physics that enabled the transition from the mimicry of sound “emitters” (i.e. rubber mouths, larynxes, lips, etc.) to sound “receivers” (the ear), see Sterne 2003. 116 As Brian Kane notes, this thanatological focus, while “somber and solemn,” is, in practice, quite difficult and unlikely (though will take on new resonance in the following chapter), as death is rarely “scheduled” (2017, 65). Kane also notes the oddity of Edison’s silence on the similarly precious (and ephemeral) voice of the very young, despite his having fathered five children (ibid.). 117 As Levin notes, this economic, occupational shift produced a variety of “ambivalent political consequences,” especially with regard to gender in the workplace. Although an unprecedented number of women joined urban companies during this period, the vast majority were employed as comparatively passive conduits for words dictated by men. Interestingly, during the rise of late 19th and early 20th-century spiritualism, this same gendered passivity was reinterpreted as a permeability to the spirit realm, contributing to cultural constructions of women as ideal mediums for communion with the afterlife. For more on the co-constitutive emergence of “wireless” communications, spiritualism, and the “angelogical” ideal of immediacy in postal privacy, see Galvan 2010, Henkin 2006, Peters 1999, Sconce 2000, Schmidt 2000. 109

Before its much later domestication as a system purely for playback, Edison envisioned his gramophone as the next step in the increasingly popular project of “natural stenography,” in line with Isaac Pitman’s influential invention of “phonography,” a system of phonetic shorthand

“heralded” by workers and critics alike as a democratizing and more “natural” system for written communication (Levin 2010, 27-28). For Edison and other early adopters, the most popular and promising use of the gramophone was the capacity to record one’s own voice without the need for intermediary systems of transcription or translation, predicting a world in which “illiteracy would be eliminated by substituting listening and speaking for reading and writing” (26). For its first twenty years, the gramophone and its competitors were most commonly marketed as “talking machines,” useful for personal or office dictation of diaristic118 and/or epistolary content; with

Edison, in particular, promoting the “phonogram,” an-up-to-4000-word sonic “sheet” that he predicted would become the default standard letter form (ibid.).

Out of this market, and developed in parallel with the burgeoning record industry, was a limited experiment with “individual or personal gramophonic recording,” often called the

“phonopost” (Levin 2010). Its first appearance was in the form appliances in domestic or office settings, including the “Phonopostal” and the Pathé’s Pathépost, both of which employed flat,

Berliner-style discs of middling quality and endurance (Levin 2016; ibid. 27).119 Such devices were short-lived and did not survive the wider transition to playback-only machines in the consumer market. “Voice mail” met with slightly more success in the commercial arena, but

118 A by-then-passé-but-still-popular “mash-up” of the gothic and epistolary genres, Bram Stoker’s Dracula contains several chapters “dictated” by Dr. Seward. Employing the device following his interactions with Renfield, Seward hoped to capture fleeting traces of the former’s subconscious motivations as filtered through his own, more analytically rigorous “babbling” (Kittler 1999). 119 The form’s often barely intelligible output, Levin believes, was likely due to users’ lack of familiarity with the most effective ways to employ the “horn” and other “audile techniques” of contemporary, professional recording (ibid.; Sterne 2003). As Mark Katz notes, similar difficulties plagued early studio recording artists and engineers, the limitations of “horn” recording leading to the initial fading of rhythm sections in early jazz and, later, with the invention of electronic microphones, the rise of the “crooner” (Katz 2004). 110 largely as a novelty. Peaking in popularity in the 1940s and ‘50s, voice mail took two forms. The first were printed postcards whose images contained pre-recorded grooves playable on any home phonograph, with its opposite side left blank for a written message.120 More influential was the proliferation of coin-operated, public machines: modeled on pre-existing, single-use devices in other modalities—e.g. the filmic Mutoscope/Kinetoscope, photobooth and, later, phonebooth— and hosted at touristic locations, including amusement arcades, pleasure piers, train and bus stations, World’s Fairs, Times Square, and the Empire State Building. These machines encouraged users to speak, sing, play, or otherwise sonically express themselves, cutting discs in the moment. The machine would then spit out the discs, often with envelope and pre-posted packaging. One such “booth” was marketed to business owners with the following copy: this machine

sells what EVERYONE wants to buy again and again—records of their own voice! Personal records are simple and exciting to make with VOICE-O- GRAPH. The patron steps into what looks exactly like a telephone booth … picks up the microphone, which looks just like a telephone … then dictates his letter, sings his song, speaks his piece, or records birthday, anniversary or holiday greetings exactly the way he wants them. … WHAT A THRILLING, HAPPY EXPERIENCE! IT’S A FUNDAMENTAL FACT THAT NO ONE CAN RESIST THE CHANCE TO MAKE PERSONAL RECORDINGS—there’s a little Bing Crosby or John Barrymore in all of us! And it’s always fun to hear what you sound like to other[s] (International Mutoscope Reel Company 1957, image reprinted in Levin 2010).

This ad reflects several important features that prefigure the later marketing and use of mass- market magnetic tape recorders. These include the appeal to consumers’ naturalized familiarity

120 This concept has seen many manifestations, from the singing telegram to the contemporary musical greeting card (a product line that has since been updated to enable short, personallyrecorded digital messages). 111 with the use of the telephone (both private and public); the saliency of voice, and particularly speech acts (Austin 1975) in acknowledging life-cycle rituals; the novel (though uncanny) pleasure of hearing one’s voice unmoored; the affordance for freer expression (but corralled by a comfortable limit of two minutes); the capacity to McLuhan-esquely extend, contain, reify and commodify part of one’s intrinsic self; and the desire to, and capacity of, the average citizen to vicariously insert themselves into popular mass culture (just like Bing Crosby!) (Levin 2016, 6).

Levin’s growing library of “instantaneous” or “personal recordings”—which he interestingly glosses as “audio equivalents of the polaroid snapshot”—includes musicians’ and poets’

“demos,” actors, orators, and other public speakers “practic[ing] their delivery,” and a vast range of short, one-to-one, “audio-letters,” many containing otherwise untranscribable voices, from young children to animals (Levin 2016).

Most importantly, during World War II and the Korean War, similar machines could also be found on United Services Organizations (USO) bases, in Red Cross clubs, and other NGO relief centers. The American Red Cross (ARC) is most famously known for its voluntary “army” of medical personnel but, as historian John Hutchinson notes, its 1905 congressional mandate is most explicit in highlighting the organization’s primary role as “a medium of communication between the people of the United States of America and their Army and Navy” (American Red

Cross 1905, qtd. in Hutchinson 1996). The ARC has provided vital correspondence assistance in every major foreign military engagement since 1881, with practices ranging from remittance delivery to aid packages, epistolary dictation to literacy education. In 1942, the ARC began operating roving “Clubmobiles” which acted as temporary service clubs for American service members serving overseas during World War II, Korea and, later, Vietnam. Operated almost exclusively by women, these clubs primarily provided food (most famously, freshly-made donuts, earning their volunteers the moniker “Donut Dollies”) and other concessions (including

112 cigarettes, gum, and candy), and entertainment, in the form of records, books, magazines, and films, as well as group activities, ranging from sing-alongs to board games. Their overall goal was to give service members a safe, comfortable, spatiotemporal respite from the rigor of military life, with carefully controlled socio-cultural parameters,121 and a brief “connection with home”

(Ramsey 2011, iv). To aid in the latter, ARC Clubmobiles, as well the ARC’s more permanent rear echelon and stateside camps, began providing “voicemail” services, involving portable vinyl cutters and volunteers (again, exclusively female), who, in addition to operating the machine and packaging/addressing the result, also acted as “hosts,” coaching timid, flummoxed, loquacious, or exuberant recordists into producing serviceable 2- to 3-minute messages to family and friends.122

By the time the ARC deployed volunteers to Vietnam, the advent of affordable mass- market access to magnetic tape recorders had made one-on-one coaching services unnecessary, while the construction of media libraries providing audio, visual, and textual resources had been taken over by the Armed Forces Entertainment (AFE) division of the Department of Defense.

However, local stateside chapters, in partnership with the 3M Corporation (who began producing pre-packaged, three-inch reels, explicitly intended for “audio letter” use), were instrumental in providing taping opportunities to families without recorders (Heidelbaugh 2012). Called “Voices

From Home,” this program involved hosting large, well-advertised events in churches, community centers, and ARC distribution hubs. Timed to coincide with upcoming holidays, volunteers were on hand to help facilitate recordings on 3M’s “Living Letters” line of pre- packed/pre-posted open-reel formats, with a primary focus on arranging appointments for

121 Despite the sexist prerequisites regarding age, “attractiveness,” affective disposition, and marital status imposed by the ARC in its attempt to “establish these women as safe and non-threatening to the social norms of the time,” the program marked the breaching of an important access threshold with regard to women and service in combat zones (Ramsey, 2011: ii). For an examination of gender in the USO, see Winchell 2008. 122 For an illustrative example, recorded at a 1944 USO event (the other major provider of wartime, shipped-in entertainment) by Pharmacist’s Mate, Ralph Miller, listen here: “Mail Call: Changing Media, Consistent Content,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/mailcall/2.html. 113 immediate family (though serving walk-ins as well), while also offering accompanying photographs, gift wrapping, and postage services. This communal, semi-public site of production, in which the presence of one’s friends and neighbors, but also strangers with whom a similar separation might be one’s only connection, created a shared affective space, defined by a multisensory sociality of private loss and longing, but also public performance of institutional and individual comradery and support: a form produced in parallel by many recordists in Vietnam.123

Reel-to-Reel: A Brief History

Before the massive deployment of US nationals to Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, use of the reel-to-reel tape recorder had largely been the province of professional audio engineers, avant-garde composers,124 field ethnographers, and amateur audiophiles, from hi-fi enthusiasts to ham and pirate radio operators.125 By the end of the war a decade later, it had already been eclipsed by 8-track tapes and other early forms of enclosed cassettes and players, as well as the steady pre-eminence of vinyl, having failed to sufficiently ingratiate itself with consumers.

As noted by media scholars Karin Bijsterveld and Annelies Jacobs (2010), the reel-to-reel tape recorder is one of several sound reproduction technologies which tried, and ultimately failed, to capture a broad consumer market in the period between the auditory hegemonies of the

123 Another example of a sponsored/curated holiday messaging program was conducted on television. In Episode 4 of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s recent The Vietnam War docu-series, the Crocker family were invited by their local television news station to record a Christmas message to their then-nineteen-year-old son, Mogie. Filmed on a soundstage, the family awkwardly wishes their son a “Merry Christmas,” each reciting a short message on a set resembling half-a-living-room. The tape was then shipped to their son (Burns and Novick, 2018). 124 One of the most famous examples is the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a non-profit organization that functioned as a research center, composition program, venue, and arts promoter for audio “experimentalists,” including Pauline Oliveros, Morton Sobotnick, Raymond Sender, and later Terry Riley and Steve Reich. For more on these artists’ dual commitment to aural and social experimentation via new media, see Bernstein 2008. 125 For history, ethnography and analysis of this still prevalent practice/pastime, see Bartlett 2007, Walker 2001, Haring 2007. 114 phonograph of the mid-1920s to the 1960s and the mobile one-two punch of the boombox and

Walkman126 of the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Introduced to European consumers in 1953 (in the form of the Philips EL 3530), reel-to-reel was the first widely available (and affordable) product since the Edison cylinder recorder that allowed consumers the ability to not only play back but also record auditory performances. Manufacturers and marketers sought to establish reel-to-reel as an indispensable media appliance, akin to a household’s radio or television,127 but distinct in its intended use as an active and creative “instrument,” rather than a source of passive entertainment (Bijsterveld and Jacobs 2010). Nevertheless, this process of “domestication”—a term employed by Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch to denote the processes by which “new technologies gradually acquire a familiar embedding and function in everyday life” 128— encountered marked resistance due to a fundamental disconnect between the device’s simplicity of capturing auditory information and the unexpected difficulty of satisfyingly storing and retrieving that information (26).

Like the novelty booths described above, the tape recorder was originally marketed through explicit comparison to an established, familiar form: the family photo album. Early ad copy highlighted the emotional value of capturing a baby’s first words129 and Grandma’s

Christmas carols; drew structural parallels between “playing sounds out loud” and “blowing up a photograph,” the sound level indicator and a camera’s light meter; and extolled the

126 For more on mobile music technologies, see Bull 2000, Gopinath & Stanyek 2014, Tuhus-Dubrow 2017, Williams 2017 and, moving the historical ticker forward, Bull 2007, Bickford 2017 for examinations of digital, mobile music cultures. 127 At the time, the television's status as the “electronic hearth of the home” made it the gold standard of media domestication (Tichi, 1991, 21 qtd. in ibid. 33). 128 Silverstone and Hirsch describe four “phases” to this process: “appropriation” (i.e. buying it), “objectification” (i.e. displaying it, as performance of personal norms and cultural capital); “incorporation” (i.e. into one’s everyday practices), and “conversion,” or establishing the device’s role as a relational device between owners and those outside the household (ibid.; Silverstone & Hirsch 1992). 129 The same author, warning parents that any sound might be valued once it’s gone, suggests that “[e]ven though your constantly crying and screaming baby may almost give you a nervous breakdown, I do not want to refrain from advising you to record this sound” (Koekoek 1968, 91, in ibid.). 115 phenomenological superiority of sound in its ability to “remain vivacious … bind[ing] people together more forcefully” while reifying fleeting memories into personally-curated, self- contained, and immersive episodes, allowing one to “not only hear it again … [but to] experience it all over” (Koekeok 1968, 93 qtd. in ibid., 29-30). Still, consumers soon discovered that, unless one spent the time to carefully catalogue one’s recordings, creating detailed track listings and other interpretive “keys” for later retrieval, these recordings were far less manageable than equivalent photos with detailed captions (ibid.). Though excited at the prospect of capturing everyday aurality, many of Bijsterveld and Jacobs’ “family archivist” interlocutors (and some of my own) recalled frequent ambivalence about what and when to record, often setting down hours of material that, while thrilling in the moment, might prove nearly non-sensical without a detailed, extra-auditory account of primary context, from the voices involved, the day’s news headlines, the reason for the gathering, etc.

No matter the intended subject, the recordist in these situations was, in addition, always already recording themselves which, for many, edged the phenomenological experience away from immediate immersion to a future-oriented and affectively distanced form of performative reflexivity (Berger and Del Negro 2002).130 Regardless, searching endlessly for a precise

“cherished moment” while one’s extended family (im)patiently waited on the couch could quickly become more trouble than it was worth. Unlike a physical photo album, whose passage around the room could easily be accompanied by conversation and a shared “soundtrack” of prerecorded music (an increasingly common practice in this period, especially during ritualistic family functions), sharing audio requires a relatively silent sociality from all those gathered,

130 Of course, this “flavor” of reflexivity was not necessarily experienced as negative, especially for those deriving satisfaction from the act of capture itself; but the sensation was often interpreted ambivalently if noticed or commented on. The recent slew of hand-wringing articles debating the banning of cell phones at concerts and scholarly work regarding social media connectivity as engaging an emergent “fourth- dimensional” form of social being speaks to the contemporary relevance of this issue (Scott 2015). 116 directly at odds with the multivocal and multi-layered density of “ordinary,” everyday talk

(Douglas 2004 in ibid.; Goffman, 1981; Fox 1992, 2004).

In addition, the fragile and cumbersome open-reel format, lack of industry standardization with regard to tape length, speed, and fidelity, and a steady torrent of new hardware models with little regard for backwards compatibility turned away all but the most ardent of hobbyists. Facing meager sales, companies quickly expanded their suggested uses “from dozens to hundreds,” including amateur radio plays, capturing distant soundscapes (from buskers to parades, bird song to roaring campfires), speech rehearsals, home jam sessions, and even

“voice letters.” This technology’s primary foothold in the market came from those seeking to expand, or further control, their audio entertainment collections; precisely the user profile marketers had been attempting to avoid, as it put the device in direct competition with the ever- present phonograph and the increasingly popular transistor radio (29-31).131

Where earlier ads had shown large families gathered around the recorder as a living room centerpiece, mother and child at the kitchen table, or father “tinkering” in his garage studio, the majority of later images featured one of two organizing tableaus. In the first, small battery- operated recorders were shown at the center of picnics, parking lots, and crowded living rooms, surrounded by “hip” young adults. The second was typically a suburban living room, a solitary middle-class man, seated next to a large wood-paneled player, surrounded by a “library” of records, books, and catalogued tapes. Both groups of ads skewed increasingly male and youthful, and emphasized the capacity to “tape” and organize your favorite songs (“in any order you please!”), be they from your or your friends’ pre-existing collections or from the radio132 or

131 Though prerecorded music came to dominate most users’ recordings, a small but vocal minority of “sportslike” “sound hunters” persisted, and several hobbyist periodicals intersecting with ham-radio operators, and other collection-focused subcultures, sprang up to serve them (Bijsterveld 2004). 132 This is the genesis point of the “art” of radio capture, a topic I will return to in my Conclusion (30). 117 television. Taping also allowed users to make “nonstop,” worry-free133 dance playlists (30). In

Mark Katz’s terms, manufacturers’ original, prescribed purpose for the recorder as a “family memory device” emphasized the medium’s affordances in making users’ previously ephemeral sonic histories “tangible,” “repeatable,” and multi-sensorially “visible,” as “traceable memories,” as accessible as pulling an album off the shelf (ibid. 29; Katz 2004). Users, on the other hand, most highly valued the recorder’s “portability,“134 “receptivity” and “manipulability,” allowing them the freedom to collect, cut, combine and concatenate the flux of their own lived experiences of mass market audition (Katz 2004).

Ultimately, reel-to-reel never found a comfortable “home within the home,” instead enjoying a short-lived, “multi-sited” domestication defined more by its peacetime users’ inventive subversions of intended use, developing patterns that would come to dominate subversive,

“underground” forms of “creative consumption” in the decades to follow (ibid.; Willis et al.

1990). For most correspondents separated by crisis, communicating one’s immediate lived experience became far more urgent than reifying the same for later perusal. For my interlocutors, what were perceived as disadvantages by early “family archivists”—the lack of a broadly codified set of “audile techniques” (Sterne, 2007), performance conventions, or storage solutions

– provided an open field of expressive potential; the liminal and inchoate status of the medium and the communicative exigencies and existential ruptures of wartime simultaneously affording a unique set of adaptive and negotiated correspondence practices. For a brief window during the height of the Vietnam War, several factors converged to put a series of increasingly affordable

133 No need to switch the record – especially helpful in the age of 45s as the dominant format for the latest, and most in-demand, singles – or to worry about an animated party-goer causing the record to skip. Bijsterveld and Jacobs don’t mention any ads invoking reel-to-reel as a “home jukebox,” which might be due to their exclusively Dutch interlocutors (where “soda-shop” sociality was not as common), nor have I found any such ads in American periodicals. 134 As marketers began to catch on to “mobility” as a key user-end function, their ads came to resemble contemporary, pharmaceutical commercials, depicting active youths enjoying each other’s company. 118 and manageable reel-to-reel machines in the hands of everyday Americans, prompting an explosion of use and practical innovation.

Magnetic Tape in Vietnam: A Peri-Epistolary Overview

On the institutional plane, the military, its confidants, and ancillary infrastructures put magnetic tape to myriad uses, from the sophisticated to the banal. Personnel employed in data analysis, surveillance, espionage, police investigations and the like used magnetic tape to learn

Vietnamese, record tapped phone lines, tape interviews and court proceedings, and pluck enemy

(and friendly) radio chatter from the sea of signals floating over Southeast Asia. Audio engineers deployed by one of the military’s growing number of media-production wings, e.g. the

Department of the Army Special Photographic Office (DASPO),135 alongside journalists, analysts, and camera crews, committed thousands of voices and acres of geography to tape, from battles to villages, US soldiers to Viet-Cong. These tapes would be repurposed as propaganda, news reel, and government reports. For people deployed by NGOs to independently assess the reality on the ground,136 one’s tape recorder was both indispensable and dangerous, a necessary tool but also a symbol of the license and intractable potential of the undisciplined “real” for wary governments and political factions, in an environment with far too many moving parts already

(Fitzgerald 2002 [1972]).

In my archival research, the largest categories of non-epistolary audio capture I have encountered include interviews—from newly-arrived privates to generals, local farmers to top

National Vietnamese Army (NVA) officers—article summaries for editorial staffs, mission reports for superiors, ethnographic interviews (from satirical parodies of recruitment commercials

135 Recording Vietnamese artists for use in “soft power” films and radio programs for the “hearts and minds” campaign was one mandate of the DASPO and other similar organizations. 136 Some examples of NGOs included universities, think tanks, newspapers, radio stations, and dozens of different US-based, Vietnam-focused relief agencies. 119 to recitations by Buddhist poets), field recordings (from battles to school construction), as well as several hours of field notes, musings, and personal testimonials.137

Benefiting from proximity and shipping discounts, many of those deployed assembled and optimized impressive personal stereos that would have been prohibitively expensive and impractical stateside, creating hi-fi hooches and an aural sanctuary. As Meredith Lair explains in

Armed with Abundance (2014), for those serving in non-combat roles (the vast majority of those deployed between 1962 and 1975) and thus stationed in the (relatively) safer rear echelon or urban centers in South Vietnam, this insulatory impulse was cultivated and encouraged by the military in order to address plummeting morale, exacerbated by each new wave of draftees. At the height of the draft, the political and ideological climate in the United States was the most conflicted and polarized it had ever been. New recruits were inculcated in a world of extremes, anti-Communist hysteria and nationalism on the one side, the Civil Rights and anti-war movements on the other. Extreme views were fueled by a rapidly rising death toll, increasingly frequent revelations of government corruption and misinformation and, most importantly, the testimony of returning veterans whose patriotic expectations has been disappointed, their commitment disillusioned, and their reception upon release either concealed or openly hostile.138

Increasingly overbuilt bases, with EOCs (Enlisted and Officers Clubs) featured a host of excessive comforts, from ice cream to Olympic-sized swimming pools; celebrity-packed USO tours to a rich cover band scene; movie theaters, gourmet(ish) restaurants, access to inexpensive alcohol and cigarettes; as well as vast media libraries, housing thousands of records, books, and periodicals.

137 If one was embedded deeply enough with a poorly supplied unit, tape occasionally doubled as twine for a tourniquet (Müller 2016). 138 During my interviews with my grandfather, the only time he was overcome with emotion (and the only time I have seen him cry) was his recounting of his flight back from his first tour, on which he was told to remove his uniform for his own safety, as well as the public relations optics (Jim & Joan Gunby 2015). 120

All bases at home and abroad also had “general stores”139 where one could pick up nearly anything deemed necessary or advantageous to daily military life, from writing supplies to socks.

When taping became commonplace, these stores were the primary source of tape recorders and reels.140 As Lair argues, these attempts to shield service members from boredom, as well as the obvious poverty, disease and ravages of war affecting those just beyond their gates, created an atmosphere of “consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice” for those in the rear141 (and, a constant source of resentment or fantasy for those on the front) (Lair 2015; Fish

2003). Lair also argues that this physical edifice engendered a parallel social and affective distance, exaggerating the contrast between the living conditions of US service members and the people they were ostensibly there to protect, severely undermining the “hearts and minds campaign” while dangerously contributing to the dehumanization of Vietnamese people (Lair

2015). With “all the comforts of home” available on base, and little to no cross-cultural education, one’s excursions outside this “zone” were more often than not defined by a frame of touristic Orientalism at best, exploitative racism at worst.

A central part of this “containment” effort centered around expanding the Armed Forces

Radio Network (AFRN), first established in France during WWII, and populating its airwaves with a “controlled repertory” of officially approved American popular culture. Its programming ranged from prerecorded music to live concerts, skit shows to talk radio, celebrity interviews to on-air letter readings, as well as sanitized “managed news,” and contextually-relevant public

139 The army had the PX, or “Post Exchange,” the Air Force, the BX, or “Base Exchange, the Navy, the NX, or “Naval Exchange,” and finally, the Marines, the MCX, or “Military Corps Exchange.” 140 Many recordists, in discussing the frustrations of daily military life, bemoaned the lack of basic supplies, from engine parts to bullets, noting the irony of being able to simultaneously listen to the radio, watch television, and record a letter home while cleaning a gun with no ammunition. 141 This enmity between the “front” and “rear” was captured in dozens of occupational folk songs, a favorite topic of derision being the “vainglorious rear echelon” (Fish 2003, 5). 121 service announcements,142 organized by a host of radio personalities, most famously John

Allgood and Adrian Cronauer (Fish 2003; Müller 2016). The initial stations in the region were begun by the first generation of “techies” deployed alongside the advisors and analysts in the early 1960s. Using “coopted” hardware, these men sought to boost morale among the geographically isolated units, many of whom were working “out in the boonies” with the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN), colloquially knows as “Arvin” (Fish 2003). Officially annexed by the military in 1965, the newly-minted “Armed Forces Vietnam Network” (AFVN) eventually comprised eleven radio stations, and one television station, broadcasting 24/7 to nearly every corner of the Southeast Asian theatre (ibid.). Though popular with many, these stations’ and hosts’ mandate to function as escapist access to a “[s]tateside sound[and feel] … right in the middle of Vietnam,” complete with an unyielding “sunny disposition”143 in both musical fare and on-air attitude, ignited a host of competitors as well as several “informal” communications networks (Cronauer 2008 qtd. in Müller 2016, 5; Fish 2003).

Already thrust into an increasingly fraught milieu of intersecting, and often conflicting, cultures, defined by endlessly shifting ethno-, media-, techno-, and ideo-scapes (Appadurai 1990), service members struggled to “integrate” and “mediate among this array,” inventing new means of channeling their experiences “to tell and preserve their own stories” (Fish 2003, 1-2). Most fundamentally, as Joshua Akers notes, the shift from a majority older, careerist, volunteer force, raised by WWII veterans, convinced of the infallibility of the US military and the reality of the

142 Depending on the station, PSAs appealed to authority or humor, often attempting to be both entertaining and informative, including everything from reminders to take one’s malaria pills, to the dangers of contracting “social diseases” while on leave in Saigon or Bangkok (Fish 2003; Müller 2016). They were also a common source of ridicule and parody, a genre I will return to in Chapter 4. 143 Though service members sometimes appreciated the undying optimism projected by AFVN hosts, the potential for disturbing juxtapositions was high. As one GI noted, “You get this ‘good morning Vietnam! It’s a beautiful day out there’, and I go: what in the hell is he broadcasting from? … They were trying to project that you were at some surf party in Santa Monica or something … after you’ve been mortared and your buddy is lying next to you dead or is screaming for a Corpsman, somehow it just doesn’t fit” (Unnamed GI, NPR, All Things Considered, “Vietnam: Radio First Termer,” qtd. in Müller 2016, 3). 122 communist threat, to one composed primarily of young, undertrained, and unwilling draftees, occasioned an overriding ideological and ethical shift from “mission success” to “individual survival,” driving an existential wedge between officers and enlisted men (Akers 2018). On the ground, this distinction manifested as a set of “informal” SOPs, or “Standard Operating

Procedures”—e.g. throwing a grenade down a discovered tunnel rather than going in to thoroughly flush it out, per regulation (the latter much more likely to get you killed for a relatively meager benefit) (ibid.). This tension also led to an increasing fixation on “getting short”—i.e. nearing the end of one’s contract—over rank advancement. The tendency to fill vacated officers’ posts with stateside volunteers over field promotions (in contrast to WWII practice), prolonged and exacerbated this divide, and is partially responsible for the infamous practice of “fragging,” or the intentional harm of intransigent and/or incompetent officers by their own subordinates (ibid).144

Growing out of the same culture of discontent, subversion and institutional disorganization were the informal communications channels by which these ISOPs were primarily disseminated. While print media, in the form of underground newspapers, utilized the growing number of typewriters in the rear to present an unvarnished alternative to the bowdlerized Stars & Stripes, audio led the charge, complicating an already crowded and conflicted ideological soundscape. As the AFVN began as a pirate enterprise itself,145 its unsurprising that its primary competition came from other similar, independently-minded

144 Used more broadly today to refer to “intentional friendly fire,” particularly of an officer by their subordinate, it originally described the practice of throwing a fragmentation grenade, typically under the bed (so as not the inadvertently harm the other occupants of the tent) of a fellow soldier. The resulting blast was rarely fatal (out of roughly 800 confirmed attempts, only 86 were lethal) but served the immediate purpose of removing the officer from active duty (Winston 2017). 145 The first foreign-based stations during WWII were established by groups in the Canal Zone, Alaska, the Philippines, and Casablanca, and catered to specific units. These were eventually organized into Armed Forces Radio (and eventually Television Network), which trained its own independent broadcasters (Fish 2003). 123 broadcasters. Many of these stations employed rudimentary set-ups, running turntables and tape decks through “homebrew mixers” and broadcasting primarily to “Portable Radio

Communications” (PRC) “manpacks,” an increasingly common, portable comm system, at least one of which was assigned to every unit outside the rear.146 Other stations operators were more sophisticated and stable, including the infamous Dave Rabbit of Radio First Termer, only recently revealed to have been operated out of a secret studio in the basement of a Saigon brothel.147 These outlets specialized in unapproved music, iconoclastic and irreverent comedy skewering and satirizing the military while glorifying “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” (particularly psychedelic/hard rock and proto-metal) (Fish 2003; Walker 2018). Contrary to popular belief, the content was not always “anti-war” or even “anti-military” as much as it was anti-authoritarian and countercultural, a distinction that intelligence officer Steve Robbins believes saved many stations from being shut down (Fish 2003). Robbins also notes that this same ambiguity led the “powers that be to correctly assum[e] that the VC [Viet-Cong] would not attack and/or destroy [them] … since they had a slightly anti-war … flavor at times,” allowing PSYOPS [“Psychological

Operations”] missions to piggyback on their signals and use them as cover (Robbins qtd. in Fish

2003, 4).

Utilizing tape recorders for in-flight (and “in-fight”) communications, many Huey crews also mounted enormous loudspeakers,148 blasting music while flying between missions, as soundtrack, mood regulation, intimidation tool, and, as helicopters frequently preceded bomber

146 One such operation was run by Barry Rommo, i.e. “Good Guy One,” and a rotating cast of “Good Guy Twos,” who raided their command posts after the officers had left, broadcasting on a “testing frequency” so as not to interfere with normal operations. They also took requests via two-transmissions (Fish 2003, 3). 147 Real name, C. David DeLay, Jr. (Walker 2018). 148 Taking over concert venues and clubs around the world, loudspeakers were another recently ascendant technology primarily developed by the military but seeing far more use in the private (entertainment) sector. 124 crews in a scouting capacity, even as a tactical “warning” system for civilians in the area.149 A more benign use of the same tech was employed by Tim Sikorski’s150 resupply crew who, unable to do much more than drop a pallet of “Christmas dinners” to a mountaintop camp, played carols on their descent and ascent to bring some cheer (“it was the least we could do”).151

A more subtle and insidious use of the same technology combinations was Operation

“Wandering Soul.” Exploiting the widespread Vietnamese belief that if a person was not buried on their ancestral land, their spirit would roam the earth in endless agony, PSYOPS—the division of military intelligence responsible for psychological warfare—created a tape combining

Buddhist funeral music and “eerie” period-specific sound effects, in which was embedded the voice of a young girl pleading for her father to “come home with me” (Friedman n.d.). The tape was broadcast via radio, on-the-ground loudspeaker teams walking through the jungle, and helicopters sailing above it, specifically targeting Viet-Cong, the insurgent contingent of the

North Vietnamese Army (NVA) deployed to the South and thus more likely to die (their body often unrecovered) away from their homeland (ibid.; Pieslak 2009).152

The NVA also weaponized simmering racial and socio-economic tensions within US ranks in the form of Radio Hanoi, hosted by Thu Houng, or “fragrance of autumn,” but known among US troops as “Hanoi Hannah.” Accurately recognizing the lyrics and style of popular

149 Even the jungles were saturated with the sounds of American popular culture. This latter practice was one facet of the recent US deployment of “Shock and Awe” campaigns in the second Iraq War, serving to both disorient the enemy and encourage civilian evacuation (Pieslak 2009). For more on service members’ use of personal music collections for mood regulation, group cohesion, and interpersonal communication, see Bradley and Werner 2015, Pieslak 2009, Gilman 2006, and Daughtry 2015. 150 Tim Sikorski, Tim, “Tim, Binh Thuy March 28-29, 1970.” Tim Sikorski Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2936AU2799, March 28, 1970. 151 Sikorski does not mention this but I doubt that the iconicity between the skids of a helicopter and the runners of a sleigh (especially as both were “delivering gifts”) was lost on the men (ibid.). 152 For in-depth discussion of the construction of the tape, see Friedman n.d.; on the larger world of PSYOPS during Vietnam, see Roberts 2008; and on the program’s impact from an NVA perspective, see Bảo 1996, Kwon 2008. For more on “sound as weapon” in US military campaigns more generally, see Pieslak 2009 and Garofalo 2010. 125 music as a potent symbol and combustible site for hashing out sectarian divisions in the US occupation, Hanoi Hannah broadcast a disproportionately Black, Latinx, and country-western repertory while reporting on civil unrest at home (often well before the AFVN153), highlighting the “fact” that the “real fight” was happening at home (Müller 2016). As Michael Kramer notes, the AFVN eventually started catering to its own counterpublics, playing everything from Jimi

Hendrix to Bob Dylan, but attempting to recontextualize “rock” as an appropriate leisure activity, as opposed to a defining identity (Kramer 2015). In so doing, they offered up some late-night shows as a “carnivalesque” release valve, engaging anti-war sentiments in a safe, controlled environment, while signaling their implicit understanding of their members’ frustrations and anxieties (Bakhtin 1984).154

Also piggybacking on the ubiquity of the PRC was the “Bullshit Band” (or “Net”).

Essentially an “open conference” party-line for enlisted men, especially those stationed outside the range of the AFVN, radio operators utilized a non-tactical frequency to “reach out” into the dark, not unlike shortwave hams or long-haul truckers (Fish 2003, 3; Fox 2002). Stationed in the deep jungle, the most common site for endless shelling, users typically introduced themselves and named their hometown to find personal connections. Though under constant barrage, they were rarely in any immediate danger but also had little to do other than endure. In this environment, a familiar accent or turn or phrase could go a long way toward making their mission tolerable.

Eventually, the Bullshit Band was also utilized for music, with pre-arranged “signal songs” to

153 Mike Roberts of Detroit remembers hearing about his hometown’s infamous 1967 riots from Radio Hanoi, while the AFVN (not the mention the Stars & Stripes) remained silent (ibid.) 154 These shows situated themselves as only loosely affiliated with the military and thus able to critique their “parent company” (like a late night host challenging their television network), though doing so in way that did not directly challenge policy or dogma. Hosts focused instead on the indecencies and hardships of “war in general.” An anti-war song, or “rock‘n’roll” more generally, framed as an encapsulation of a GI’s angst, and provided an affective, external scaffolding with which the listener could sing/scream along, cathartically expelling this negative emotion before going back to work (Kramer 2015; DeNora 1999). 126

“switch back” to tactical frequencies, in case another operator caught wind of an eavesdropper or activity was reported in the DJ’s vicinity (ibid.).

Finally, Lydia Fish notes the explosion of in-country occupational folk-song during this period. In addition to the dozens of Special Services and NGO-sponsored tours and open-seat ensembles, including everything from glee clubs and barbershop quartets, brass to blues bands, talent contests to Christmas pageants, every form of amateur music-making present in the states had an analogue in Vietnam (Fish 2003, Finnegan 1989). While some of these ensembles appear in my interlocutors’ letters, more prominent is the ubiquity of the resident guitar (or occasionally harmonica) player. These musicians demonstrated a mastery of unit-specific repertoires, situational parodies of contemporary pop songs, and original compositions. Covering the same topical ground, but tinged with more satirical bite than those of previous conflicts, Fish notes that these songs “serve[d] as strategies for survival, for unit bonding … [and] the enhancement of morale … provid[ing] entertainment and a socially sanctioned means of expressing” grief, longing, fear and frustration (5).155 All of these forms (and more) circulated on an unofficial tape network, serving as ambient soundtracks, compositional inspiration, and were frequently remediated in anthologies and audio letters as “pre-packaged” messages or experiential vignettes.

Beyond their explicitly artistic aims, service members also employed tape in a variety of personal, archival forms, in an effort to “record and document their own war” (Fish 2003, 1).

These included vocal diaries156 and personal phone calls, soundscape slices (from shooting

155 For more on the history of occupational, military folk song, see Cleveland 1984 and Eliason & Tuleja 2012; for Vietnam specifically, see Cleveland 2015, Burke 1989, and, for an extensive bibliography of related criticism and collected songs, Fish 1999. 156 See the Frank Kemink Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Numbers 1400AU1369 through 1400AU1377 for the audio diaries of an unnamed soldier; https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1400AU1369. 127 ranges157 and take-offs,158 to indigenous fauna and monsoon downpours), and mission audio

(from cockpit recordings159 to urban firefights,160 the banal banter of a trans-Pacific supply run,161 to the frustrated first minutes of a delayed, morning briefing). Many also raided the aforementioned audiovisual centers, their hoochmates’ stashes, and their own fragile, vinyl collections to create, personally-curated compilations of their favorite recordings for personal listening, to accompany particular events, or share with service members visiting from other camps or heading out into the bush. With ample access to inexpensive reels and frequent,

157 Larry Shelton and friends spent roughly an hour drinking and swapping stories, while also familiarizing themselves with newly acquired weapons on the firing range, comparing the relative kick, firing-rate, reload speed, and tendency to jam in anticipation of in-field use (Larry Shelton, “Sounds of war - Under fire: gunshots, motors, explosions, machinegun firing, rocket blasts, voices, reloading," Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1139AU0900, Undated; hereafter, cited as “Shelton, TTU, 1139AU0900”). 158 Ray McCleery recorded several hours of the sounds of jets taking off from his air-craft carrier’s runway, using them to help him fall asleep for several decades afterwards (Fish 2003, 9). 159 Michael Cook preserved long stretches of harrowing, in-situ comms chatter between himself and co- pilots, outer “wings,” and “the tower,” during night-time bombing raids and strafing missions. For an example, see Michael Cook, “Bien Hoa is Taking Rockets,” Michael Cook Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1179AU1487, February 26, 1969). Flying in the dark” became the new norm for combat pilots during the Vietnam War, bringing a new saliency to real-time audio contact when physically sealed inside one’s cockpit and relying on someone else’s eyes for direction and fire. Night-flying became a common topic in Air Force occupational folk-song from the period (Fish 2003, 4). 160 The ratio of portable field radios to service members increased from one set per 38.6 men in 1943, to one for every 4.5 deployed in 1971. This expansion was intended to increase the flow of information both up and down the chain of command but ultimately created an overly complicated system that was plagued by “information pathologies,” inconsistencies that ironically led higher-ranking officials to rely on helicopters, deployed lackeys, and written reports (Van Creveld 1985 qtd. in Müller 2016, 6). These recordings range from routine, operator-to-operator reports to lengthy, pitched battles with no vocal contributions due to the imminent danger of the recordist. One such example comes from Andrew J. Hudson: “Audiotape - Recordings of a firefight on Highway 311, September 14, 1969,” Andrew J. Hudson Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2256AU2444, September 14, 1969. 161 Vytau Virskus describes the necessary prep-work he employed to “jack-in” to his C-130’s internal comm system, delighting in capturing the real-time frivolity and comradery of his units many “characters” before alerting them to their being “on tape,” at which point his commander “politely requested” he shut it off (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019). He had originally intended to send this tape to his girlfriend Cathy but, while listening back decided the language was “too saucy” to be epistolarily appropriate (ibid.). 128 unexpected lulls of free-time between bursts of frantic action,162 soldiers employed tape in all the ways described above, many, though not all of which, overlapped with their epistolary output.

Section II: Sound Methods

All epistolarity is haunted by the specter of death. In the 19th century, letters bore indexical associations with tragedy and bereavement. An individual letter is always/already bounded in time, its seal trapping an authorial ghost whose vitality can never truly be “restored” in a future reading. For war-torn correspondents, the possibility of relational annihilation is very real, not only in the possibility of a service member’s death, but also in the lasting effects of spatiotemporal ruptures. Identity is irreducibly relational, constructed intersubjectively; thus, it was crucial to maintain modes of relation that “firmed up” or safeguarded ways-of-being-with that had been formally codified between the distanced parties prior to deployment.

When attempting to recreate these modes while apart, many military families were surprised to find that much of what they recognize as “intimacy” comes down to the affordances of extended copresence. Sharing the banalities of everyday routines and rituals, riding the minor eddies of a partner’s flow of “ordinary affect” (either by being there, or noticing expressive idiosyncrasies in private retellings), witnessing the fleetingly emergent and constantly shifting ways-of-being of one’s partner as they navigate new social universes, or of one’s shared offspring as they continually rediscover the world with each new intentional immersion and afforded purchase (Stewart 2007). As David Ciavatti has noted, these experiences quickly coalesce into an immediately recognizable pattern, a larger entity, “family,” that takes on a life of its own, an intersubjective and intercorporeal web of significance, in which one person represents only one

162 The aforementioned “hurry up and wait” phenomenon was a central feature of military temporality, especially in the context of a guerilla war. 129 limb or organ, with its own individual series of roles based on indelible, ethical, affective, and aesthetic connections to every other part (Ciavatta 2014).

Although many of these patterns are formed in childhood, creating forms of intentionality against which future interactions are measured and evaluated, the edges are of course malleable; and the structure is mobile, leading to new additions—“X is like family”—and entirely new editions—the bonds formed in combat accelerating a process that typically takes years. But, ultimately, this fundamental “family recognition” is difficult to shake. No matter how strained the originating bonds become, the latter form an almost inescapable, relational habitus, composed of unconscious, multisensorial assemblages: the texture of grandma’s hands in her rocking chair, the straining of one’s son to reach the counter, the latent energy in an aunt’s pitching stance in the backyard. 163 These ultimately coalesce into portable, archetypes of intercorporeal engagement that one tends to recognize everywhere and recreate in future relationships, but whose specificity is never fully subsumed in one’s memory (Bourdieu 1990; ibid.; Stewart 2007).164 Though these examples are primarily visual, all involve movement, and thus sound—from the rasping of intimate touch, a satisfied sigh, and the rocker’s creak, to grunting overexertion, and a swooping wind-up—easily recognizable given prior exposure, offering glimpses into the relational auditory

“real” one had yet to notice (Ihde 2007). When leaving an intimate behind, it is often these features that correspondents newly identify, codify, and long for, their epistolary contact an effort to capture these moments. This grasping at motion or sound is often more important than discursive attempts to formulate the essence of the relationship itself.

As described in a recent study by Brandi Frisby et al, for romantic couples in particular— but especially those negotiating a relationship over a huge geographic divide—both partners must

163 Bill Withers, "Grandma's Hands," recorded 1971, track 3 on Just As I Am, Sussex, vinyl record. 164 Milan Kundera, Immortality, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. 130 balance the “dialectical tension [between] openness … as an implicit communicative expectation in all romantic relationships [with the] innate need … [of individuals] … to be strategic and protective when communicating” (Frisby et al. 2011, 241-242). Comparing the communicative habits of military and non-military couples, the authors found that, contrary to popular belief, military couples tend to engage in less “topic avoidance” than non-military couples, despite mutual worries of “piling on” to already stressful situations. In addition to emotional openness, while military and non-military couples engage in similar amounts of “everyday talk,” military couples rated this content as far more important than their non-military counterparts (Frisby et al.

2011). This finding speaks to the importance of mundane details to understanding the temporality of a partner’s day. From the minor affective “inter/ruptions” of everyday life as noted by

Kathleen Stewart (2007), to unexpected encounters with aesthetic beauty, these moments provide the receiving partner with an imagined temporal scaffold of their lover’s affective life, undergirding the phenomenal sense of shared intimacy. As I show in the following chapter, the rasping of a finger against a lighter, the cadence of one’s voice when listing the monotonous details of daily chores, or catching a line from a song on the radio, these details, in their irreducible aurality, are intimately connected to spatiotemporal configurations, shared chronotopes of “the world” (i.e. “home”), and “in-country” (i.e. one’s “hooch”) (Bahktin 1981).

Though composed of different practices and audible details—“summer in Texas” conjured by kids out of school and bikes in the street; “getting short” by audible countdowns and the intensity of hooch parties—the wartime lifeworlds communicated and conjured, defined by longing and loss, anxiety and anticipation, are often affectively identical.

Newly aware of the densely layered sonic content of their lived-in spaces, recordists came to experience, in real time, the interplay of reflexivity and attention endemic to performative recording. The speaker’s own soundscape was newly salient—as was the recipients’

131 imagined reception of that soundscape. The listener was newly aware of new “figures,” the

“grounds” the soundscape, and the chain of transpositional trading between the two in repeated listenings. This suspension of agency and immersion of self in creation and reception evokes

Alfred Schutz’s “mutual tuning-in-relationship” in which the reciprocal sharing of the “flux of experiences” in a stream of consciousness results in the constitution of a “vivid present” in which

“I” and “Thou” become “We” (Schutz 1964). This process links listeners intersubjectively to the same “polythetic”—i.e. irreducibly sequential—temporal journey. Schutz’s evocation of musical experience is equally applicable to any sound recording, especially those containing multiple layers of the always emerging sonic real.

Vernacular Affordance, Media Ideology and Tactics/Space

Central to each section of my corpus analysis is James Gibson’s conceptualization of perceptual “affordance,” or the embodied “action-capacities” a given environment’s “ecological physics” offers up to an organism: “what it provides and furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson

1979, 127). In applying this model to the reel-to-reel tape recorder, I chart the ways in which the materiality of tape and player/recorder enabled new communicative practices while constraining others. I will also be attending to how recordists themselves “made sense” of the medium’s capacities and limitations in and through “lived practices of communication,” what McVeigh and

Baym have termed “vernacular affordances” (2015, 1). These reflexive reifications helped recordists develop and continually reassess alternative communicative “tactics” to navigate the highly-regulated “conceived spaces” of imposed military service and separation (de Certau 1984,

Lefebvre 1991).

Employing a relatively unfamiliar and novel medium for epistolary practice, recordists faced little in the way of a potentially limiting, prescriptive discourse regarding “proper” practice.

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In addition, most were addressing an intended “audience of one” and, even when tapes escaped this circumscribed sphere, potential listeners were rarely anyone with whom recordists were not already intimately acquainted. For many Vietnam-era correspondents, this intimacy lent audio letters a sense of relative compositional freedom compared to written letters, offering them a shared space for improvisatory and experimental expressivity through the “defamiliariz[ation] and reinvent[tion]” of preexisting communicative methods. They created their own ‘homegrown’ systems of illocutionary and phatic signification” through multimodal means (McVeigh and

Baym 2015, 3). Recordists developed new, intersubjective means of capturing and conjuring sonic presence, based on a new awareness of the salience of previously unmarked sonic dimensions of their shared, pre-deployment lifeworlds: recording reified these elements. Far from unspoken assumptions, these newly attentive modes of listening—what Jonathan Sterne has termed “audile techniques”—were a central topic in the epistolary “dialogue” of most correspondents as they established new compositional conventions and successive

“standardizations” of reel-to-reel’s socio-semiotic construction; what Ilana Gershon has dubbed

“media ideologies”—i.e. “how people understand both the communicative possibilities and the material limitations of a specific channel, and how they conceive of channels in general” (Sterne

2003; Gershon 2011, 283).

Performance Frames

Because reel-to-reel was novel, Vietnam-era America recordists interpreted it in a stereotypically performative manner, taking into account prior cultural associations with professional domains of oratory and artistic performance, and the “unnaturally” vocally monologic nature of their interactions with the medium. With his 1975 Verbal Art as

Performance, Richard Bauman helped redefine the primary folkloric object as the performance event. He explained performance as a “mode of communication,” prioritizing it over the texts 133 such events tend to produce, which were previously conceived as idealized, immutable and irrefutable records. Following Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman, Bauman defined performance as a distinct, interactional “frame” that provided “keys” for the interpretants involved, allowing them to read the event via a culturally-situated set of metacommunicative cues embedded in the performance itself.

In order to determine the degree to which a particular interaction meets the culturally- situated definition of a performance, Bauman offers four features/continuums, each of which implies an element of immediate co-presence. First, as Bauman focused specifically on “verbal arts,” a performance event must display spoken communication with an emphasis on how it is

“carried out” over above its “referential content” (293).165 Second, the performers feel, and the audience expects, a higher degree of responsibility/accountability in terms of the performer’s competence, thus opening the performer’s expression to evaluation. Third, the “heightened awareness” of all involved due to the markedness of the performance as outside the everyday and the “special scrutiny” of the audience on the effectiveness of the performance, gives rise to the possibility of an “enhancement of experience” (ibid.).166 Last, all performances are unique and fundamentally “emergent,” their situated features—from the motives of their participants to inclement weather—interacting to create an event which falls somewhere on a continuum from the (idealized) poles of complete fixity and absolute novelty (302-303).

From loquacious, self-described “jabberers,” who approached audio letter composition as a, wide-open, unself-conscious, free-associative space, to speakers for whom more than a few words sent them into embarrassed laughing fits, pleading that “someone else take over,” degrees

165 This focus on the manner of delivery is drawn from the preceding work of Roman Jakobson on “the poetic” as a mode of speech (1962). 166 This “enhancement” is often glossed as “entertainment” but, as this heightening can involve a multiplicity of affects, from patriotism to profundity, it is most useful to privilege quantity over quality when defining its experience. 134 and flavors of reflexivity were an important topic of conversation. This affordance of openness, combined with the desire to not only communicate but also surprise and delight, led many to experiment, incorporating other speech genres, staged productions, and remediated performances.

In all cases, interaction with the technology itself became a key site for intimate interaction and intersubjective co-constitution of performative subjectivities. For the remainder of this chapter, I will group my methodological overview around three kinds of sound sources, newly salient and manipulable within audio epistolarity, each offering a different set of expressive affordances, and themselves perceivable as mediums within the larger medium of reel-to-reel tape exchange

(McLuhan 1994 [1964]): soundscapes, voice, and popular media.

Soundscapes

The most obvious and tangible feature of the auditory real captured in my interlocutors’ letters is the recordists’ “soundscape,” or, an individual’s total acoustic environment (Schafer

1994 [1977]). Following recent anthropological use, I privilege Schafer’s emphasis of the concept as “a publicly circulating entity that is a produced effect of social practices, politics, and ideologies, while also being implicated in [their] shaping” (Samuels, Meintjes, Ochoa and

Porcello 2010, 330). Framed in this way, the role of soundscapes as a “structuring structure” of sonic habitus, defining, and defined by, embodied ways-of-being in an individual’s “field” of intersecting subject positions, is made explicit (Bourdieu 1984, 2000). Largely unmarked until disrupted by travel or training, soundscapes form the seed bed of everyday auditory experience, helping to glue together one’s visual world, guiding one’s reflexive navigation of one’s environment, while indexing and alerting one to entities that currently occupy the sensual periphery (Ihde 2007). Foreign military service requires adaptation to an entirely new milieu, filled with the sonic signatures of unfamiliar customs, fauna, and infrastructure: honing the auditory becomes an existential imperative. 135

Basic training is typically associated with producing combat-ready bodies through careful drilling of rhythmically precise “dressage,” but, “becoming a soldier” involves far more than repetitive movement (Lefebvre 2017). From disassembling and reassembling a rifle while blindfolded to accomplishing similar feats of de-/re-formation in live-fire tactical choreographies, soldiers are inducted into military culture through the inculcation of new “somatic modes of attention,” employing every sensory modality in order to accurately attend to and predict one’s own and others’ bodily modes of engagement in potentially life-threatening situations (Csordas

1993; Hockey 2013). One also becomes uniquely attuned to the voices of military authority, learning to respond immediately and reflexively to verbal commands (though not necessarily through “deaf” obedience).167 Once deployed into a combat zone,168 one quickly develops what J.

Martin Daughtry has called a “belliphonic ear,” a form of “acoustic knowing” that enables most seasoned service members to immediately identify the precise caliber, international provenance, and distance of artillery, mortar or small arms fire; distinguish among dozens of aircraft, armored vehicles, and “transpo” units; the thud of a grenade, the whistle of a bullet, the ejection of a spent clip, the sloshing of water in a canteen, and hundreds of other sounds (Daughtry 2015; compare,

Feld 1996). Combining these skills, practiced listeners are able to “engage in a kind of culturally and topographically inflected hermeneutics of the wartime environment, constructing detailed narratives for battles that they could not see but could clearly hear” (Daughtry 2014, 26). Making sense of and accounting for the “belliphonic” was a key interpretive task for service members and

167 This reminds me of Charles Hirschkind’s interlocutors’ honing of ethical audition via cassette sermons (2006). Though this form of military training is popularly perceived as creating unreflective forms of obedience, soldiers themselves describe the necessity of this hierarchical structure for producing near super-human forms of coordination. 168 As Daughtry notes in his examination of wartime audition in Iraq, these same skills are required of all participants in a combat zone, including the civilians already present before the conflict begins (2015). 136 their families: what was left unsaid or unexamined in their soundscapes was potentially as damaging as what was heard or discussed.

While the Vietnam soundscapes of service members were fundamentally unfamiliar to most recipients, their intimates’ voices the only truly recognizable feature in a din of “noise,” stateside recordists’ aural environments were more varied and more predictable. Having far more control of their recording sites, spouses, for instance, were able to sequester themselves in their bedrooms, turn out the lights, and crawl under the covers for a “heart-to-heart,” or, alternatively, carry their portable recorder around a family barbeque, eliciting messages from dozens of distant relations as a videographer might today at a wedding. In both cases, the environment of 1960s domestic America shines through, the recordists’ efforts rewarded with the audibility of flickering candles, the rustling of bed clothes, the crickets outside the window, the mewling of farm animals, sizzling bratwursts, fireworks, or exploding piñatas.

Just as often, though, the realities of temporary single parenting required stopping the tape mid-sentence when the baby spat up, the toddler came running in seeking attention, the postman needed a signature, the oven dinged, the neighbor’s motorcycle thundered down the street, the newest F-105 took off half a mile away (but not far enough), and countless other interruptions. These moments often elicited bursts of irritation or annoyance, requiring the speaker to restart their story, sit their 10-year old back on the piano bench, or come back three hours later, exhausted and too tired to muster anything beyond “I love you. Good night.” At the same time, these fractured narratives provided a window into the affective authenticity of home life without the partner, acoustically capturing a contrastive chiaroscuro of affective absence. In either case, the sound of the absent intimate’s voice(s) resounding in a familiarly resonant space, often meant as much as the content of their words.

137

Voice

Ever since Murray Schaeffer coined the phrase “schizophonia,” the voice has been specially marked and isolated as a particularly troubling (but also enabling) form of disembodied sound. Recent philosophical explorations by Adriana Cavarero (2006) and Steven Connor (2000) have examined the history of the voice as a metonym for identity and the privileged mode of expressing and identifying others’ “natural” subjectivity. Cavarero’s project is akin to Hannah

Arendt’s in The Human Condition (1998 [1958]), charting the philosophical history of a particular feature of human embodiment and then attempting to recover/recuperate it. In Arendt’s case, the “devocalization of the Logos” and vocal (as opposed to purely semantic or even pragmatic) expression served as the epitome of a subject’s unique incursion into the human world. Steven Feld provided a phenomenological grounding for the importance of the voice in describing the imbrications of sound and space in Kaluli acoustemology (Feld 1996). As part of a larger, vibratory domain of perceptual resonance, Feld describes sound, hearing, and voice as “a special bodily nexus for sensation and emotion because of the coordination of brain, nervous system, head, ear, chest, muscles, respiration, and breathing” (97).

One always hears one’s own voice in speaking (via the ears, skin, and bone conduction), cementing the link between self, body, and world from the beginning of the formation of subjectivity in early infancy. In “The Grain of the Voice,” Barthes describes this visceral “erotic” connection between voice and an active body in the context of listening to recorded sound in the absence of a visual channel (Barthes 1977). The embodied traces described by Barthes and others as bringing the body into imagined “presence” include but are not limited to the domain of paralinguistics. As engaged by scholars in the ethnography of communication and discourse studies, these features—which are often left out of written transcripts—carry important signals and cues. Affiliation may be indexed in matching an interlocutor’s pitch in answers to directly

138 posed questions (Gorisch et al 2012); giving “instructions” via modulations in volume that specify conversational distance (Hall 1959); or evoking spatial or temporal distance with a dramatic pause in storytelling (Tedlock 1977).

In addition to “informational” content, other scholars, including Walter Ong to Don Ihde, have described the privileged capacity of sound to “surround’ and “penetrate” in ways that, when encountered in isolation, often leave room for listeners to engage in broader multimodal imaginaries than a purely sighted or multisensory artifact might allow. Jay Clayton described the experience of early phonograph listeners and the “counterintuitive power of sound transmitting technology: ‘[i]nstead of abstracting and distancing,’ like media of visual reproduction, the telegraph had an effect of ‘intensification and immediacy,’ an internalizing of distance, producing in its users ‘a split but oddly augmented identity’” (Clayton 1997, 226 qtd. in Weidman 2006,

468). When the recording includes a human voice—a sound privileged in the non-linear receptive anatomy of the cochlea and uniquely disturbing to one’s “inner languaging” 169 (Becker 2004)— the affective possibilities increase exponentially.

When performance shifts to irreducibly mediated and distanced interaction, the interlocutor focuses more on production, reception, narrativization, metacommunication, and the medium itself. Three interesting features seem to unify my interlocutors’ vocal performances. I call the first feature the “metamediative”: that is, explicit references within the recorded

“products” of a performance to the medium employed, especially as they pertain to the producer’s interactions with the medium. Whether they take the form of performance disclaimers, warnings of imminent technical malfunction, evaluations of competence, or teaching moments, these details accomplish a variety of metacommunicative tasks from phatic encouragement to excuses

169 Human hearing is most optimal is best between 4,000 and 6,000 Hz, the general range of human speech (and the reason why earplugs which cancel all frequency ranges equally let this most distracting of auditory stimuli through). 139 for ending the performance. Aside from explicit declarations of value, these small asides seem to be the primary site for revealing a performer’s feelings concerning the medium they are employing. In my interlocutors’ tapes, producers seem to idealize a seamless, ordered performance. Thus, when they or their correspondents inevitably fail—lose their train of thought, cough, laugh, cry, are interrupted by an outside disturbance—they appeal to inexperience with the medium, pause to evaluate, stop the tape, or offer a metanarrative aside. They “break” from the

“storyrealm” into the “taleworld” or stop the narration in order to save face, assuage disappointment, or improve future performance (Young 1987). Despite their “everydayness,” these examples often include references to “practice” and auto-contextualization on both ends of the communicative chain. My interlocutors describe a complicated set of composition and reception rituals, from recording in the dark to closing their eyes, to placing the speaker at head level, all of which were intended to enhance the experience by creating the condition on one’s own that mimics, as closely as possible, the idealized domain of face-to-face communication.

Many recordists seem reflexively focused on creating a co-present public via personal dispersal. By this, I mean that they frequently shift to new genres of expression and include other voices but they also impersonate other voices, report others’ speech, and verbally recreate other times and places. Recordists imagined and shared their public interactions in addition to their private thoughts, with frequent descriptions of their current environment, comments on features in their soundscapes, and notes about the quality of their own voices. These features of the recordings highlight the phatic affordances of the voice in itself (which is always already the voice for others).

140

In my analysis, I will be eschewing more metaphysical considerations,170 as my interlocutors’ emic understandings of voice closely resemble those of the “provincially

European,”: they interpret the voices on the tape as an unmediated representation of essentialized identity and an icon of agentic subjectivity (Weidman 2014). Instead, I will focus on three expressive domains by which my interlocutors endeavored to make their voices salient to their listeners (and in which they sought the same from others): the individualistic/affective, the sociolinguistic, and the sounding body.

Most importantly, voice was for my interlocutors an aural fingerprint, a (dis)embodied sign of the intimate’s timbral and enunciatory peculiarities, immediately apparent and offering the recipient an “echolocative” glimpse into their partner’s interior life. As Cathy Virskus described it to me,

when you are listening to a tape, you hear the cadence of the speech, you hear whether somebody’s emotional or not, I mean you get a much better sense of what somebody’s thinking and feeling when you hear their voice and hear the way they speak and … even though you’re making a tape, there are times when maybe you are at a loss for words and so you hear that and you know somebody’s thinking about something and so … it’s much more honest and real (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019).

Cathy’s words also highlight the rich paralinguistics of everyday speech—the almost infinite variety of affective, prosodic accompaniment surrounding every utterance—as well as discourse markers, fillers, response cries, “flood outs,”171 and other “vocal gestures,” uninhibited emotional

170 This topic falls outside the scope of this project but, for some fascinating reading, in addition to Cavarero 2006 and Connor 2000, see Connor 2014, for a similar, cultural history of paralinguistic vocables, Dolar 2016, for a psychoanalytic approach to voice as a neglected, Lacanian objet petit a; and Pettman 2017 for a philosophical call to attune our ears to the agentic voices of other “be-ings,” from the machinic to the Gaia. 171 Goffman defined “flooding out” as an effusively emotional “frame break,” for example, breaking into laughter in the middle of one’s speech, therefore “breaking” the intended illusion of competence while also callling attention to the context just violated (Goffman, 1986). 141 outbursts like laughing, crying, sighing, and cursing. These features not only make language intelligible but also help define the suite of vocal techniques that make you, “you.”

For my interlocutors, voices were intimately bound up in the spaces from which they spoke. Above, I mentioned the context of a room’s acoustics, with intimates’ voices resounding in recognizably shared domains of prior copresence. But one’s voice also marks one as a member of several social milieus, each with its own prescribed performance practices and ethical obligations that a person may register, uphold or reject given the exigencies of the moment. Most broadly, these include gender, race, socio-economic status, and geographic provenance (from originating US region, to state, city/town, neighborhood, parish, etc.). For service members thrust into action with people from all over the country, not to mention on the other side of the world, hearing a familiar accent, turn of phrase, or colloquialism uttered on a tape, on the Bullshit Band, or emanating from a table of card players was deeply affecting. Such connections were the source of many lasting friendships, often overlapping with stateside relationships as new contacts were told to “give my family a call” if one got out earlier or perished in the field. This specificity in register is also the domain in which the majority of “relationship work” took place; parents adopting didactic tones (and their children rebellious ones), brothers “giving shit,” spouses speaking adoringly and uttering the most important of speech acts, “I love you.” Men recording in barracks, who had been speaking boisterously before, often quieted down in these moments, almost whispering: this kind of effusive emotion was verboten, at least in mixed (men’s) company.

Speech acts, as defined by J. L. Austin, are linguistic expressions that not only present information, but verbally accomplish the task they are accompanying. Given Austin’s most famous example –the officiants’ ritualistic requirement to verbally effectuate the end of a marriage ceremony and the beginning of the union on which the preceding event has been

142 focused—speaks to the potential salience of this category in intimate auditory exchange (Austin

1975). “Everyday speech” 172 is of course densely dialogic, polyglossic and endlessly intertextual.

As Cynthia Gordon notes, one of the primary ways in which families173 linguistically construct themselves is through the creative use of “familylects,” defined as “repeated, ritualized ways of speaking that re‐create family‐specific frames of interaction” (2009, ii). For Gordon, familylects constitute a form of “extreme intertextuality,” by which she means a hyper-localized and densely reiterative use of language that forms a community of utterance only possible through extended, constant, and didactic copresence (ibid.; Bahktin 1984).

My interlocutors also looked to voice as a primary index concerning states of the body.

As Brandon Labelle has noted, the “mouth” is an interstitial site, a membrane through which self- making and intercorporeality become possible, the “oral cavity as the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation” in a universal “oral imaginary” (LaBelle 2014; ii).

For my interlocutors, sounds engaging a visceral, kinesthetic empathy, such as stuffed-up nasal passages, shivering, moans of pain, exhaustion, sexual desire, or audible kissing, were the highlight of most correspondences, the peak performances; second only to the sounds of children.

Following Steven Feld and Aaron Fox (1994), and, more recently, Paja Faudree (2012), I do not draw hard distinctions between “music” and “language,” the two frequently freely intertwining in a continuum of mellifluous merriment, especially, but not exclusively, in the mouths of children.

172 See also Tannen 2007, Tracy 2013, Wennerstrom 2001, Goffman 1967 & 1981, and Fox 2004 for thick description of and analytical approaches to “everyday talk.” 173 An adjacent term for the same phenomenon in the context of a friend group or romantic couple is “microculture” (Wuff 1988). 143

Pop Culture, Music, Performance Events

By the early 1960s, enabled by post-WWII economic prosperity and perceived security, the socio-cultural demarcation of the “teenager” as a (nearly) ubiquitous life-cycle stage, along with attendant practices, products, and ethics of “distinction,” was firmly entrenched in American life (Savage 2017, Bourdieu 1984). A central feature of the resulting “youth culture” was a new mobility, most famously symbolized by the car, but also embodied in the transistor radio and portable 45RPM record players, both of which enabled groups of teens to construct their own

“temporary autonomous zones,” complete with DJ-framed “soundtracks,” organized around carefree “hangin’ out” (Bey 2003). Depending on one’s location and radio pick-up range, dozens of stations were potentially available, appealing to (nearly) every taste, and inculcating an expectation of sonic self-curation (Douglas 2004). Into this mix fell reel-to-reel, offering unprecedented control over the contents of one’s mobile listening environment and jumpstarting the obsessive culture of radio “catch and release” and eventually mixtaping.

When deployed to Vietnam, service members were immediately thrown into a densely- layered media landscape in which their naturalized “popular music” was now one of dozens (even in the same barracks). Even more, in this blended context the socio-cultural identities associated with a style or genre became more acutely defined: one’s affiliation with soul, rock, or honky- tonk took on greater weight in an environment divided by politics, ideology, and socio-cultural identity, but also united by a universal existential threat. Music was nearly everywhere in- country, providing an endless soundtrack for banal or horrific experiences. Popular tunes thought mindless and fun back in “the world” took on existential significance when they not only accompanied, but also provided an irreducibly polythetic temporal structure for autobiographical

144 memories (DeNora 2000). 174 Popular media were inescapable in Vietnam and easily accessible in the United States, and thus colored nearly all activities, whether intentionally or not.

I attend to three primary, agentic uses of popular media (including television) by my interlocutors: community building, solitary soundscaping, and explicit sharing. 175 All of these modes of creative consumption were remediated—a process defined by Bolter and Grusin (2000) as the representation of one medium in another—in audio letters. Some of these uses were attentive and intentional; others were not. They ranged from accidental ambiance to deliberate sampling and sequenced anthologizing. As David Novak describes it, in media exchange,

“[subjects] re-appropriate received materials for widely divergent personal goals, and construct social relations through an intertextual discourse of mediated references” (Novak 2011, 41). The resulting gaps between intention and reception, fragment and whole, can become home to new affects, interpretations, and indexical links which, in turn, partially constitute the subjects involved.

As described above, the unique signature of a regional accent heard from across the room could initiate a lasting connection in the disproportionately varied cultural melting pot of an in- country hooch. 176 In some sectors, and especially as social divisions became increasingly tense stateside, this social distinction could lead to self-segregation and tribalism. A rear-echelon resupply camp could become less a temporary way-station, and more a cultural battlefield, certain tents and clubs providing ideological oases or aural “red lines” dividing its maps into culturally- insulated neighborhoods, akin to village bells in the 19th-century Europe (Corbin 1998). At the

174 Some examples include Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” (1966), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” (1970), and The Boxtops’ “The Letter” (1967). 175 Given there were only three networks in the United States at the time, it is kind of astonishing the military created and curated its own. Though primarily composed of rebroadcasts of stateside television shows, curated by the DOD, a significant portion of its content was also produced by the military, including holiday specials, news broadcasts, and remediations of earlier live events (especially those of the USO). 176 As noted by Appy (1993), members of racial minorities and the working-class made up a disproportionately larger part of (especially ground, and thus, combat) forces in Vietnam. 145 same time, one’s military unit became one’s family: protecting your new “brothers” became not only a moral, but an existential, imperative, forcing cross-cultural connections that would likely have faltered (or never happened) stateside. Unsurprisingly, when there was time to bond, it often occured over or through music (Bradley and Werner 2015). Or, more precisely, music afforded collective social participation in the form of discursive evaluation (Frith 1996), bodily engagement (Turino 2008), and socio-political criticism (Hesmondhalgh 2013), among other ways.

Many of these modes engaged the ever-present AFVN but, through the consumer affordances noted above, service members also had unprecedented access to personal stereos, and thus, to relatively solitary aural self-curation. Just a few potential uses service members put music to included blocking out unwanted social, political, infrastructural, and other forms of “noise”; playing biographically-significant songs to drown themselves in nostalgia; building an affective scaffold for a drug trip; and making a soundtrack for multitasking (including the composition of letters home). As I discuss in Chapter 4, musical accompaniment is such a frequent feature of audio letters originating from Vietnam that it quickly became the norm: some recordists even apologized for its lack. Music soundtracks also supplied recordists with a constant stream of conversational handholds, frequently pausing mid-sentence to comment on the music or place the mic closer to the speaker. Recordists also cut and pasted popular media as a communicative device. Most often, what was “shared” was a form of co-presence as co-consumption, singing along, shouting in delight, emotionally evaluating, and generally engaging their recipient in a shared mediated lifeworld, suspended, like the signals themselves, between home and hooch.

Recordists also “sampled” songs, shows, and other performances from the radio and television, creating epistolary collages, “phonographic anthologies” (Lacasse and Bennet 2019), and other

146 creative reappropriations, using pre-recorded material to say what they could not say through words.

These and other techniques will be the focus of the final section of Chapter 4,

“Letterness.” The preceding four sections of Chapter 4 comprise my corpus analysis of audio letters exchanged between service members and their intimates while deployed in Vietnam. In each section, I will examine the ways in which the auditory frame enabled recordists to capture and communicate their temporal lifeworlds by exceeding the semiotic bounds of written epistolarity. By privileging the aural, reel-to-reel enabled recordists to attend to and share intimate, untranscribable details of their everyday lives. In denaturalizing this previously unmarked domain in the context of an unfamiliar technological medium, recordists were forced to reflexively improvise new kinds of epistolary performance. In the process, the indiscriminate nature of audio recording caught every moment, from vocal slip-ups to serendipitous juxtapositions, distant mortars to depressive exhaustion. These moments created ruptures, allowing for the unintentional incursion of the auditory “real,” home to both supra-human elements beyond our capacity to hear, but also to the essential, authenticating minutiae of everyday co-presence.

147

Chapter 4: Audio Epistolarity

Conceptually and structurally, this chapter follows the outline established in Chapter 1. In the first section, The (Audio) Epistolary Pact, I provide an overview of the norms and ethics of exchange in audio epistolarity that emerged over the course of its brief ascendancy, including frequency, content, cost, and other practical considerations, as well as its role in the larger ecology of Vietnam wartime correspondence. In Section II, Spatiotemporality, I cover new sites of composition and forms of reception, focusing particularly on “events,” including concerts and holidays, but also combat; the “belliphonic” newly present and disturbingly salient. In Section III,

Simulacrum of Presence, I will explore how recordists employed different speech genres, registers and languages to perform their roles as parent, lover, sibling, etc. at a distance, while also describing reel-to-reel’s new accessibility to “untranscribable voices,” most notably, children. In Section IV, Materiality, will show how, in audio epistolarity, the metonymic aura of bodily extension shifted from the physical medium of conveyance, the reel, to the means of capture, and this transition’s affordances for imagined presence. Finally, in Section V, Letterness,

I will partially relinquish the floor to the “voices” of popular culture, discussing the ways in which recordists appropriated these modes of expression and auditory media for their own purposes.

Section I: The (Audio) Epistolary Pact

In discussing the emergent ethics of audio epistolarity, this section also acts as an overview of basic practices and a preview of topics and issues to be discussed in more detail in

148 the following sections. In assembling my corpus of “audio letters,” my tapes naturally fall into two, overarching groups. The first, and largest by a wide margin, comprises those made by service members, volunteers for government-chartered NGOs, and a handful of private citizens, employed by press outlets, universities, or other institutions, who were deployed or otherwise assigned to the Southeast Asian theatre. This group includes every branch of the military

(excluding the Coast Guard), enlisted and officers, representing nearly every rank. The recordists held many different jobs (from infantry “grunts” to counter-intelligence analysts; doctors to chaplains; DJs to filmmakers), and they claimed many different levels of affective engagement, from career-oriented volunteers to unwilling, resentful, draftees. Nevertheless, due to material constraints of the medium and the spatiotemporal affordances of particular postings and occupational responsibilities, some groups do predominate in the corpus. Though inexpensive compared to stateside prices, the cheapest tape recorder most frequently available to those in- country, cost approximately $22, with tape reels running from 30ȼ to $1.50, depending on the length, quality, and the inclusion of an external “mailer.” With newly arrived enlisted privates making $78 a month, this was not a purchase to take lightly.177

Tape recorders varied widely in size, weight, and recording and playback quality, from

Akai’s 2.5-foot-tall table units that required external amplifier, speakers and microphone, to portable, battery-operated, “toy-like” devices, weighing around a pound. For those in the rear, whether working out of an office or bunking down in semi-private hooches between flights, these factors were of little concern. For those “humping” heavy equipment (in addition to any personal baggage) across miles of paddies, jungle, and even up the sides of mountains, it was an entirely

177 This does not take remittance burdens into account; i.e. the portion of their paycheck sent home by service members during their tours. The draft disproportionately affected low-income families, often depriving them of primary or secondary “breadwinners” with little prior notice (Appy 1993). In addition, families of career military personnel were not allowed to live “on base” during tours, depriving them of easy access to the discounted prices at the Base Exchange (BX) (Gunby 2012). 149 different matter (Marlantes 2010). Consequently, pilots, analysts, and other support troops working away from the front make up a disproportionate part of my corpus.

The second group includes tapes recorded by the extended relational networks of the people described above, mostly deriving from the United States.178 Featured most prominently are parents, then romantic partners, and then young children, but the tendency of stateside recordists to purchase more portable devices afforded a far broader network of possible connections.179

These include extended family; stranger suitors;180 “war brides”;181 childhood friends, school

“chums,” primary school classes, and professors; priests; local politicians; and a host of other voices. In general, tapes from Southeast Asia are typically dominated by one central correspondent, embedded in a disruptively evocative soundscape of the belliphonic. Although other actors do appear, the need to constantly introduce and define one’s relationship to each new participant meant that visitors typically appeared in the context of more immediately recognizable interactional frames, including hooch parties, musical “pickin’ sessions,” and “shootin’ the bull”

(Fox 2004). Tapes from the States, on the other hand, are more densely heterogenous, featuring a panoply of familiar voices, recognizable spaces, and curated mixed media. These tapes were typically organized by and filtered through a primary intimate (often a spouse or parent). Acting

178 I have encountered a few instances of tapes exchanged between friends or family, their tours temporally overlapping but serving in different branches, or units within the same branch, and thus assigned to geographically distant posts. These include Forrest Fenn and Bill Griggs, who met in boot camp and stayed in touch post-deployment, as well as Robert and Carl Vogel, brothers, older and younger respectively, called up within six months of each other (an all too common occurrence, particularly for low-income families during the height of draft). (Bill Griggs Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Numbers 096AU0842-096AU0843; Carl Vogel Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Numbers 1863AU2309-1863AU2322; Appy 1993). 179 As in previous conflicts, matrimonial rates among service members skyrocketed between 1965 and 1972, as many couples eloped just prior to one member’s deployment (of course, divorce rates caught up to mirror this trend). Many of my recordists are young couples, many stateside wives and fiancées living with the family of their betrothed, waiting to buy their own house until after their intimate’s return (Clark 2014). 180 As in the Civil War, local newspapers frequently printed the contact information of service members serving in Vietnam in the format of “personal ads,” which many private citizens answered (Rhoades 2009). 181 See Klemesrud 1971 for a contemporaneous account of “Vietnam War Brides.” 150 as social hub for the comparatively broader network of salient relations, primary stateside recordists ventured far from home (or opened theirs), to capture and share as much of “the world” as possible.

Frequency

There are far fewer surviving tapes than written letters produced during the Vietnam era.

Magnetic tape is relatively susceptible to degradation when stored alongside other artifacts in a shoebox in one’s garage. In addition, the common practice of reusing reels, “taping over” one’s most recent letter to produce a reply, means that many recordists simply exchanged the same ten to fifteen reels for the duration of their separation, only occasionally saving particularly meaningful tapes for their personal archives. But the most obvious reason fewer tapes survive is that most correspondents simply did not record as often as they wrote, no matter how voluminous their epistolary output.

In the larger correspondence ecology of the Vietnam epistolarium, written letters remained the primary means of daily communication, constituting both the most formal kind of

“turn” in one of many on-going “conversations,” and an opportunity to most easily and consistently document the affective topography of one’s day. Tapes, on the other hand, were generally regarded as extra-ordinary, a site for exceptional sonic performances that ranged from highly personal private exchanges of effusive expression between lovers to boisterous social

“roundtables” involving up to a dozen interlocutors at once. Though tapes were perceived as providing a freer, easier and more dynamic means of conjuring an imaginatively “I-to-and-from-

You” intersubjectivity, they also demanded a greater degree of preparation. Recordists aimed to monitor and manage their immediate soundscape and their affective comportment (mood, health, energy, or verve), reflexively gauging on the fly their capacity to adequately perform their

151 expected role(s) vis-à-vis their intended listener(s). Many also felt compelled to produce enough material to “fill up” a tape. For those recording on a regular basis, the shortest exchange rate I found was three to four days, but most were far less frequent, and nearly all interspersed with written letters. 182 As Dale Fillmore notes, with the shortest tapes offering the verbal equivalent of ten to fifteen pages of handwritten text, “you gotta kinda build up a week or two of things to say

… before you can, ya know fill a tape up and send it.”183 Just a week prior to this taping, though,

Fillmore had made and sent another recording, beginning it with an apology for breaking his own rule: “Normally, I wouldn’t, uh, tape two tapes in a row but, uh, I got some very, very interesting news last night.”184 His “justification” (as he put it) was a promotion he was eager to describe extensively and animatedly to his parents and fiancé while still in the grip of his infectious elation about what it meant for his career (and their family) (Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0947).

Fillmore’s example highlights another common trend: the ubiquity of recordings of holidays, life-cycle rituals, and other special occasions in nearly every collection I have encountered, from intimate “pillow talk”185 to commemorate a couple’s wedding anniversary, to company-wide New Years’ Eve parties at the on-base Officer’s Club (OC). Especially on large, family-oriented holidays, when even distant relatives are crowded around one’s table, the absence

182 With the shift from paper to tape, “length” seemed to take on a more embodied, interactive, conceptualization. 183 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0948, December 22, 1970. 184 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0947, December 15, 1970 (Heresafter, cited as “Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0947”). 185 I mean this quite literally. Sandra Miller’s tape, like some others I will discuss later, was recorded in her bedroom while lying in the bed. The recorder to which she expressed her (relatively chaste) longing was positioned where her husband Elza’s head would normally be (Sandra Miller, “Audio Letter,” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 427AU0438, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Miller, TTU, 427AU0438”). 152 of a missing intimate is thrown into stark relief.186 The tape recorder provided a new means of capturing the affective and intimate density of unstructured, real-time events, producing a genre I am calling a “roundtable.”187 In many cases, just after such events, service members and their spouses recorded very emotional “follow-up” tapes, the sudden shift from intense, supportive sociality to solitude exacerbating their loneliness.188 The 19th-century habit of (Christian) Sabbath epistolarity also extended to Vietnam and audio letters, facilitated by the military’s adoption of

Sundays as a relatively light, “on-call” day for many above a certain rank. 189

As mentioned in Chapter 3, one reason for the ultimate failure of the reel-to-reel tape recorder as a mass consumer product was the relative difficulty of locating, and then cueing “on demand,” a particular moment in 600 feet of tape. (600 feet was the average length for a three- inch, fifteen-minute reel, and the most common size employed by my interlocutors.) Unlike written letters, which one could read and then easily rescan when composing a reply, audio letters’ “time axis” was difficult to manipulate, necessitating a different set of techniques for reply (Kittler 2017). Some took notes on their first play-through, though this was relatively unpopular, as it tended to disrupt one’s immersive engagement. Others, with the freedom to listen again (and again, and again) to adequately address all the queries posed, took their time, but most

(and especially those on military schedules or with young children) did not have this option.

186 Many of the smaller collections I have found contain exclusively “holiday” tapes. It is unclear whether this is because these were the only ones saved, or, whether, like their 19th-century counterparts, this new practice was reserved for “special occasions” only. 187 Today, at least in my family, this practice persists in the form of the group Skype and/or Google Hangouts call to at least one invariably missing sibling who’s spending the holiday with his/her significant other’s family in a different state. 188 Miller Family, “Audio Letter,” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 427AU0458, Undated. 189 As discussed in Chapter 1, in the early part of the 19th century, letter-writing was primarily associated with business culture. Thus, for more conservative religious denominations, writing on the Sabbath was considered a sin, no matter the content. For the same reasons, though, Sundays were also intimately associated with family. These two ideologies butted heads for a generation until, with mass adoption of the post for familial contact in the latter part of the century, the paradigm shifted and, first writing to, and then calling, one’s distant relatives on Sundays became a norm of US sociality (Henkin 2006). 153

Consequently, most chose to respond immediately (often using the same tape) while the content was still fresh in their minds (countless tapes start with “I/We just listened to your tape and …”).

This emergent rhythm resulted in correspondences full of semi-regular bursts of conversational activity, the medium in this case phenomenologically facilitating the kind of temporally- compressed immediacy both sides sought.190 For couples who were only recently separated, perhaps this means of communication felt familiar, akin to the long-distance phone calls shared between new service members in training and their intimates while both were still stateside but separated by state borders and military sequestration.

Structural Affordances and Consequences

By the 1960s, the influence of radio and television had largely supplanted once-dominant practices of “everyday musicality,” from co-workers drunkenly belting out standards in their professions’ repertory of occupational folk songs at the neighborhood bar to middle-class families gathering in the parlor for multi-generational Sunday recitals. The same can be said for public speaking: the range of the average American’s experience with these “ways of speaking” was mostly limited to business boardrooms, political podiums, and other domains of professional oratory (Hymes 1974). When faced with fifteen, thirty, or even sixty minutes of undifferentiated time with no safety net, recordists drew on a variety of techniques and conventions from other media to tackle this expanse, a compulsion mentioned by many though rarely explained. As

Fillmore noted, it was “sorta hard to fill up these tapes … [though] there’s nothing that says I have to.”191

190 In addition, for recordists who could not afford their own tape recorder, both listening and recording one’s reply in the same sitting was the only available course of action (Head 1970). 191 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0946, December 14, 1970. 154

Still, Fillmore and his correspondents consistently did fill this tape and every other, their resulting addresses filled with mid-sentence pauses, performance disclaimers, floor-holding fillers

(“uhhhh,” “um,” “let’s see…,” etc.), and discourse markers (“well …,” “I mean …,” “ya know?”)

(Schriffin 1987; Goffman 1981). These discursive “particles” and borrowed conventions served to knit together disjointed monologues into conversational approximations that gave these performances “a character of familiarity, making the discourse sound right” (Tannen 2007, 62).

Conventional talk helped to provide the assurance and intersubjective reality of a “shared universe of discourse” (ibid.). These moments also functioned as “frame breaks,” revealing their intimates’ struggle with self-expression (and echoing one’s own), providing access to the previously unmarked banalities of one’s existential navigation through unfamiliar, technological waters (Goffman 1986). I discuss some of these paralinguistic modes and borrowed conventions in more detail below, but here I want to provide a brief overview of the unique stylistic configurations these experiments produced.

In the dominant culture of the Vietnam-era America, “unaccompanied” vocal performance was considered more intrinsically performative than written forms. Thus, for most, taping seemed to “key” a more traditionally performative frame, implying a responsibility for listener engagement and a greater degree of evaluative scrutiny, marking “blank space” as inherently undesirable (Bauman 1984 [1977]; Goffman 1986). In a tape to my grandmother, my grandfather, after four solid seconds of silence, finally exclaimed in bemused frustration:

This thing is just drivin’ me nuts! I get talking along and I just can’t think of what to say next and then all of a sudden I’m sittin’ here with a dumb look on my face and the tape’s still runnin’! (Gunby 1967, T1)192

192 When he finally starts speaking, his smile is so audibly wide (and thus his zygomatic muscles so taut), he has trouble getting the words out from between this grin (ibid.). 155

Finishing, he assures my grandmother—and likely himself—that “I’ll get the hang of it yet”

(ibid.).

For other recordists, the relative expense of reels compared to paper, the coexistence of other epistolary channels to “pick up” the communicative slack, and the compositional affordance for multimedia bricolage prompted them to savor all available lengths.193 Whatever the reason, I have encountered only a handful of tapes that did not maximize content, implying that, as in all other forms of wartime epistolarity, volume was valued above all else.194 Some recordists, whether through a dispositional proclivity as class clowns, family storytellers, or artistic performers, or through occupational training as briefing experts or radio operators, were adept at

“just talkin’,” getting phenomenologically “lost” in their performances and easily able to fill seven-and-a-half to thirty-minute sides with purely extemporaneous verbal content. (Though the resulting tapes were engrossing and entertaining, some of these recordists’ correspondents complained that they often forgot to address specific requests and questions.)

Other, more self-conscious recordists devised a variety of organizational techniques.

Some prepared and read fully pre-composed letters aloud.195 Some worked from written outlines, letters, and notes to avoid missing anything, sacrificing spontaneity in the process. Still others preferred to “talk from the hip,” but managed their output by recording short, two-to-three

193 Interestingly, some recordists employed work-arounds to achieve this goal, from speeding up the recording speed, to letting the recorder run while they went to grab a pack of cigarettes; “… it takes up a lot of tape that way [sound of flint-strike and cigarette inhale] … I’m gonna have trouble fillin’ out thirty minutes of tape as it is … so I waste a little tape every chance I get” (Ernie Miller, “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 2),” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1857AU2252, 1966). 194 One of the more obvious “incomplete” tapes is a two-minute recording of bird song, clearly an effort to capture a fleeting moment, possibly to share, though never sent (Lee Livingston, “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents,” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2212AU2510, 1967). 195 More than a few recordists began their tape exchanges with similar compositional “training wheels,” but most eventually transitioned to more unrehearsed forms of delivery or gave up taping altogether. 156

“sentence” utterances, then pressing “pause,” or stopping the recording entirely, until they had formulated their next thought. In one segment, Lee Livingston, a particularly loquacious and rapid speaker, not-so-playfully mocks his father’s stilted delivery and jumbled technique, saying,

“And … yesterday we played golf” BIIINNG! …. So yesterday you played golf!? BIIIING! … Can’t ya just sit and talk? Goodness, if we don’t have anything to talk about let’s just quit sendin’ tapes! … I figured out what you were doin’ there about the second BIIIIING! … they got one of these little buttons on the microphone, ya push and stop it and start it, ya know.196

In imitating his father, Livingston adopts a deep, posh, Mid-Atlantic accent,197 while his vocal evocation of the recorder’s pause-button effect, which resembles a metallic “ping,” rapidly rising in pitch for about a second, is remarkably accurate. (Apparently this mannerism was very entertaining for him, as he repeats it several more times on this and later tapes.)

Slightly more abrupt were tapes in which the recordist “takes a break,” going off to “play a few hands of cards” or “grab another beer,” frequently coming back “as confused” as they were before.198 Recordings composed in this way might be completed in fits and starts over the course of a few hours, but many took several days or even weeks, creating a potentially confusing temporal character for listeners without a detailed roadmap. In a written letter composed over

196 Lee Livingston, “Audio letter from Lee Livingston to parents, #3,” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2212AU2486, January 15, 1967 (Hereafter, cited as “Livingston, TTU, 2212AU2486”). 197 While his impersonation is clearly parodic, his intonation and content choices are indexing, and taking a critical stance on, socio-economic markers of white, upper-class, emotional detachment and meaningless small talk evident his father’s careful delivery, e.g. replacing fillers with pauses. From the one surviving tape containing his father’s voice, I can report that Lee’s impersonation is spot on (Livingston Family, “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents, # 15, 29 May? 1967,” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 2212AU2499, May 29, 1967). 198 Robert Vogel, “Robert G. Vogel Audio Letter 4,” Carl Vogel Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1863AU2312, August 18, 1968 (Hereafter, cited as “Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2312”); Ernie Miller, “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 3),” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1857AU2253, 1966. 157 several sessions, changes in handwriting, ink, or spacing made this process obvious. 199 In audio letters, many recordists verbally dated and time-stamped the beginning of their tapes, but few did so on subsequent returns, resulting in a series of cobbled-together, experiential vignettes with often dramatically divergent soundscapes and affective changes in the speaker’s demeanor.

Having come back from a party, one in-country recordist’s speech was slightly slurred, his affect newly sentimental.200

Though tapes sent from the United States were affectively similar to those composed in

Vietnam, service members’ schedules were far less predictable than those of their tapes’ recipients, and their capacity to capture fleeting moments more infrastructurally circumscribed. In addition, as the single “missing piece” (at least until multiple members of one’s family were called up) in a larger network of expectant correspondents desirous of direct address, many service members “chunked” their tapes into smaller, epistolary units bookended by messages for their central contact, the stateside “hub,” with instructions concerning who should be around to hear what. This “chunked" arrangement of short vignettes, each capturing a self-contained piece of real time congealed around a moment of anecdotal awareness interestingly mirrors a structure common in the writing of Vietnam veterans. Due to the nature of much military life as a series of

“hurry up and wait” missions in which the salient (and often violent and heightened) action is captured in what’s been referred to as “flashbulb” memory. Coined by Brown and Kulik (1977), the original model sought to account for the vivid, highly detailed, and often time-dilated recounting of particularly memorable events that exceeded “critical levels of surprise and

199 Typewriters were widely available to service members in Vietnam. They were the primary tool for composing the 245 different underground newspapers started during the war, but they were rarely used in personal epistolary writing (Fish 2003, 4). 200 More than anything, these moments reminded me of the jump-cut, road-trip sequence in Breathless, the constructed “dialogue” uniting disorienting shifts in framing, angle, and exterior backdrop (Godard 1960). This cinematic technique has been recently revived in YouTube vlogging, particularly in the hyper- compressed, four-minute “think pieces” of the Vlog Brothers (vlogbrothers, “How to Vlog: From the Vlogbrothers,” May 20, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2lY0T5cA0s). 158 consequentiality” (Talarico and Rubin 2009, 189). Such events were a common occurrence in the lives of service members.201

Rather than distracting or negatively disorienting listeners, though, these disjointed moments of clumsiness and confusion seem to have humanized the speakers and the proceedings, revealing the foibles and insecurities that only those closest to the speaker would know. More often than not, these were the points in the tape to elicit laughter, sighs, surprised exclamations and other paralinguistic sounds that would be all but impossible to “inscribe” or materialize in any other way.202 Most recordists’ style fell somewhere in between, balancing the interruptions of home/hooch life with the cathartic, indulgent affordances of “jabbering” (Gunby 1967, T5),

“talking heart-to-heart” (Miller, TTU, 427AU0438) , and “goofin’ off.”203 As long as the content and delivery were perceived as genuine and effortful, the “off the cuff” approach of both extremes could index the spontaneity and immediacy central to my interlocutors’ ideal of postal presence.

Content: Themes and Subjects

Thematically, audio letters to and from Vietnam were not that different from those composed during earlier conflicts, nor, for that matter, from letters exchanged between families divided by international migration (Yamonaco 2011, Turcotte 2011, Gerber 2006). As Liz

Turcotte has noted, central to sharing the minutiae of one’s experiential life—an essential feature

201 This structure is also highly reminiscent of mixtape compilation, a topic I will return to in the following chapter. 202 Difficult to linearly narrativize in the first place, communicating these kinds of experiences is further complicated by the master narrative of “civilians won’t understand,” leaving the individual with no audience besides those he or she served with—who already know the details—and thus little practice in “telling” their story. 203 Eddie Fish, “On the Road to Con Thien by Eddie Fish,” Frances T. Shea Buckley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1662AU1621, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Buckley, TTU, 1662AU1621”). 159 to constructing relational intimacy over large distances—is describing not only the practical activity, but the intricate temporality of one’s day. In these tapes, recordists provided detailed surveys of their daily duties, weekly schedules, leisure activities (“joining an 8-track tape club cost me $46 but it really makes the time go by faster over here”), the ever-present threat of

“harassment” from officers, and distant or proximate violence. These descriptions capture the tension between boredom and brief, unexpected moments of heightened action and frantic preparation (Head 1970).

In addition, recordists seem to have been hyper-aware of the precise number of days they had been in-country, the number of days until they would be “getting short” (nearing the end of their contractual requirements), gaining a promotion (which meant an upgrade in pay and a greater likelihood of being granted a “drop,” i.e. a reduction of days off the end of one’s contract), or transferring to a stateside posting. Many also stated the exact time of day. All of this information would roll off the tongue with no pause for mental calculation. In-country recordists’ frequent and highly specific references to these numbers seems to indexically express one effect of their military training on their linguistic repertoire, the amount of time dedicated to imagining home, leave, or just “the world,” and the “ticking-off” element of their temporal everyday. The family focus of these tapes also likely contributed to the prevalence of these topics in correspondence.

“Money matters” occupied hundreds of feet of tape. Family members described setting up bank accounts for remittance payments; service members gave instructions, attempting to manage taxes, bills, and mortgages while they were away.204 Due to the overabundance of commercial products available to service members, intricately detailed descriptions of “shopping

204 Though encouraging this kind of talk from their absent “bread winners” to make them feel needed, the realities of epistolary delay and simple practicality led most women, especially those in lower socio- economic strata, to take over the family’s fiscal duties entirely (Turcotte 2011). 160 trips” and purchased products were far more common on service members’ tapes than those from home, a distinctive shift from earlier conflicts (Lair 2011). Focus on these minutiae was also encouraged by the ontological openness of epistolarity—what is said in this moment is but one utterance in what will be a chain of utterances, giving one ample future opportunities to return to

“bigger” topics later.

The most frequent subject of discussion was the correspondence itself, and in particular, the medium. While I will discuss the latter below, here I want to emphasize the importance of framing every letter with assurances of safety and health, expressions of longing, validations of lovers’ feelings, and well wishes for networked others. Tapes also included excessive expressions of gratitude, itemizing the contents of care packages or highlighting the saliency of particular moments on tapes. Recordists often made requests for different kinds of content or absent voices.

All of these elements served to phatically maintain the epistolary connection while shaping its

“world” in the ways most desired by its participants.

Ecology of Correspondence

Of course, for most, tapes were only one part of a larger media ecology of correspondence. The most highly valued were the most direct, though also the least accessible.

All service members had access to leave time, ranging from short, weekend furloughs, during which many paired off and ventured into surrounding urban areas to touristically indulge in everything from sight-seeing to shopping, sex tourism to drug trafficking. Longer periods of leave usually lasted for one to two weeks, during which many either flew home for short periods, or took advantage of Hawaii’s ample military accommodations, tropical climate, and mid-Pacific proximity (halfway between the Southeast Asian jungle and sunny coastlines of “the world”),

161 arranging to meet their families, spouses, or other intimates there. Planning for, and fantasizing about, these trips was a frequent topic of discussion on tapes.

Thanks to the massive communications systems imported and installed by the US military in the early years of US involvement in Southeast Asia,205 direct calls between Vietnam and the United States were possible but typically reserved for official communications.

Occasionally they were offered in the case of family emergencies, most famously hors mori, death-bed parlays when there was no time to fly home. With enough effort, though, any system can be subverted. Vytau Virskus described one such work-around by his “very innovative” girlfriend (and now wife), Cathy. Summoned off the flight line with an ominous announcement that he was “wanted in the first shirt’s206 office … you have a call from the world,” Vytau rushed over to find out what was up, worst-case scenarios marching through his mind (Vytau and Cathy

Virskus 2019). As he explained, “no one got call[s] … except for bereavement calls, EVER.”

Picking up the phone, he was relieved and delighted to hear Cathy exclaim, “Hi Vytau!” After his stunned reply (“What on Earth! How did you get this number?!”), Cathy explained that she’d managed to track down his APO (“Army Post Office”) number (which was supposed to be classified), then spent several hours calling dozens of numbers until finally getting lucky. Falling into old rhythms, the two “just caught up” for the “better part of an hour,” the admonishment of his commander (“Sarge, next time you get a call like that, you do it on your own time!”207),

Cathy’s $350 AMEX charge, nor the following “month worth of hooting” he received from his

205 Itself, constructed on the backbone of the departing French colonial infrastructure (FitzGerald 2002 [1972]). 206 Military jargon for “first sergeant,” generally the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in a given unit. 207 Interestingly, when speaking as commanding officers, Vytau used a “southern” accent, which he eventually noticed and jokingly commented on, saying “I guess every Sergeant had a Texas accent back then,” even though his did not. The influence of fifty years of popular cultural depictions is apparent even in the most intimate stories of those who lived them. 162 buddies (“mostly from jealousy I think”), able to diminish the power of this unexpected call from home (ibid.).

Marginally more accessible was the Military Auxiliary Radio System (or MARS), a joint military and civilian network of amateur radio operators, facilitating “calls” between foreign military bases and private stateside homes.208 Typically costing $2 to $3 per session, limited to five minutes, and requiring a reservation at least eight hours before the desired appointment,

“MARSgrams” connected service members seated in one of a group of adjacent, on-base booths

(similar to those still found in train stations) to their family’s kitchens and living rooms. The resulting “conversations” were conducted semi-synchronously, one speaker uttering their “turn,” then ending with “over,” which was relayed by an on-base radio operator to a volunteer civilian, then to the intended recipient, followed in reverse sequence by the response (Vytau and Cathy

Virskus 2019; Harrod 2015, 19). Though these calls were an awkward approximation of “real time” conversation, they were very popular. The booths were almost never empty unless the base was on alert—and sometimes even then, those with reservations unwilling to risk missing their chance (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019).209

For recordists used to speaking “uninterrupted,” their intimate’s imagined presence their only immediate interlocutor, the prospect of real-time communication after so long an absence could be intimidating.210 As Fillmore explained:

208 MARS represents the official appropriation of the network of amateurs who intercepted messages broadcast by Nazi POWs, as discussed in Chapter 2. 209 More relevant to experimental missions in the States, “squawk boxes” were another means of one-way communication between military spouses and families in this period. Used during NASA’s Apollo missions, and primarily employed as a means for broadcasting “air-to-ground” communications to relevant internal parties such as directors and visiting dignitaries, they were also given to the astronauts’ wives, allowing them to listen in on all radio communications between pilots and ground control. Famously, without informing the families, the transmissions to household units had a built-in, five second delay, allowing mission control to edit sequences in real time in the event of a catastrophe (Kertscher 2015). 210 This, of course, was on top of the strangeness of the stilted interchange itself, as well as its proximity to military experience, a context few wanted to be reminded of while speaking with their “sweethearts” (Harrod 2015, 19). 163

I tried to call ya last night, I thought I’d surprise ya, and I was scared to death myself because, ya know, it’s been a month and I really didn’t know what to say over the phone. And then I had to yell in the thing and say “Over” and it kinda ruined the effect for me but I did get to hear your voice and, uh, the same time ya say it, not a week later like on the tapes.211

Most common were still care packages and written letters. Though inundated with sanctioned popular culture, comestibles, and recreation, most service members longed for and requested more personal items, including Kool Aid, aerosol cheese, repaired clothing, grooming products, magazines, pre-recorded tapes and records, and hundreds of other items. Homemade foods (especially baked goods) and regional delicacies were especially effective in grounding a service member in homesick nostalgia, but food was also crucial for unit cohesion and morale.

Like most items from “the world,” these were freely shared, bakers often including enough to

“feed the whole lot of ya” (Head 1970). Service members routinely shipped home the fruits of their urban and catalog shopping, including everything from ornaments to ordnance.212 Greeting cards also remained important in delineating the cultural, life-cycle calendar, as well as providing them decorative material to personalize what little space they retained dominion over.213

In the minds of most recordists, taping offered a channel inherently superior to the written letter, providing a medium that could more closely match the speed, and thus the true content, of their thinking. But this same freedom also stymied some speakers for whom talking to

211 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1154AU0950, January 06, 1971 (Hereafter, cited as “Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0950”). 212 Some service members routinely sent home souvenirs, including deactivated claymores, grenades and other projectiles. They usually remembered to alert their recipients to the content. (Timothy B. Staats, “#8 July 24, 1969,” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 274AU0044, July 24, 1969. 213 For many, both a yearly tradition that one did not want to miss, and for those without “much to say,” an easy means of communicating appropriate emotions through safely, pre-packed sentiments, to which one could sign one’s name. 164 anyone outside their immediate unit became more difficult as their missions became increasingly traumatic. Some stopped communicating completely. Others found the “distance” of writing, exporting their “voices” outside their immediate embodiment, an easier means of communicating these kinds of experiences. In addition to the more practical hindrances to taping from “the bush,” combat trauma can, and did, render the voice the least useful channel for discourse for some. In the former sense, Michael Baranowski vividly describes, the Vietnamese jungle as less than forgiving to bodies, let alone delicate technologies, not accustomed to it:

I have a recorder here and I’m gonna try an’ keep it elevated, off the ground and away from … everything here. I’m gonna try to keep it up in the air because everything I touch here, eats through my skin, or bites me or [laughs] or rots something off [laughs]. This is, this is something else, the grass will cut you, the mud will, uh, rot your skin and, this is something else (Baranowski 1968 qtd. in Egloff and Allison 2000).

Though generally good-natured about these difficulties and his combat duties in earlier tapes, even Baranowski had limits. As we will see below, he eventually directed his observant and cutting wit toward the powers that be satisfyingly, cathartic, effect.

More mundane, though no less important for conducting the business of “the everyday,” were forms of information that were not amenable to an auditory channel, especially those difficult to accurately cue and adjust in the moment. When relaying or requesting Christmas card addresses, product serial numbers, bank account passwords, contact spellings, and other bits of information whose accuracy was paramount, many recordists abruptly stopped their tapings to write this information down for a future letter.214 On the other end of the spectrum, certain topics

214 Timothy B. Staats, “#1, 1968/11/21,” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 274AU0037, November 21, 1968 (Hereafter, cited as “Staats, TTU, 274AU0037”); Lee Livingston, “Audio letter from Lee Livingston to his parents, # 1, 27 December 1966,” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2212AU2484, December 27, 1966 (Hereafter, cited as “Livingston, TTU, 2212AU2484”); Gary Snead, “20 165 were simply too difficult to discuss on tape. Though “Dear John” letters are frequently mentioned on tape, I have yet to hear one delivered auditorially. During the Vietnam War, it also became customary to deliver condolence notifications in person, though the official position of Casualty

Notification Officer (CNO) had yet to be formally established. Though such notifications were not their responsibility, many friends of fallen members reached out to these families as well.

Tapes between service members and comrades’ parents do exist, but I have not heard any carrying this kind of news or content.

In addition, talking frankly about sex in mixed company has never been easy (let alone encouraged) in US culture. These mores were changing at precisely this point in history, but the

“Free Love” movement had made a greater impact on action than on discourse. Typically, given their “uniquely endearing quality,” the fewer tapes produced in a given correspondence, the wider their eventual distribution with the recordists’ social network (Heidelbaugh 2012). Compared to written letters, tapes sent home were more often passed around, and limited access to privacy in a barracks setting meant tapes from home were met with several pairs of ears. Some recordings became a fixture of a barracks’ soundscape and an intertextual resource within a given unit’s microculture. Though not subject to institutional monitoring, this potential audience ambiguity led some to self-censor, reserving their more romantically intimate discourse for other channels.

In their tapes to romantic partners, several recordists cautiously approached the edges of sexually- explicit content before retreating into euphemism, “flooding out,” or abruptly changing the topic.

It was especially awkward when recordists needed to discuss such matters with their parents. In describing his and his new wife’s post-tour plans, regarding where he intended to live, his wife’s

(July or August 1968),” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1393AU1406, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Snead, TTU, 1393AU1406”). 166 job transfer, and which holidays they expected to spend with each side of their family, Gene Day arrived at the subject of family planning, saying,

Well, we’re gonna wait about two months before we, uh … try to start our family and, uh … uhhh [laughing] well, this is kinda [laughing harder; audibly blushing] hard to explain this on a tape … but, uh, gonna wait about two months.215

Full of awkward pauses and nervous laughter, this sequence was probably as difficult to listen to as it was to produce.

More fundamentally, though many older parents (and even grandparents) appear on tapes to service members, most seem far less comfortable than their children in this new medium. As

Robert Haldeman explained to his wife,

Got a tape today from … my folks and my brother Barry [laugh] and, uh, [laugh] which is kind of funny ‘cuz Barry talked on it most of the time. Mother says she’d sooner scrub floors than talk on a tape recorder. And Dad didn’t have too much to say either, he’s sorta shy about that sorta thing, I guess.216

In another example, Livingston responds to his mother’s “fumbling” through her side of their most recent tape, saying,

These modern gadgets really get to ya sometimes. Oh, it’ll be a lot. It’s a lot more fun than writing I think and as Mother requested in her letter, you wanted letters as well as tapes, Sorry about that, xin lỗi [“sorry”] as they say in Vietnamese, because I’d much rather send tapes than letters (Livingston, TTU, 2212AU2486).

215 Gene Thomas Day, “Audio Letter from Specialist Gene Thomas Day to Mr. and Mrs. M. L. Day,” Gene Thomas Day Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1685AU1695, Undated. 216 Robert Bruce Haldeman, “Audio letter from Maj. Robert Haldeman to Barbara Haldeman,” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1912AU2258, January 11, 1970. 167

In general, tapes sent by older parents were more segmented, featuring short phrasal turns separated by pauses. Along with their explicit comments, these pauses indicate less comfort and facility with the new medium. The increased ease of the young in adopting new technologies is so cliché as to not require mentioning but one could also read this discomfort as part of the larger epistemic rupture in the hegemony of print culture along generational fault lines, and the fracturing into modality-specific froms, from tape to Super 8, of amateur recordings’ non-textual means of self-extension (McLuhan 1966, Kittler 1999).

Section II: Spatiotemporality

As outlined in Chapter 1, written letters between intimates were not only a necessary site for exchanging information and discussing the “business” of everyday life (especially in the absence of other communicative channels); they were also most intersubjectively salient in their authors’ endeavors to construct a “permanent presentism,” a spatiotemporal slice-of-life that contributes a new chapter to the “world-building” effort of an epistolary relationship. One key to this process was “placing,” the discursive construction of a multi-modal, affectively evocative, and immersive rendering of the writer’s actual (or, idealized) reality that served to conjure their imagined presence, framing the following proceedings in an aura of compositional immediacy, and thus intimate authenticity.

When adapting this form to audio, a great deal of this discursive “work” was off-loaded to the indiscriminateness of the medium itself, bringing correspondents closer to the

“angelogical” ideal of sharing their immediate, temporal experience, the tape recorder producing an unfiltered record of a single sonic event or a series of them in real time (Peters 1999). This aspect of audio composition freed up recordists to focus on spontaneous, verbal expression, conjuring their presence through newly available “ways of speaking” and paralinguistic nuance.

168

Yet this medium also made them more acutely aware of the sea of sounds in which their voice was floating, and of the irreducible permeability of self and soundscape. This new awareness offered recordists a rich new resource to give their listeners “a better sense of what’s really goin’ on over here” or a window into “what our lonely nights are like while you’re gone.”217 Recordists carefully curated their soundscapes while speaking; they recorded a variety of untranscribable events, from holiday gatherings to “pickin’ sessions” (Fox 2004). They also recognized the potentially hazardous, semiotically-unmoored, undertow of the decontextualized schizophonics of the “belliphonic” (Schafer 1997; Daughtry 2015). In the rest of this section, I will discuss the phenomenological and affective consequences of this shift for sites of composition and reception, as well as the myriad experiences recordists captured in the process.

The Sites of Composition: Vietnam

Dealing with the rigid temporality and scant privacy of military life, Vietnam-based recordists taped whenever and wherever they could. For many, this meant plopping oneself down in their corner of a shared hooch to “chat … for a little bit,” accompanied by the ever-present soundtracks of their, or a hoochmate’s radio(s). As mentioned in Chapter 3, musical genre presented a tense, cultural battleground in Vietnam. People of different ideological persuasions and socio-ethnic/economic subgroups—from “black militants” to southern “good ol’ boys” — carved out their own sonic niches, often claiming different clubs or shifts, and populating their own collective jukeboxes with records and tapes from home (Bradley and Werner 2015). The necessarily integrated nature of hooch life, however, required much more flexibility. While taping

217 Larry Shelton, “[A]udio letter from Larry Shelton to his family,” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1139AU0891, Undated; Sheppard Family, “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife,” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1705AU1716, Undated. 169 to his mother, Robert Vogel is interrupted by a passing hoochmate, saying “There’s another guy going to the shower with his radio.”218 As the guy pauses to talk to another friend, Vogel pushes his recorder towards his radio, picking up half a bit: “I hope you like listenin’ to Phyllis Diller, cuz I really do” (Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2311). The same recordist’s tapes could contain everything from bluegrass to Motown, Singaporean vocal jazz to Vietnamese religious hymns, Pat Boone to

Jimi Hendrix, comedy routines to television shows. Sometimes musical choices were dictated by the recordist’s mood, but more often they just reflected the flavor of the moment. Whether influenced by talk radio’s soundtracking or the comfort afforded by its presence, although music’s presence was often unintentional, it quickly became the norm.219 Several recordists apologized for “talking unadorned” in tapes recorded after lights out, during lockdown alerts, or when their radios were broken.220

Hooch tapes were also frequently full of interjections, both solicited and not, from hoochmates, visiting buddies, maids, commanders, and many others, from ribald to innocent, companionable to exploitative. Some interjections expand the listener’s sense of the recordist’s network: Fillmore introduces his parents to his friend “Goose,” who’s “so short he might not have time to finish speaking on this tape,” and will imminently be visiting their mutual hometown.221

Some represent offhand, backchannel queries (“What was that show we saw? … Oh yeah!”),

218 Robert G. Vogel, “Robert G. Vogel Audio Letter 3,” Carl Vogel Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1863AU2311, July 31, 1968 (Hereafter, cited as “Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2311”). 219 Doug Bradley and Craig Werner highlighted one exchange between an officer and a new recruit, the latter complaining about the inappropriateness of Pat Boone playing over the loudspeaker as grunts counted (and stacked) dead members of the Viet Cong. The Sargeant explains the utility of Boone’s voice in both “letting [the VC] know we’re still here” and comforting the older guys (who had arrived during the first wave of hyper-patriotic jingoism, for which Boone was an iconic voice) (2015, 20). 220 Tim Sikorski, “Tim, Corpus - San Diego,” Tim Sikorski Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2936AU2808, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Sikorski, TTU, 2936AU2808”). 221 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0962, March 21, 1968 (Hereafter, cited as, “Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0962”). 170 elicited performances (Ernie Miller shouting to his hooch maid, “Hey, say somethin’!” and then, after her obviously memorized recitation, “You just heard my house girl say the Hail Mary in

Vietnamese. How ‘bout that?”), or full-on side conversations, the tape recipient becoming an observer, rather than direct addressee.222 Beyond music and talk, tapes captured the generalized ambiance of off-hours military domesticity, including shuffling cards, clinking glasses, shoe- shining squeaks, gun-barrel brushing, slapping tent flaps, creaking bed springs, and all manner of overheard vocalizations—claps, whistles, knee-slaps, guffaws, or “yeehaw!”

Other recordists, worried about these distractions or self-conscious about their performances, sought quiet and mental solitude, intentionally recording after lights out, surreptitiously absconding from a unit party, or using their recorders’ portability to seek out pockets of relative calm on base. Though bases bustled with activity, it typically was not difficult to find a place apart, as long as one was willing to deal with some discomfort. One of Vogel’s favorite spots was out by the perimeter fence:

No one out here to bother me. It’s pourin’ rain and I’m gettin’ soaked but they’re having a party in the barracks … when I first come out here, I sat down in the damn ground Vietnamese-style, Carl knows how they sit, sat on a damn rat trap [laughing]. Almost cut my ass off [continues laughing]. I just touched the back of my fanny [delivered in a parodic, southern accent] so I guess I’ll live alright. Kinda nice out here in a way, nice and quiet [audible crickets] (Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2312).

In another tape, flooded with music and jostling bodies, Vogel complained that he couldn’t go out by the fence lately because the “area’s not secure anymore … they’re expecting a VC attack in the very near future” (Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2311). Many of these recordists’ tapes were chunked

222 Ernie Miller, “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 5),” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1857AU2255, 1967 (Hereafter, cited as “Miller, TTU, 1857AU2255”). 171 into smaller bits, reflecting their frequent interruptions. Thomas Bowe, apologizing for yet another break in a tape with fifteen stops and starts already, saying, “Just had a break there, a few people walked by and I don’t like talkin’ with a buncha people running by; embarrasses me.

There goes another one, oh well [cut]” (Bowe 1968).

Others, like Ernie Miller, routinely carried their recorders with them, utilizing its portability as ambulatory affordance. “I’m out just walkin’ around out here; thought I’d talk to ya a little,” his relaxed demeanor evident in his voice, but also his sauntering pace audible in the gravel crunching beneath his feet, his steady inhalations of his cigarette, and his frequent pauses to highlight the accompaniment of crickets.223 Others used this mobility to share the intricacies of the sonic details of their work life with their listeners back home. Larry Shelton, a radio dispatcher, made many of his tapes “on the clock,” his messages to his parents frequently interrupted by bursts of transmission activity, and eliciting several instances of (literal) code- switching—i.e. “Hi Mom. Over. How ya doin’? Over.”—throughout, indexing the intersection of two competing spatial imaginaries.224 During lulls in incoming radio traffic, Shelton also connected to friends in other posts and camps, asking them to introduce themselves to his parents.225 Shelton also recorded several instances of him and his friends trying out new weapons on the firing range near his hooch, verbally identifying and describing the salient properties of each for his listeners (Shelton, TTU, 1139AU0900).

223 Ernie Miller, “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 1),” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1857AU2251, 1966 (Hereafter cited as “Miller, TTU, 1857AU2251”). 224 Larry Shelton. “[A]udio letter from Larry Shelton to his family,” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1139AU0890, July 1, 1967; Larry Shelton, “Audio Letter home from Larry Shelton,” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1139AU0902, 1967. 225 Larry Shelton, “[A]udio letter from Larry Shelton to his family,” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1139AU0892, Undated. 172

Others whose jobs were intrinsically mobile, metonymically brought their intimates along. Richard Crane, a helicopter pilot, introduced his wife to his latest “bird,” putting the recorder on the seat beside him as he “spec’d” the chopper, describing each step his flight prep in detail. “Well, I don’t know whether or not you can hear me but … I’m pre-flighting her … and I got somethin’ I want you to hear! [dramatically spins up the blades]. Howdya like that?!”226 Gene

Day, a truck driver, made several of his tapes while on route to deliveries, sometimes monologuing while describing the scenery; other times including his wife227 (and sometimes his parents) in dialogues with passengers.228 Unlike the untamed belliphonic I will turn to below, these scenes shared an untranscribable, experiential component of the recordists’ occupational lifeworld and demonstrated their mastery of these particular weapons of war. These tapes offered a potentially comforting level of control within a larger atmosphere of wartime chaos.

For those serving in an urban administrative, offshore medical, or out-of-country staging area, days might be quiet (For instance, my grandfather’s missions derived from Korat Air Force

Base in Thailand, far from direct fire). For those on the front, life was noisy and unpredictable.

The dense, jungle environment and the small-band guerilla organization of the majority of the

Vietnam War’s infantry level combat enforced a new, hyper-vigilant awareness of one’s sonic envelope (and that of the enemy) when out in the bush. Consequently, “the bush” was one of the few in-country environments that actively discouraged audio letter composition. Though I have

226 Richard Crane, “07 UH1 Startup, 29 Days,” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1787AU2125, Undated. 227 In an unusual but fascinating tape, Tim Sikorski recorded a road trip up Highway 1 in California for his brother (Sikorski, TTU, 2936AU2808). Mostly an extended monologue, the tape recorder (likely) positioned on the passenger seat, the narrative abruptly changed course when Sikorski picked up a woman he met in a local bar. Now part of the conversation, she spoke with Sikorski’s absent brother a few times, while he was getting gas or paying the motel. After one of these short interludes, Sikorski came back on, saying he had left her at a (presumably different) motel without notifying her [and laughing at his own deviousness]. 228 Gene Thomas Day, “Audio Letter from Specialist Gene Thomas Day to Mrs. Roxie V. Wise.” Gene Thomas Day Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1685AU1706, June 07, 1967. 173 found multiple references to individual service members expending valuable space and weight on

“humping” record and tape players into the bush for listening purposes, I have heard only a few references to making tapes in the same environment. I have yet to find any extant examples

(Marlantes 2010, Irvin 1987, Bradley and Werner 2015).

Camps under attack are a different story. NVA (“North Vietnamese Army”) mortar attacks were a regular part of life, requiring a color-coded “Alert” system. As recordist Timothy

Staats notes, “alerts” in the Army ranged from “White” (just “a normal day”) to “Green” (for when “they think somethin’s up … but they don’t do nothin’”) to “Yellow,” which means all clubs are closed, everyone returns to their rooms, lights out, sitting on their bunks fully-clothed, locked and loaded, in the event a “Red Alert,” sending everyone “haul[ing] for the perimeter … ready to defend themselves.”229 These attacks were also almost as predictable as clockwork, typically occurring every night at a particular hour, in an effort to keep the camps’ occupants constantly on edge. Instead, as Staats explains, the result was more often irritation and indifference:

We don’t take these alerts too seriously as … we’re always going … from one color to another color. We’ll be sittin’ here in bed and somebody’ll come through and yell, ‘Yellow Alert! Yellow Alert!’ Somebody’ll roll over and throw a boot at ‘em, tell ‘em to ‘Get out of our room!’ Then some drunk’ll come through one night, like our platoon leader … yelling, ‘Purple Alert! Purple Alert! Standby for Polka Dots!’ […] So he comes through last night and says, ‘Yellow Alert!’ and we’re like, yeah, sure Sarge, last night it was ‘Purple,’ get outta here … (Staats, TTU, 274AU0040).

229 Timothy B. Staats, “#4 May 1969,” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 274AU0040, May 14, 1969 (Hereafter, cited as “Staats, TTU, 274AU0040”). 174

Those serving on one of the many “dugout” hills near the demilitarized zone (or DMZ) were afforded no such luxury, often stationed on the edge of “the bush” for months at a time, and generally under constant barrage. In this environment, while serving the same psychologically destabalizing purpose, mortar attacks were also a cover for, and a prelude to, legitimate incursions and invasions, “probing” hill defenses for weak spots and potential avenues of entry.

Whereas a very large number of tapes capture both friendly and enemy fire, often barely commented on by the recordist, in some the violence gets too close to ignore. In one tape, Vogel, intent on capturing a real-time battle to share with his brother and mother, has been waiting by his favorite spot near the perimeter fence for several hours. “Well I’ll be a sonofabitch … my feet are asleep, my ass is wet, I’m pretty damn tired so, I think I’ll, I think I’ll cut this off tee tee230 and go to bed. … Aaah shit. I don’t know what the deal is. Charlie’s supposed to hit this place real quick” (Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2312). But, before he gets very far, he spots a helicopter hovering in a fashion that indicates activity. Hurrying back to the fence, he starts narrating, shots firing in the background, as he describes what he’s looking for. “Must be somethin’ goin’ on in the area …

[let’s] see if he drops a flare … [pause] … Yep, that’s one … [another pause] … Alright, two red flares, goodbye we’ll see ya later kid!” (ibid.). The next cut begins some time later:

Well, here I am sittin’ in the damn bunker, the siren went off. Charlie’s out there in some damn way, they got a couple of A1Es231 out there bombin’ the hell out of ‘em so I’ll just … say so long for now and I’ll make another tape to ya as soon as I can (ibid.).

230 Meaning, in military pidgin, “a little, small, a few.” 231 The speaker is referring to the A1-E Skyraider. Due to “its ability to carry large bomb loads, absorb heavy ground fire, and fly for long periods at low altitude, the A-1E was particularly suited for close- support missions,” and, by extension, base defense (PBS, 2019). 175

Perhaps thinking his family might want a more reassuring conclusion, Vogel cuts backs in, again, an indeterminate amount of time later, saying “Well, all clear’s been sounded, I think I’ll just go grab another beer and hit the sack for the night” (ibid).

In a more imminently dangerous example, Michael Baranowski, a marine lance corporal and, according to his taping-partner-in-crime, an aspiring radio journalist, captured an attack taking place less than thirty yards away while down inside his “fighting hole” on Payable Hill

(Baranowski qtd. in Egloff and Allison 2000). In the midst of near-constant sounds of mortars, illumination rounds, rifle and machine gun fire, Baranowski “reported” in an appropriately quiet voice, “the rest of the tape here are sounds, as I recorded them when they called a one hundred percent alert, which is pretty rare” (ibid.). Baranowski continued, even more quietly,

now the word’s been passed to fix bayonets … Sarge just came running by saying, ‘Lemme me go get my bayonets so I can get in on this’ [laughing] … this started to be a fun tape, now it’s getting [to be] too much like a 12ȼ combat comic book … there’s so much garbage going on, we don’t know if its outgoing or incoming, no word’s been passed down like that, illumination is being kept up … looks like an acre Christmas tree, fire, saltpeter, high explosive (ibid.)

More subdued but also clearly entranced, he continues, “[Laughs] That’s a heavy thing, a heavy feeling, sittin’ there in the dark with all that stuff goin’ on” (ibid.). Continuing his “coverage,”

Michael dips into other vocal genres with allusions to soundscape recordings—“Sounds of the

Enchanted Forest,” delivered in a pseudo-fantasy-narrator idiom—to commercial jingles— commenting on the airstrikes “wip[ing] napalm all over that place,” he quips in a sing-song manner: “You’re In the Pep-Si Geee-neration”232 (ibid). Finally, ending, and clearly dazed from the onslaught but no worse for wear, he “closes,” saying,

232 I’m not sure what the connection is here. “Napalm” as an index of American culture? It’s ubiquity and phosphorescent coverage? Though I’m also not sure there needs to be one. The rapid, polyglossic shifts 176

Now it’s dark, quiet, it’s been quiet for about 15 minutes now. I was just crouching down in the hole there, talking to a hand grenade before I realized what I was doing, and the rain’s just on time, now it’ll rain the rest of the night …. (ibid.).

Sites of Composition: The States

As mentioned in Chapter 3, stateside recordists had far more control over their recording spaces, having to actively seek out saliently recognizable moments like static-electricity fights between young children, baby’s cooing, and preparing meals. Stateside recordists ventured out of the house to capture the voices of broader networks and live events such as road trips and choir concerts. Thus, the singular speaking voice was typically privileged.

Most non-event stateside tapes are closer in form to earlier epistolary writing—that is, they embody a sequence of utterances spoken rather than written. For both writers and recordists, one’s intended content was always a moving target. Both creators’ field was the mind’s eye, framed by the aura of their recipient(s), filled with remembered experiences and expressive outbursts, which the writer/speaker attempted to linguistically render into cohesive and potentially entertaining, moving, humorous, didactic, pithy, narrative, authentic, or poetic expressions of care. Speaker and recipient often struggled to achieve a directed intentionality, focused on conjuring the presence of their other while fighting distractions from without and within. Both also often abandoned linguistic expression: they included “attachments” in the form of photographs, flower petals, or songs, their minds occupied by their recipients’ expected reaction to their monothetic addendum.233 Nevertheless, the spatiotemporal character of recording

between different registers, idiolects, and speech genres afforded by the auditory are what stand out “in the moment.” 233 Although tapes were routinely sent along with written letters, photographic slides, and records, all of these were also described within them, slides acting as a Kodak carousel performance, songs as part of the mix, and often, letters read aloud. 177 gave the recordists’ inner time a far louder “voice,” from its external incursions (the interruptions of the everyday) to the internal (the recordists’ own real-time stops and starts and mid-phrasal asides). The contents of these communications were acutely audible in ways difficult to capture in written form. This always/already potentiality of figural escape into ground intensified when the recordists attempted to direct their microphonic attention to sources out of their control.

One of the most popular affordances for audio letters was capturing the unpredictable

“liveness” and dense multimodal heterogeneity of social events (Auslander 2008). These ranged from spontaneous to scripted, personally-directed to fly-on-the-wall, deeply personal to nearly anonymous, and generally fell into one of three categories: musical performances, holiday gatherings, and “roundtables”/parties. In this section, I will discuss a few examples in depth.

Musical Performances

The auditory frame into which my interlocutors plunged themselves brought with it a variety of potential creative lines of flight in the form of established audio-only genres, including

DJ-curated popular music, radio plays, talk radio, and sportscasting. The “proper” execution of these genres required professional skills and performative dispositions few possessed, at least at the outset. Many recordists, seeking to “spice up” the staid written form they were adapting, borrowed framing conventions freely from these other genres.

The freedom of the auditory frame led many recordists who were artistically inclined to pepper their “letters” with musical performances. Several, in the course of “normal speech,” drunken revelry, or self-directed navel-gazing, frequently “broke into song,” employing short bursts of musicality to intertextually underscore a point, referring to a culture of utterance shared between recordist and recipient. I will discuss a few examples of this below, but here I want to

178 highlight moments intentionally set apart as recordist-performed “epistolary song.”234 From short, space-filling asides to personal serenades and even full-on concerts, recordists might consider the tape’s recipient either a direct addressee or part of a larger, imaginary audience.

As an example of the first category, Thomas Sheppard, recording his usual Sunday tape to his wife, begins with an apology.235 After several days of receiving no mail, he’d begun going

through all the stages of worry. First of all, one of the kids were sick, or maybe two. And then maybe you were sick so no one could write. And then it went in progressive stages to, you weren’t sick, you were probably just so busy and one thing and another … By yesterday, I was cussing out people and … stomping around the area and, [in] general, just being nasty as hell… (Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1714).236

His voice throughout this passage is becoming increasingly exasperated, speeding up, rising in pitch and volume, until finally “breaking” with a sigh of relief as he says, but, “… here’s the mail

… I feel one hundred percent better and I hope I didn’t worry you any with my last letter, which was probably pretty short … anyway, we got ‘em, and now we can go on with the war” (ibid.).

Newly softened and nostalgic, his voice beginning to crack, he continues, “Oh boy do I miss you.

Good gracious! [big inhale] Getting so bad now that, uh, I’m almost starting to count days, and that’s a helluva dangerous thing to do before you get over the six-month period” before pausing to collect himself (ibid.). “Now I find myself getting those big empty spaces on the tape so, in the meantime, while we’re waiting for the tape to run ou-,” at which point it abruptly cuts off.

Flipping to the other side, Dr. Sheppard makes his original intention clear,

234 An auditory rendering of the musical headers and broadsheets exchanged during the Civil War (as discussed in Chapter 2). 235 Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard, “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife,” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1705AU1714, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1714”). 236 This is saying something for Sheppard, who’s most emotive expressions, like my famously profanity- averse grandfather, are often some variation on “Boy,” or “Gee.” 179

Well, what I was going to say when I was so rudely interrupted, was that, meanwhile, while I’m waiting for the tape to run out, I’ll sing two or three bars of La Bohème and throw in a little bit of Madame Butterfly, in honor of its being Sunday and I sure do miss those Sunday morning arias we used to hear (ibid.).

He begins “Side-B” with his tape-specific, “rudely interrupted” convention, one that he carries though all of his recordings, as well as with the discourse marker “Well…”, framing his performances here as if just asked a question, or, more accurately, given his “turn” to talk

(Schiffrin 1987). After appropriately transitioning, he indexes their couple-level microculture of shared Sunday audition, the tape seeming a natural place to pick up where they left off, his voice taking the place of the tenors and baritones of their local AM station’s rebroadcast of the

Metropolitan Opera’s Sunday performances. This move simultaneously ties the couple together on three spatiotemporal planes; international, national, and municipal, in their shared aural imaginary.

Serenades, though none were explicitly identified as such, ranged from the emergently improvisational to pseudo-professional performances. Having gathered for a joint birthday party for his sister and niece, Gary Snead’s family decided to musically interpellate him with a family sing-along. The tape opened with the sounds of a strumming guitar (eventually revealed to be

Gary’s sister’s gift from the family), as his mother framed the event, “Hello Gary, this is the whole darn bunch here, makin’ a racket.”237 Following a few seconds of whispered vocal cueing among five participants, while the guitarist tuned her instrument, the group tentatively broke into

“Deep in the Heart of Texas,”238 singing in octave-unison, each voice slowly gaining a more

237 Gary Snead, “Gary Snead 23 (6 Oct 1968),” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1393AU1409, October 06, 1968 (Hereafter, cited as “Snead, TTU, 1393AU1409”). 238 While there are several versions, their rendition seems most stylistically similar to Gene Autry’s 1942, Okey Records version. 180 confident purchase, with whoops and shouts, heterophonically cutting through and making themselves heard in their individuality (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1409). After two choruses, bookended with a four-clap “break,” they ended the song with a triumphant “Gary!!!,” and companionable laughter.

While Snead’s sisters harmonized the beginning of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” in the background, his father, in typical radio-show fashion, introduced everyone present, before the group continued with the Hank Williams classic (Clyde shouting “Hong Kong”—a play on

“Honky Tonk”—to close it out, and making everyone laugh). Continuing the “medley” style revue, Clyde sang a solo rendition of “This Ole House,” complemented by a new guitarist, beer cans cracking open and clinking glasses, his voice emotively cracking on the last word of the final line, “I’m gettin’ ready to meet the saints” (ibid.). Sounding less like an intentional, stylistic, honky-tonk “cry” than an emotional catch in the throat, this vocal effect comes across as a real- time, reflexive response to the newly-salient context of this line in a tape headed for Vietnam. As a pilot serving in a Marine Light Helicopter Squadron, Snead frequently saw combat, though this was rarely discussed in detail; the music acting as a buffer in this instance.

Wanting in on the fun, the five-year-old “birthday girl” was coached into an adorably wonky “I’m A Little Teapot” before Snead’s brother-in-law Jimmy transitioned the tape into a more traditional roundtable of greetings and individual messages:

Gary, I think you can hear in the background we got a pretty good accompaniment around here … It sounds like y’all are doin’ alright over there, not havin’ it too rough. I guess that’s kind of an understatement but anyway, I think ya know what I mean (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1409.).

Not having taken part in the earlier singing (his wife was the musician), Jimmy nonetheless framed the gathering with a musical metaphor, referring to Snead with the singular “y’all”

181 regionalism, and imparting his concern with the sheepish delivery of this final apology/well wishes.

In addition to being an outlet for service members to creatively vent their frustrations or poetically document their experiences, in-country folk song could also function as an epistolary token of gratitude. His recovery complete, musician Eddie Fish recorded a short series of songs as a parting gift for Frances Shea, who served on his medical team. After three versions of well- known occupational songs, Fish remarked:

Before I go ahead and [play] “Road to Con Thein” for you, I’d like to say a couple things. I’d, uh, like to thank … you and the rest of the OR people, recovery people, for, bein’ so good to me … treating me like you have since I’ve been here aboard ship. I’d like to, uh, thank you most of all Ms. Shea for the wonderful compliments that … you [gave] me on this song, and uh, I hope you like this. You’ll have to pardon me, past few songs that I tried to do here … weren’t too good but, they’re live and you’ll have to understand that this is just goofin’ off really. Well, I’m gonna start with this song that you wanted now and I hope it’s a little better than what happened the night of [inaudible] Folly (Buckley, TTU, 1662AU1621).

Performance disclaimers out of the way, Fish delivered a rousing performance of his (very catchy) original song, honoring Shea’s service and her request, and indexing their shared history with reference to the inciting musical connection.

Back in the states, Cathy deployed her musical talents in taping to Vytau in her “very intentional” mission to be “the one he was going to want to see when he got back” (Vytau and

Cathy Virskus 2019). As an Assistant Press Secretary in the Michigan House of Representatives, she spent the majority of her time conducting interviews, then editing and distributing them to local radio stations and other news outlets. With access to a “semi-professional recording

182 studio”239 in the basement of the statehouse, Cathy had decided to record a somber Gordon

Lightfoot song that captured her morose state in Vytau’s absence. When she pitched this idea to her “very musically-inclined” boss, though, he suggested a “less depressing” tune, “Song For A

Winter’s Night” (ibid.). Using the original song as a backing tracking track (with Lightfoot’s voice reduced), she belted out her own, heartfelt version (Virskus 1969). As she told me, “When I sent him the song, I had imagined myself what the reaction might be and how it might go over, it was perfect. Apparently, everybody there, including him, just went nuts over hearing this cute little thing singing this song to him,” so much so that Cathy’s tapes became anticipated events in his unit (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019). Whenever a new tape from Cathy arrived, Vytau said, after gathering together the ingredients for his signature drink, “that’s when Cathy did her act … on the tape recorder … she was a hit!” (ibid.). Although Vytau had a private room for the majority of his tour, for many other service members, public audition was not so much a choice as a necessity, given the lack of privacy in barracks life.

Another set of recordings captured slices of musical life, intended to share musical ways- of-being for the folks back home.240 These included Texas-style “pickin’ sessions,” typically featuring a central resident instrumentalist, around which a host of other voices, some more committed to singing, some to drinking, would gather in raucous sociality, trading jokes, barbs, banter, tall tales and song challenges (Bauman 1986, Fox 2004). Haldeman recorded several of these for his family and for his own use, fending off requests to “turn that damn thing off,” which frequently turned to demands the drunker the participants got.241 Others focused on local artists, like Joe Tarpley’s recordings of his neighbors Ba An and Cu An, Buddhist poets whom he

239 As this point in our interview, Vytau jokingly cuts in saying, “she cheated!” (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019). into main text? 240 While similar recordings were likely made stateside, I have yet to find any. 241 Robert Bruce Haldeman, “Country Music by Bob & Robbie," Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1912AU2298, Undated. 183 interviewed and recorded in performances for his wife Martha, while also making copies for the

An’s.242

Holidays

Correspondents separated by crisis are keenly aware of the passage of time, attending to multiple, intersecting, levels of modulating saliency. The nature of the time interval depended a great deal on one’s branch. If serving in the Marines, Army or Navy, most service members’

“contracts” were strictly temporal, comprising between nine and twelve months. For others, like my grandfather, an Air Force pilot, his duty to country was completed the moment he touched down from his 100th mission, though many pilots returned for second and even third tours. As my grandfather discovered upon arriving in January 1967, with anti-aircraft flak sites multiplying by the day and what many pilots perceived as ham-stringing regulations that prevented US fighters from engaging hostile aircraft unless fired upon, the deck was heavily stacked against him. “On average,” he was told, “you will be shot down twice and picked up once” (Gunby 2009,

13). With an average completion rate of only 65% before severe injury or death, many of my grandfather’s co-workers and friends were far less lucky than he was. As he quipped in his memoir, “There was a saying going around at the time that ‘A real optimist was an F-105 driver that quit smoking because he didn’t want to die of lung cancer!’” (ibid.). Volunteering for every mission he could, my grandfather completed his first tour in just seven months (ibid.). With little control over the most important interval—“getting short,” or looking to the end of the tour of duty—continued attention to one’s family’s specific observational rituals toward national holidays, became particularly important. There is rich history in the military of grand gestures for

242 Tarpley, Joe F., “1968, Ba An to Mrs. T Cu An's Translation,” Joe F. Tarpley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2354AU2525, 1968; Tarpley, Joe F., “1968 Interviews,” Joe F. Tarpley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Item Number 2354AU2526, Texas Tech University, 1968. 184 holidays—from presidential visits to unsanctioned cease-fires243—and Vietnam was no different.

With MARSgrams booked months in advance, tape provided a way to sonically share the most acutely lonely days for many service members, with “holiday” letters comprising one of the most frequently-preserved examples in extant collections.

Christmas, in particular, was quite difficult, especially for those with children. To include her husband Robert in their traditional festivities, after putting the kids to bed on Christmas Eve,

Barbara Haldeman set up their home recorder, capturing the sounds of the children fighting their bedtime and her last-minute holiday preparations. After finishing, she wished him a happy

Christmas Eve and said, “I’m gonna leave it set up tonight where the kids can [forlorn inhalation] you can hear ‘em tomorrow. I don’t know whether they’ll say anything but you’ll hear paper rattling anyway … Goodnight darling, I love you.”244 The tape cuts to the next morning: “… as usual, [the kids] denied my request to sleep in until 7:30,” Barbara grumbled in borrowed military jargon, before recording the sounds of the kids bounding down the stairs (ibid.). The next twenty- five minutes were packed with tearing paper, squeals of delight (“Look what I got! Puppets!”), siblings fighting over control (“No that’s mine!”), quantity (“Everyone else is gettin’ more presents than me!”), and quality (“I don’t have to play your records anymore because I got my own record player!”). Some excerpts were so loud that the recording started clipping, encapsulating the affective “distortions” of daily life. Barbara instructed the children to “Thank

Daddy too,” while the family dog rumbled through the wreckage, occasionally bumping the table holding the tape recorder (ibid.). In addition to the obvious benefit of hearing the children’s exuberant gratitude and joy, Barbara’s animation on this recording was greater than on any of her

243 Most famously, the sporting Christmas Truce of 1914 (Weintraub 2001). 244 Haldeman Family, “Audio letter to Maj. Robert Haldeman,” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1912AU2273, December 24-25, 1969 (Hereafter, cited as “Haldeman, TTU, 1912AU2273”). 185 other tapes. Her bouts with depression, despite the good humor of their children, and its consequent trace in her voice—“Well dear, since your hams for children have finished talking, I thought I’d try and finish up the tape … [though it] sounds like I got a mouth full of gravel”—a frequent topic of her private tapes to Robert.245

A contrasting example that perfectly captures the increasingly divergent worldviews of the military and its draftees was recorded by Timothy Staats in July of that year. Staats began a tape to his parents with a minute and a half of several short verse/chorus clips of Christmas carols as performed by a large, all-male choir. Staats himself then came on, saying “Well, I guess you imagined I’m listening to a Christmas program.”246 Identifying it as “Christmas In The Military,” as shown on the AFVN, Staats sardonically continues,

Golly gee, it really looks like fun … only the military could produce a program like this. All the good stuff ya know. Peace on earth and goodwill towards men, show[ing] these pictures of gunships making gun runs and nuclear-tipped missiles. And, they’re deadly serious about it too (Staats, TTU, 274AU0043).

Zeroing in on the choir’s rendition of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” he cuts together his own

“version,” highlighting the irony and inappropriateness of the content, before exclaiming, “No doubt about it! I’m gonna be home for Christmas this year!” (ibid.). Staat’s tone on this recording was more than just scathing: it sounds as though he may have been offsetting his immediately acute homesickness with ironic detachment. As far as I can ascertain, he was not home for

Christmas, as his tour overlapped that winter, and his accompanying written letters make arrangements for delivering gifts on his behalf. Over the end of this song, he abruptly changed

245 Haldeman Family, “Audio letter to Maj. Robert Haldeman,” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1912AU2285, November 30, 1969. 246 Timothy B. Staats, “#7 July 16, 1969,” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 274AU0043, July 16, 1969 (Hereafter, cited as “Staats, TTU, 274AU0043”). 186 topic, as he was borrowing his roommates’ TV to watch the Apollo 11 launch: “Soon as this program’s over with, Combat comes on. Combat’s a favorite program over here. Boy th[e] rush as you work to get done to see Combat. Sure must have been nice to fight in a war where if you shot somebody you didn’t get court-martialed, and you didn’t worry who was who and what was what” (ibid.).

Although religious holidays were the most common, I have found tapes for nearly every occasion, even Halloween. As an introduction to their regular Sunday tape, Snead’s three adult siblings adopted a range of “spooky” voices, from rising and falling, ghostly wails (verging into three-part harmony at one point), to creaky witch laughter (“Ee/er/ee/er”) and howling wolves.247

Clyde’s voice cut through continued wails to flatly say “Murder,” sending everyone into hysterics. As his sisters resumed their (now choked) wailing, Clyde closed the skit with his whispered baritone, saying “Hello Buddyyyyy, this is from the Sneeeaaad Family Chamberrrrr,

The Sesspool Weeeeell. Happy Halloweeeeen. Boo!” (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1411). Surprisingly,

Snead’s numerous nephews and nieces were absent: the only child present is a none-too-happy infant, woken by its parents’ shenanigans.

Of all US holidays, New Year’s Eve is perhaps the one for which the illusion of temporal synchrony is the most important. Bowing out of his unit’s festivities—an on-base, officer- organized barbeque to “keep all the enlisted men occupied so they don’t go out and fire all the hand carriers and machine guns … [and] get somebody killed”—Fillmore set up his recorder next to his transistor radio, the local AFVN station playing the National Anthem.248 He made his

247 Gary Snead, “Gary Snead 25 (31 Oct 1968),” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1393AU1411, October 31, 1968 (Hereafter, cited as “Snead, TTU, 1393AU1411”). 248 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0949, December 31, 1970 and January 1, 1971 (Hereafter, cited as “Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0949”). 187 excitement clear, saying, “I been kinda waitin’ all day to record this tape because I was gonna put the countdown on it and everything,” and, he added sheepishly, “be the first to kiss Janey on the

New Year” (referring to his wife of two years, currently living with his parents while he was deployed) (Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0949). As he was in a time zone fifteen hours ahead, he was pretty confident he would be the first to celebrate, “at least in our family anyway” (ibid.). Asking everyone to get ready, he continued,

I’ll be startin’ the countdown here very shortly, and that big smack you hear at the end a big kiss for everybody but … after it hits Janey, [it can] bounce off and, uh, hit everybody else who wants to be hit by it. But I want to get Janey right in front of the speaker right now so she can really, really let her have it. It’s gonna be real nice and sweet and big and loud and this is all my love (ibid.).

Dramatically counting down the last five seconds, he closes by exaggeratedly kissing the microphone before turning up the radio, Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians’ rendition of

“Auld Lang Syne” flooding out all other sources.

Roundtables & Parties

What I am calling “roundtable recordings” were typically produced by placing the tape recorder in the middle of a stateside living room or in-country hooch during larger social gatherings. Framed as a metonymic surrogate of the absent other, the recorder was essentially freely available to all those present, either as a “direct line” for individual or “coached” performances, or simply “left on” as a passive observer, capturing all sound within its ambit.

These events were sometimes organized for epistolary purposes, but more often recording was a contingent bonus of a preexisting arrangement. Recorded events included post-church Sunday meals, comprising several short messages from the service member’s less available extended family and friends; and epic drug-fueled hooch hangouts, featuring a constantly shifting (and

188 blaring) soundtrack “DJ’d” by whoever brought the records, with a heady atmosphere of bong hits and popping tabs, dirty jokes and drunken debates, gambling and party games. They could also consist of a generalized “messin’ around” intended to give the listener a “taste” of hooch life and a vicarious return to the Bacchanalian hedonism of high school or college (depending on the age of the participants). This section offers a thick description of a typical stateside family roundtable.

Taking advantage of a gathering for the 4th of July, Arturo Garcia’s family borrowed a friend’s tape recorder to include their missing son in the party. Comprising only fifteen minutes between both sides, the tape nonetheless contains a vast multigenerational microcosm of family life on the Texas border. Transcribing the entire exchange would be a chapter in itself, so here I offer a few illustrative examples of the range of behaviors roundtable recording produced. These tapes were almost always introduced by the matriarch or patriarch, and Garcia’s tape is no different.249 His mother described her recent hospital visit (but told him “Don’t worry!”). Her introduction was followed by several short messages in the same format: an introduction by the previous speaker, followed by “Hi Tutti” (his family nickname), “this is [blank]. We’re having a really good time. [Blank] is here, and [blank] is here, and also [blank],” usually listing about eight to ten people—an introductory convention so common that it quickly became a source for call- back jokes.

In the course of seven minutes, Arturo’s sister received a dramatic, verbal drumroll introduction (“Here comes Nora, she wants to say somethin’ … Here she coooomes … HERE

SHE IS!”), to a surprise guest (“Hi Tutti, this is Batman”) to a new take on the proceedings

(“…we’re having a terrible time”), all of which are accompanied by laughter, back-channel

249 Garcia Family, “Audio Letter,” Arturo Garcia Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 712AU0023, Undated (Hereafter, cited, as “Garcia, TTU, 712AU0023”). 189 admonitions, and eager new participants jostling for access (Garcia, TTU, 712AU0023). Some, like Garcia’s brother, got a minute or two, though largely because his parents kept asking him clarifying questions concerning his school progress, which he obligingly relayed and answered.

Others, like Garcia’s sister Nora, started the now standard introduction—“Hi Tutti, we’re having a really good time. George is here, and Rita and, uh, goodbye”—before immediately “flooding out,” descending into embarrassed laughter, requiring another to take over (Goffman 1986). Some spoke for the whole room to hear—“the kids are throwing rocks at the car windows, ISN’T THAT

RIGHT!”—while others whispered reminders of previously made pacts—“[R]emember what you told me [before you left]. I won’t tell no one …” (Garcia, TTU, 712AU0023).

Throughout, the older participants seamlessly blended Spanish and English, while the younger generations only employed Spanish when referring to culturally-specific, life-cycle events—the arras [traditional coins bestowed on the groom] for Garcia’s upcoming wedding, his cousin’s quinceañera [a girl’s 15th birthday party]—and shared popular culture. A sung verse of

Ray Vasquez & The Dreamers’ “La Mini Falda De Renalda” underscored a point about how well the younger women were dressed. Closing out the tape, Garcia’s sister came back on after dinner, referring to the family’s inability to meet him for R&R (though they would have loved to), “… and you’re right. We’re all sitting here just collecting fat, you know us [guffaw]. We don’t wanna go overseas ‘cuz we don’t wanna sink the ship [laughing]. I think we think that’s funny, but it’s not!” before closing with a few songs:

Nora: “And you’re gonna hear some real professionals on this—[interrupted by clapping] on the mic in a little while, so everybody get ready! [smiling/laughing]”

Friend: “Here again for your enjoyment are [the] Garcia Singers. Hooraaaaay! …raaaaaay … raaaaay … raaaaay” [mimicking a radio announcer’s delay/echo effect]

Whole Family: “Pack up all my cares and woes / Here I go, Here I go / Oh, singin’ low / Byyyyye Byyyyye Blackbird …” 190

Friend: “This is dedicated to all the known Texans listenin’, you poooor people”

Whole Family: “I’m an old cowhand …”

As most of the singers didn’t know the verses, they mumbled through, but jubilantly shouted the choruses, the young children responding out of time, with the famous "Yippie Yi Yo Kayah," from the Bing Crosby version of “I’m An Old Cowhand,” in the latter song, before truly closing out the tape with a series of brief goodbyes and well wishes (ibid.). The inability to accurately monitor the amount of recording time remaining led many recordists to produce a number of

“pre-closings,” lending the end of many tapes an awkward, but endearing, sequence of salutary postscripts, the last invariably cut off before completion.

Sites of Reception

One of the most important differences between written and audio letters is the audio letter’s newly salient sites of reception. Playback for most was through the tape recorders’ built-in speakers (headphones were not yet a ubiquitous technological accoutrement for anyone but audiophiles). Unless a service member had access to a private listening space (and carved out time to listen), tapes were generally a public, communal phenomenon, their influence spreading

“geometrically” (as Vytau Virskus put it). The tapes became a resource for intertextual reference in unit microcultures and a site for passing on new forms of audio epistolarity. As one veteran quipped, “[t]he men play their tapes so often that we all have them memorized”).250 With a far larger network to address, and often only one tape recorder to share among them, many deployed recordists made tapes explicitly intended for all, or with verbally-denoted segments that called out particular listeners. Stateside families gathered to listen together whenever a new tape arrived.

250 Unnamed soldier, qtd. in Heidelbaugh, 2012. 191

This was particularly important for young children (whose own performances I will discuss below), giving them the opportunity to hear their parent’s voice while having other adults around to interpret any content they didn’t understand (or were frightened by). Like their counterparts sent to Vietnam, tapes sent home could also become important sonically-accessible resources for community understanding, and part of the larger stateside soundscape of the Vietnam era.

When her first tape from Gary arrived earlier than she’d expected, Kaye Snead had not yet bought her own recorder, leading to this wonderful encounter. Out shopping for a recorder, the manager of the local department store

...offered to let me use one of his tape recorders to hear your letter … trying it out. We started the letter on Side 1, and he didn’t have a booth or anything where I could go so it was sitting on the counter […] There wasn’t anyone else in the store except Mother and I, and this man and his young son. The man was busy and the young son was busy loading tape recorders and TVs on this big dolly […] He knew the situation, that it was a letter from my fiancé, who was in Vietnam, and all of a sudden, I knew he hadn’t been paying attention but, came to the part that, when you said to tell the mailman “Hello” and that boy had the funniest look on his face and just shook his head as he went out the door, and I know he’d never understand so I didn’t even try explaining (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1406).

More deliberately, Kaye, an elementary school teacher, also played Gary’s tapes for her fourth- grade class, then prompted them with questions like “What did you learn about Vietnam? What’s it like for Gary over there?,” and recorded their responses.251

Kaye was not the only one who made such use of the tapes. Sandra Miller, though not a teacher herself, was acquainted with one, and asked her friend to have the children record

251 Kaye Snead and Class, “Gary Snead 29 (25-28 Nov 1968),” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1393AU1415, November 25, 1968. 192 personal messages to her husband Elza, recreating the common schoolroom trope of children being asked, often by journalists, to verbally honor troops, astronauts, and other important dignitaries on television.252 Verbally “honoring” someone constituted an important speech act, another phenomenological affordance of audio over written letters. During WWII, scenes like this had played out in dozens of newsreels, often expressly orchestrated by the military. By contrast, the government’s prolonged disavowal of the existence of the Vietnam War, let alone its actual scale and consequences, meant that civilians (and particularly women) were forced to pick up the slack in this regard.253

Of course, not all tapes were intended for public consumption, nor did many recipients care to listen to them publicly regardless of their content. For my grandmother, except for those sections directed toward their children, taping itself was understood as exceedingly private. My grandfather’s listening practices, in turn, reflected this ethical pact. Waiting until his roommate was on duty, he described drawing his blackout curtains, which were standard issue for pilots stationed at Korat Air Force base, as the majority of their flights were night missions. He would lie on his bed, shut off his radio, and close his eyes, explicitly privileging the auditory in a manner akin to Michel Chion’s “reduced listening,” a sort of audio epoche (Chion 1994; Ihde

2007). Vytau’s only major adjustment to the practice Chion described was half a tumbler of scotch, enabling him to “get mellow” and fully melt into Cathy’s recordings (Vytau and Cathy

252 Sandra Miller, Terry, and Class, “Audio Letter,” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 427AU0456, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Miller, TTU, 427AU0456”). 253 Virginia Laffey has written that due to “The Johnson Administration’s desire to downplay the conflict to protect its domestic agenda and the divisive nature of the war,” “no wartime culture of shared sacrifice existed during the Vietnam War; the nation did not offer the women who waited support, recognition or opportunities to serve publicly at home” (Laffey 2006, vi). 193

Virskus 2019).254 As another recordist, Howard Hirsch, glossed, this kind of sensory focus allowed him to feel that “it’s just like you’re sitting right here in the room with me.”255

Audio letters, though primarily interpreted as linguistic expressions, were deeply layered with affect. Prosody, soundscape, and media all provided independent layers that necessarily exceed the logos of written epistolarity. Thus, unlike the written letter, the audio letter was irreducibly polythetic, its extra-logos elements constituting an experience of inner time that could not be reduced, and, in ideal situations, initiated a “mutual-tuning-in” relationship (Schutz 1964).

As Kittler has described it, the emergence of private reading (as opposed to reading aloud) idealized a sense of sequestered interiority in aesthetic appreciation (Kittler 1999). While reading a written letter can be equally immersive, the “voice” in one’s head is self-produced: the rhythm, pacing, enunciation, and tone are all an imagined and inconsistent idealization.256

In addition, whereas a text can be skimmed, careful listening may hijack’s one’s imagination, giving more agency to the orator’s world over the listener’s, and thus more convincingly conjuring the orator’s presence. Many recordists also described listening to tapes repeatedly: different layers came forward in different listenings, but, especially for those hearing familiar spaces, all layers coalesced into one idea: home. Still, each individual part of the soundscape was available for identification and extra scrutiny. In this irreducibly heterophonic experience, though the voice might function as a central melody, the density of the whole coexisting with the balancing of disparate parts defined a listener’s engagement.

254 He and Cathy recorded sixty minute tapes, a feat, he said, was enabled by his being “a highly philosophical type of individual at this point” (and thus having no trouble with “free association”) but also, he said, because he’d “had a glass … or a glass and a half” of alcohol by the time he started (ibid.). 255 Howard S. Hirsch, “Correspondence between Howard Hirsch and his family,” Howard S. Hirsch Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1472AU1537, May 1969. 256 Recent research suggests that, contrary to popular belief, conjuring a voice in one’s head while silently reading is not a universal phenomenon (Vilhauer 2016). 194

Listening can also phenomenologically reconstruct spaces. In playing a tape, one is necessarily sending one’s absent intimate’s voice booming around the listening space, perhaps familiarly resonant (if the space was previously shared), their voice washing over, and layering onto, and occupying the recipient’s listening spaces, filling out affective crevices, directing the eyes of listeners to forgotten layers, items, and nooks. In this way, an absent’s voice can re-evoke a spatial presence in an iconically echoic fashion, in a manner that exceeds a listener’s imaginative capacity, thus also partially subverting their autonomy. Ulrike Sowodniok describes this phenomenon as “vocal touch,” a necessary precondition for sound intercorporeality and kinesthetic empathy (Sowodnik 2016). However, if the “voices” transmitted are those of the weapons of war and thus only indexical of violence, one extends this as well.

The Belliphonic

In listening to tapes whose central performance is perforated (and often punctuated) by artillery or small arms fire, one might initially be surprised to hear little change in recordists’ voices. In one interpretation, the recording and transmission of belliphonic sounds in place of a familiar voice acts as a metaphorical enunciation of Elaine Scarry’s theorization of pain as the

“limit condition” of human language and communication (Scarry 1985; Pettman 2017). Though their inclusion on a tape bound for home listening might satisfy many goals—the transmission of one’s experiential soundscape, the sharing of a defining feature of one’s professional/personal sonic lifeworld—the imaginaries these sounds both index and incite represent the height of human suffering (kept apace by and also representative of the latest military tech’s capacity to inflict it). Especially when presented without verbal context, the whistle, whoosh and whine of ordnance, followed by thunderous thuds of impact by artillery, mortar, or aerial bombardment and the constant pinging near-miss of bullets accompanied by the sirens, shouts, and other sounds of mobilization, escape and retaliation, paint a vivid picture, capable of immersing the listener in a 195 fantastical and shocking space beyond linguistic limits. For the listener, these sounds engaged them in an emotional minefield of instinctive and reactionary tactile and gestural modal responses, over which they often had little control.

Many recordists sought to “tame” this “terrifying indexicality” for their listeners, identifying and labeling each kind of ordnance, vehicle, and announcement and explaining its relative distance or danger to the listener at that moment (Daughtry 2015). However, vocality in this context is a double-edged sword, demonstrating control but also imparting the recordist’s fragile humanity (what’s at stake), as well as reminding the listener of loneliness and the paucity of sonic comfort/ability as the sounds of war reverberated in private, once safe, domestic spaces.

As Daughtry noted,

At extreme volumes or in extreme psychosocial circumstances, wartime sounds become untethered from their indexicality, losing much or all of their informational content. In these situations … sound becomes indistinguishable from violence itself. This situation creates a state of ontological strangeness and opacity — or perhaps I should say “inaudibility”: for violence (including acoustic violence) resists representation, and in so doing manufactures discursive silence (Daughtry 2015, 27).

As the most televised war in history, journalism had already done a great deal to make the boundaries between the home and warfront permeable. Like artist Alexander Gardner, whose political (and haunting) use of the then-newly emergent photographic medium, to “bring the war to [the] doorsteps” of the average American (and most importantly, politician), journalists embedded film crews within infantry units who, given the guerilla nature of most combat, could come under attack at any time (and often did).257 Amateur recording, primarily in the forms of

257 According to current estimates, 63 international journalists were killed or went missing between 1955 and 1975, while covering the war, 21 of them American. This figure does not count “media staff,” i.e. crew members, (Ricchiardi, 2006). 196 slide photography and reel-to-reel, amplified this exposure immensely. Audio recording was also a key tool for semi-professional intelligence gathering. The infamous “anguish picture” of

President Johnson, slumped over, head in one hand, glasses in the other, is most iconic in its inclusion of the tape-recorder which is the clear, up-front focus of the image. At the time,

President Johnson was receiving regular, unofficial “reports” from his son-in-law, marine Charles

Robb, to get a better sense of “what was really happening on the ground,” an unfiltered, “direct line,” outside the influence of Robert McNamara’s clinical, statistical approach (Munger 2014).

Willingly letting these sounds into one’s home, which could then escape the tape space and extend the “penumbra of violence” into one’s personal domain was, for many, the price of wartime audition.

Even so, seeking to spare one’s listener this experience could ironically exacerbate their worry—creating a space of confusion and over-active, anxious imagining about what “silence” might signify.258

What I caught myself doing very early in those days…we'd go out at night because it was so hot in the hooches or in the bunkers, and we'd get out on top of the bunkers and make the tapes. And what I'd catch myself doing, if we would always see the light from the mortar round and we’d try to stop those tapes to keep the outgoing mortar sounds off those tapes. Never realizing at the time that a year later when we got home the questions would be ‘What were those blank spots on the tapes early on?’ I'm not sure the blank spots didn’t scare them more so than the mortar noise would have (Michael Horton in Hostelter 1990, 13).

On the other hand, sharing everything—as my grandmother insisted my grandfather do, up to the point of revealing classified information—can be just as confusing. One of the few “unfinished”

258 As any horror film director knows, “showing” the monster is almost always less impactful and frightening than letting the audience’s imagination fill in “the blank.” This space, both metaphorically and literally indexing a universal nytophobia (“fear of the dark”), now occupied by the viewer’s own terrifyingly specific personal horror. 197 tapes my in corpus, Michael Harsh’s recording in Phu Bai in 1968, is a case in point.259 Originally intended as an auditory letter to his wife, the tape captured an unexpected mortar/rocket attack on his base just after he hit “record,” resulting in a harrowing ten-minute recording of explosions and gunfire before the tape cut off mid-explosion. As Harsh’s tape was described in the Ohio

Historical Society’s archives as an “auditory letter,” I was likely as surprised as Harsh’s wife, upon hearing his tape, to find no “voice” outside that of artillery fire.

This rupture of my expectations led me to consider modes of reception that might be unique to wartime communication. As David Novak has described it, “distortion” has become a marked auditory feature in many forms of “world music” recording, production and evaluative modes of authentication which “conjures the idea of an undistorted other” and reinforces an ideology of sound in which “the presence of [an] original is proven by the infidelity of the copy”

(Novak 2011, 631). This observation, which explicitly connects fidelity to social organization, highlights a central paradox in statements that praised auditory letters as offering a more “direct” connection between intimates across geographic divides. Although the expansion into the timbral and paralinguistic afforded by sound recording allow for more detailed contextualization and reinforcement of a loved one’s presence on the part of a listener, the relative paucity of sensory information (compared to “everyday life”) and the saliency of “voice” in auditory perception imaginatively excite multimodal connections in listeners that, given the precarious situation and location of their loved ones, would seem to be as often frightening as pleasurable.

In addition, repeated and ritualistic audition was common in the reception of these recordings. In this mode of listening, the unintended “excesses” of the recordist’s soundscape, which a listener might miss the first time through, these features—from stutters and smiles to

259 Michael Harsh, “Reel to Reel Letter,” in AV 57 Michael Harsh Collection 1967-1968, Ohio Historical Society Manuscripts/Audiovisual Collections. 198 rotating propellers and shots in the distance—“come forward” in ways that might elicit anxiety and fear. The salience of these features would be even more prominent in a discourse network that precluded immediate access to additional information. Tapes could take up to a week to arrive, and while US armed forces were greatly expanding and improving their mail service during the Vietnam era, many communications were lost. Larry Shelton’s father, a veteran of

WWII, gestured at the heart of this shared, affective space in his first tape following his son’s deployment.

I know you’ve been through somethin’ this last eleven months that’s been indescribable. Well, so have we here waitin’. I was in the other war, I thought it was bad from that end but this end, I believe, is worse, because this not-knowin’ business, it- it seems like it’s a whole lot worse. I know it is on you mentally and I believe it is on you physically.260

Capturing the same sense of delayed worry, my grandmother viscerally remembers listening to the nightly news reporting the success or failure of missions concerning “local heroes,” in her case, Spokane, including deaths. She claims that these announcements were sometimes made on- air before family notification, meaning she spent these two hours dreading the worst and trying to distract her children, even as she was unable to turn off the news. She used her husband’s tapes as one of her primary spaces for listening, filling her space with his voice to drown out the institutional chaos over which she had no control. Also, all of the children were usually present at dinnertime, allowing her to occasionally record these meals to capture their voices in unison, a unified presence of child, that transcended any one voice, and producing some of the most evocative recordings in my grandparents’ correspondence.

260 Shelton Family, “Audio Letter from home to Larry Shelton,” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1139AU0904, Undated (Hereafter, “Shelton, TTU, 1139AU0904”). 199

Section III: Simulacra of Presence

Untranscribable Voices

Second only to tapes from those who did not make it back, the most valued of audio letter performances were those of children, for largely the same reasons. Assuming the best—the service member survived and was not severely injured, requiring lengthy hospital stays and rehabilitation—the average Vietnam service member’s tour lasted a year.261 In childhood development, the early stages of human becoming—from babbling to speech, crawling to toddling—are comparatively brief and represent radical shifts in ways-of-being-in, -with, and -of- the-world and its other occupants. From the perspective of an absent parent, losing a year in their child’s intersubjective navigations during these critical stages, their daily discoveries of the facticities and “thrownness” of existence, was tantamount to missing the circumscribed development, flowering, and the recession of a “person,” never to be seen again (Merleau-Ponty

2002 [1944]). In a very real sense, the child a service member left behind is rarely the one returned to, before one even considers the conflicts’ effects on the service member’s own personhood, relationships, and capacities for interpersonal engagement.

Equally important, unlike their adult counterparts, children under a certain age were simply unable to communicate with their parents in any way other than babbling or talking, apart from drawings, rudimentary “letters” of crayon-scrawlings, and the like. Hence, children represent a set of fundamentally unstranscribable voices, their transmission newly possible through the tape recorder. Dozens of recordings of this kind have survived, and tend to fall into

261 Of course, several volunteered for more. As some explained, their volunteering was more often from a sense of duty to the men still serving they had left behind than due to a sense of patriotic duty or ideological commitment to the government’s mission (Akers 2018). Others, like my grandfather, volunteered for career advancement, school funding, and other economic considerations (and the assurances of a less dangerous assignment the second time around). His first tour in 1967 was as an F-105 pilot, typically performing reconnaissance and bombing raids, while his second, in 1972 was as a crew chief in maintenance, both times stationed in Thailand. 200 one of three categories, delineated by age: mothers’ interactions with newborns and infants, coached “story-time” for three- to five-year-olds, and more variable performances from older children. I will return to newborns below but here I would like to discuss tape’s capacity to capture the uniquely “perceived” spatiotemporal being of children.

Many performances of young children took place in the context of family roundtables, often involving ten to twelve participants, often equally divided between those over and under ten. Whether in the church basement, the family living room, or a holiday cabin, these kinds of events always involve (at least) two, parallel generational, affective layers of temporal activity and interaction, existing in the same spaces, occasionally bumping into one another but most often existing independently. In addition to actual, physical height, these levels were socio- culturally enforced by the adults’ “conceived” understanding of, say, the piano as instrument or piece of furniture, as opposed to the children’s “lived” experience of the piano as jungle gym, fort or hiding place, to name just a few possibilities (Lefebvre 1991). If a family sat down for a multigenerational meal, this division was most stereotypically present at the “kids’ table.” Career military families were the most likely to feature children’s tapes, and the average number of children in career military families in this period hovered around four.262 These spaces could get rather large and chaotic. In taping, similar divisions developed, accrued, and conflicted.

In a representative example, Janice Whitehead’s four-year-old niece, Alice, flitting in and out of the adult social world surrounding her, was frequently coaxed out of playing with her siblings and cousins by relatives requesting that she speak into the recorder.263 As if in class,

Alice typically states her name and state of residence “for the record” before responding to any of

262 My grandparents had four children during his first deployment, and five during his second. 263 Whitehead Family, “Letter Recorded, Postmarked 15 February 1969, tape ,” Janice Whitehead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 2166AU2450, February 15, 1969 (Hereafter, cited as “Whitehead, TTU, 2166AU2450”). 201 her grandparents’ proffered questions (Whitehead, TTU, 2166AU2450). When she did address the questions, her answers were full of wonderfully elongated syllables: “How old are you?”

“Fooooo-woooor”; “Where’s Janice? “Viet-naaaaaam” (ibid.). Asked if she has anything else she’d like to say, she immediately jumped into her comfort zone: nursery rhymes, beginning with

“Little Boy Blue” (ibid.). After the first, she seemed to find her rhythm, feeding off the laughter and encouragement of her primary coach, Janice’s father—“Yeah, I believe you wooound up.

You got another in mind? Alright, cut ‘em loose!”—and the other adults. She immediately launched into a second and third rhyme, almost tripping over the last verse of one to get to the next. Unable to get a word in edge-wise, Alice’s coaches seem content to react to and describe the scene—”Goin’ through the motions and everything … that’s unreal, ain’t it” (ibid.). After a few more, she starts from the top before wandering off mid-sentence, distracted by something else that was inaudible on the tape. Later on the same tape, Alice was finally told to “get off to bed now,” followed by reluctant protestations, stomping feet on the stairs, and a whining “Goood- niiight” that is about as close to an audible icon of a frown as I have ever heard (ibid.).

Similarly, in the period of near-ubiquitous music lessons, children were asked to perform all manner of prepared pieces, including piano duets, songs, speeches, and rehearsed soliloquies.264 Five-year-old Scott, encouraged to read his original poem to his uncle Dale

Moorman, instead launched into a story of the family’s recent birthing of a new cow— “One of

‘em was born blind and we named him Rudolf and I call him “Angelface,” and, well we learned how to brand calves and I got up too close to him and he about made a hole in my head”—each

“and” ending in a rising “hold the floor” pitch and accompanied by a gulp of air (Wennerstrom

264 Underwood Family, “Audio tape sent to Capt. Lonnie R. Spivey,” Ellie B. Underwood, Jr. Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1965AU2352, Undated; Underwood Family, “Audio tape sent to Capt. Lonnie R Spivey,” Ellie B. Underwood, Jr. Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1965AU2348, Undated. 202

2001).265 When he did get around to his poem, he immediately adopted a formal, stentorian tone, saying “I am Scott Comen” before switching into a dramatically cartoonish stage voice, traversing octaves and exaggerating a latent lisp, “Fiive wittle sqwiwwels! Sitting in a tree. Said the first wittle squirrel, whaaaat’s that I seeeeee…” (Moorman, TTU, 1330AU1330). After the clapping died down, Scott was joined by his brother Adam, who related that “we have got a birthday present for ya”: both seemed to be reading in unison, “Believe it or not, Mother’s gonna have a baby” (ibid.). They were then asked to sing a hymn, “Angels Watchin’ Over Me My

Lord,” which they did in beautifully heterophonic conflict (more often singing at each other than with), with ample “participatory discrepancies,” each falling behind and catching up like two birds falling out of the nest to attempt their mutual first flight together (Keil 1984).

Unable to the keep the tape running constantly, adults also frequently attempted to recreate spontaneous aural moments from the recent past. In one instance, Dale’s father tries to elicit a funny anecdote out of Dale’s other nephew (also named Scott), the interchange likely proving far more entertaining than the original story (Moorman, TTU, 1330AU1330). The following interchange took place primarily between Dale’s father (Scott’s grandfather) and Scott:

Grandfather: “Did you tell him whatcha do for them hornet bites?” Scott: “What hornet bites?” Grandfather: “Whenever you get a hornet’s sting, or a wasp? What do ya do? Scott: “When a wasp starts to … comin’ around me, uh you can freeze? … and if he lands on ya don’t make a move, don’t move anything on ya, or it’ll sting ya? And uh …” Grandfather: “If he does sting ya, whaddya do for it?” Scott: “Uh, holler” [quietly and sheepishly] Scott: [Then, encouraged by laughter from the peanut gallery, louder]: “Holler!” Grandfather: “Well, what do ya put on it?”

265 Moorman Family, “Dale Moorman Collection Tape 5,” Dale Moorman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1330AU1330, Undated (Hereafter, cited, as “Moorman, TTU, 1330AU1330”). 203

Scott: “Medicine” [again, quietly and sheepishly, aware that he’s not providing the answer his grandfather is seeking] Grandfather: “What did you say the other day you done for it?” Mother: “What did you tell [your Aunt] you did?” Scott: “No, that was for a bumblebee.” [more laughter for all involved, Scott’s precision to detail both endearing and hilarious] Grandfather: “Oh, whaddya do for a bumble bee?” Scott: “Ya pee on it” [sheepishly] Grandfather: “Ya do what?” Scott: “Pee on it!” Scott: [Reacting to a new roaring round of laughter, smiling] “That’s what ya do to it” [smiling widely] Grandfather: “Does that help it?” Scott: “Yee-ees!” [defiantly, the world split into two, differently pitched syllables, the second lower for petulant emphasis] [Continued, riotous, laughing, his mother nearly gasping for breath] Scott: “Remember that, Dale! Bye!”

Adults frequently employed children to make important announcements, sing religiously salient hymns, and relate parable-esque stories, possibly indicating a desire to construct “out of the mouths of babes” moments, or simply taking advantage of the kids’ expressive capacity. “Jesus

Loves Me” was a particular favorite. The prevalence of this practice in “family roundtable” tapes likely due in part to the families’ gathering on Sundays and thus recent proximity to worship contexts.266 No matter the level of preparation, the listener was almost always privy to the build- up, performance disclaimers, frame breaks, flood-outs, and rousing applause (no matter the

“quality” of the resulting piece), that define in-family performance spaces.267

266 Miller Family (and Friends), “Sam & Steph,” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 427AU0441, Undated. 267 In these moments, framed as exceptional yet routine, the “artist” and “audience” frequently switched places, with participation always valued over execution. These situations are reminiscent of (particularly 204

On the either end of the contained-chaos continuum, older children were typically given opportunities to deliver individual messages. These messages might be or seem private, to the extent that the organizing parent did not listen back to the tape, which they frequently did. My mother, for instance, nine years old at the time of recording, played selections for her father on her child-sized guitar, a favorite being “Edelweiss.” Others, similarly flummoxed by being “put on the spot” (even when sequestered in their bedrooms), tried to make sense of their complicated feelings and make clear their longing. In one example, Chet Tschetter’s only daughter begins her tape section with an extended, placeholding “musical filler.” I use this term to refer to ideophonic fillers—that is, largely self-directed, onomatopoeiac utterances that iconically evoke a sensory experience.268 These utterances descend into rhythmic or melodic repetition, frequently made when trying to regain a lost thought, organize a response, or make a decision from a list of options. For example, an idiophonic filler might sound like “Let’s see … da da da da da …”

(Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). In Tschetter’s daughter’s case, she starts with an

“Mmumumumumuh,” expressing her indecision, before continuing in a subdued and hesitant voice, “Oh, I don’t know what to say. Um, when you left I had two goldfish but they died a long time ago …” (Tschetter, TTU, 2573AU2605). A more heartbreaking encapsulation of child’s wartime temporality, I cannot imagine.

Finally, when left to their own devices, children unsurprisingly treated tape recorders like toys, delighting in jockeying for the spotlight, tossing the microphone around (and using it as a club), encouraging all manner of animal utterances,269 creating their own mock interviews, radio

American) karaoke which, in answering a desire for “safe space” musical evaluation, is intrinsically connected to the fading parlor-music tradition (Drew 2001; Campbell 2011). 268 Tschetter Family, “Air Force pilot interview and letter to L. J. Chet Tschetter from children,” L. J. Chet Tschetter Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 2573AU2605 Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Tschetter, TTU, 2573AU2605”). 269 Dogs barking, whining, yipping, etc., in response to children, can be heard on several tapes (Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0950; Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0962; Haldeman, TTU, 1912AU2273; Hirsch Family, “Correspondence between Howard Hirsch and his family,” Howard S. Hirsch Collection, The Vietnam 205 spots, and songs (“…and here we are today in an orphanage”), beating on pots and pans, tables, and the side of the recorder itself.270 In addition to the machine itself, pets were a favorite real- time, and similarly untranscribable “interlocutor” for children, including dogs, cats, birds, cows, horses, and more.271 Most charmingly, children took endless delight in their own voices’ capacity to enliven the world around them, hypersusceptible to mimicry, responding to their own echoes; laughing, shrieking, crying, singing, sighing, moaning, rhythmicizing everyday speech, and constantly falling into, and then reflexively playing with, what Dianna Deutsch calls the “speech- to-song illusion” (Deutsch 1995). Children in this mode, almost completely unaware of temporalities of consciousnesses not their own, and the salience of the worlds they are co- creating, performed the same move as Perry’s epistolary interlocutors: they created and exuded vocal presences that became immediately acousmatic, leading them to “react joyfully to their own creations” (Perry 1980, 101 in Milne 2006, 163).

Ways of Speaking

When adults took to tape to speak to their absent intimates, some found the chasm-like expanse of hundreds of feet of tape, descending in darkness, a comforting container for endless, directionless, intimate talk. Others, fearing the uncanny quality of the resulting acousmatic

Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1472AU1545, Undated.). There is also one instance of a particularly persistent, attention-seeking bird in the tapes of Larry Shelton (Shelton Family, “Audio letter to Larry Shelton from his family,” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1139AU0905, November 9, 1967.) 270 One of many examples can be found in Hugh Manes’ Children, “Reel 2: Manes' children,” Hugh Manes Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2270AU2472, Undated. 271 Of course, adults were in no way immune to a household pet’s charm, often explicitly requesting a “hello” as part of roundtable tapings. One example comes from Fillmore, whose mother included him in the rambunctious process of giving the cat a bath: “I enjoyed the cat purring and … the sound effects when you gave the cat the bath and meowing. It sounded like you were really having a fight! But I didn’t hear too much water splashing around“ (Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0944, June 1968). 206 echoes, limited the presence of their own voices, filling their caves with other sources, from the voices of friends and neighbors, to remediated popular culture, convening a choir of other genres.

This section describes the range of verbal devices recordists used to create discursive spaces that best served the relationship at hand; romantic, platonic, pleading, authoritative, playful, coarse, dutiful, or meek.

“Just Talkin’”

Some recordists who were able to extemporize with relatively little effort took to the auditory space like singers to a stage. For them, the format presented few problems. Recordists glossed this kind of performance in several ways: “jabbering,” “ad-libbing,” “shootin’ the bull/breeze,” “chattering,” “rambling,” “monologuing,” or “philosophizing.” As this kind of performance was wholly unfamiliar for most, some related their performances to oratorical modes they knew in their pre-deployment lives.

Boooy, it’s hard talkin’ this long! Feel like I’m a preacher or something, talkin’ at a gospel meeting or something. My mouth’s so dry, been sittin’ in the same place talkin’, and talkin’, and talkin’. I don’t even know what I said this whole time (Head 1970).

Others were not sure what to do, uttering frequent worries about “boring” the listener, especially when their stories veered off significantly from their starting points,272 and balking at the very idea of filling up a fifteen-minute tape. As Whitehead’s father explained to a visiting guest speaker, ”You can’t talk up 600 feet of tape [chuckling] … You start talkin’ into the dadgum

272 Those apologizing, as well as using descriptive terms like “chattering,” were more often than not women. This gendered difference was likely due to different levels of reflexivity and perceived agency. 207 thing, on one of those regular tapes it runs fifteen minutes, you can talk for a week. Think of everything that you ever knew!”273

Many employed the sounds in their immediate surroundings, from mortars to missionaries at the door, to structure their talk. Many others employed the space itself, which allowed them to treat their space and their recent experience like a “big Rorschach test,” uttering

“whatever came to mind” and, then running out, just “looking around the room” for new inspiration about anything that “was notable in some way shape or form” (Vytau and Cathy

Virskus 2019). This spatial affordance allowed many to more easily slip into and out of the “here- and-now” and the “there-and-then” in cathartic and illuminating ways. In the following example,

Frank Kowalczyk seems to proceed as if he was verbally “mapping” his surroundings, describing each section in turn (a method unlikely to function as well in written form). He also included imagined references to home. Occasionally, these jumps were used for analogy (for instance,

Kowalczyk described Saigon as “just like Chicago slums”) but more often they seem to occur as a result of an almost free-association-like mode of speaking and multi-layered perception of time

(Kowalczyk, NPM, 1969). Bourdieu (2000) has described this as the simultaneous presence of past, present and future perception, layered in one’s illusio (or “feel for the [social] game”), a phenomenological, temporal awareness that affords the connection and expression of disparate topics in a way writing a letter, speaking on the phone, or even face-to-face, would necessarily disrupt or inhibit. In a tape addressed to his mother, Kowalczyk said:

On this tape, it might be a little short because there ain’t much you can say around here to cover 1,800 feet of tape. But the thing I wanted to ask you, like this buddy of mine just came up with ideas; when you do make me a tape and send it back with all this talking on it, catch the weather or the news or something

273 Whitehead Family, “Annual Spring Concert 1969,” Janice Whitehead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2166AU2455, Spring 1969. 208

on television on it. It definitely would be strange to hear something like that way over here because you just don’t hear nothing that good back here. So, how’s the weather been back there? Probably the snow and all that starting to melt. I wish we had a little snow over here. It sure will kill a lot of these bugs and make a lot of us feel a lot better. Of course, a lot of people here it doesn’t bother them, but at nights since you pull guard around here and it gets cold, you wish you had your field jacket out there because it gets cold. I know it’s going to be hard for me to get used to it when I get back in the world, but I ain’t going to complain once I get back, I’m going to take it. I'm going to ask Inland [Construction] when I get back to work to put me on an inside job for the winter because I don’t think I'll be able to hack that first winter out there. I’ll give it a try if he can't do nothing for me. The most I could do is just freeze to death out there (ibid.).

Starting with a performance disclaimer concerning a lack of content, Kowalczyk quickly jumped to a request for other media forms from home, which led directly into a discussion of cold- weather realities, the surreality and pleasure of experiencing the same in Vietnam, and the imagined effect Kowalczyk’s current environment would have on his re-acclimation to and success in non-military life. All these shifts took place over the course of one minute of tape

(6:33-7:34). This tape also succeeded in satisfying the requirements of a son’s communication to a parent, with Kowalczyk placing himself back in the world, discussing future plans (as though a certainty), and taking responsibility.

To linguistically construct and share their experiences, wartime correspondents attempted to simulate or substitute previously available “ways-of-being-with,” drawing on a richly intertextual and polyglossic community of utterance, from the microcultural level of familylects to shared popular culture, and, in the process, employing a range of speech genres, registers, and conventional forms of address. Expanding into audio, through their separate interactions with their individual recorders, recordists co-constituted a geographically-distanced intimacy as a shared subject position that provided both speaker and listener with a stable grounding for 209 negotiating their roles as parent, offspring, sibling, lover, and partner. As David Ciavatti (2014) argues, familial bonds are the most important site of instantiations of subjectivity and, for many, they are the default frame on which to construct all over forms of being-with. Repairing ruptures to one’s recognition of familial bonds within this web were essential to maintaining a sense of self-coherence. The following section describes some examples for which audio allowed a more phenomenologically salient means than writing for performing one’s duties and desires.

Mediating Relationships

Parents

As outlined above, tapes were particularly important in providing an outlet for voices typically silent in earlier forms of wartime epistolarity, most saliently, children, whose presence, until this point, was most commonly experienced via photographs and textual descriptions of their births and development by mothers back home.274 With tape, in line with Edison’s earlier prescriptions, new parents were able to share important “firsts”275—from words to steps (the latter audible in the delighted reactions of witnesses). More importantly, tape also allowed them to share the mundanities of early childcare, including calming colicky infants, diaper changes, parent-infant play (from peek-a-boo to nose-boops, bounces to word games), and stroller rides through the park.

Recordists also endeavored to capture all manner of vocalizations, including cooing, crying, gurgles, laughs, screaming, and other infant sounds. Recording to her husband Elza on

Mother’s Day, Sandra Miller records herself nursing and playing with their three-month-old

274 I have not yet heard a tape depicting an actual birth but, given the ubiquity of “home video” capture of the same beginning in the 1980s and continuing to this day, I would be surprised if it never occurred. Although in this era it was still unusual for a father to be allowed into a delivery room. 275 For those drafted in their late teens or early twenties, many of the births service members missed were those of a first child. 210 daughter. As the mic jostles around, Sandra says, “Nooooo. She’s tryin’ to stick [the microphone] in her mouth,” and then, speaking for their daughter, continues “that’s a kiss you you Daddy ‘cuz

I’m lickin’ the microphone!,” and then, acting for Elza, smothers the infant in kisses “from

Daddy” (Miller, TTU, 427AU0438). The next five minutes of tape feature Sandra breaking into singing, rhythmicized gibberish, octave hocketing, cackling, melismatic swoops, and other “baby talk” vocal gymnastics (likely accompanied by facial jumps, poking, and bouncing), in an attempt to elicit a diverse range of entertaining responses for her husband (ibid.). Throughout, Sandra also asked(and answered) questions, from the ubiquitous “What’s that?” to the more contingent

“Where’s Daddy?,” essentially “playing” all three parts276 in a wonderful evocation of early parenthood. She closed the tape with two other genres, a prayer and lullaby, both newly composed by her, as she finally puts their child down for the night.

These episodes were often very emotionally received. Having listened to his wife’s most recent tape, Sheppard, softly, and filled with wonder, mimic’s his three-year-old son’s greeting, saying “Hello Daddy.”277 He continues, indexing the intersubjective saliency of hearing one’s name uttered aloud by an intimate:

Isn’t. That. Sweet. Ya know when Scotty said, uhhh, “Hello Daddy” … that really tore me up. Boy. And, of course Greg, well, I can hear him crying once in awhile [Sheppard audibly tearing up at this point] but I’m sure I’ll get enough of that when I get back home. And ya know a few times Judy, you let the tape [run] while you were taking care of the kids and Stu, was talking to me and, Gee! did

276 This performance was part of larger, creatively intertextual familylect. In an earlier tape, Sandra read a letter to Elza that she composed in the guise of their as yet unborn daughter, as well several poems and prayers (Miller Family, “Audio Letter,” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 427AU0455, November 26, 1967). 277 Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard, “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife,” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1705AU1713, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1713”). 211

that cacophony of sound bring me right back to the living room at 1210 Park. Boy. Gee it was good (Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1713.).

For older children like those described above, absent service members sought to aid their now temporarily single-parent spouses,278 especially when the kids were “acting out.” In one tape home, Sheppard realized he had already spent an entire side talking with his wife Judy and that,

“I ought to … speak to my three marvelous young men.”279 Addressing each in turn, he expressed how much he missed each of them, citing a particular example (“wrestling” for one, “the touchdown” for the other280), before “getting serious” (Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1715). Starting with the oldest, five-year-old Stu, he emphatically reminded him that he was now “the man of the house,” a title with “great responsibility,” primarily to “help Mommy” like Sheppard would if he were there (ibid). Next came words to Scotty, whose recent disobedience startled his mother,

Judy, as described on a previous tape. “Hey Scott? Are you listening? … You be a good boy too, and you try and help Mommy and you do what Mommy says” (ibid.). Then, his tone darkening, with both worry and authority, he commanded, “And you don’t go out in the street, young man.

Don’t you ever go out in the street!” (ibid.). Trying to strike a balance between expressing his concern and imparting a lesson, he raised his voice slightly, speaking slowly, deliberately, and with clipped enunciation, as if crouching down to Scott’s level to have a “man-to-man” talk

(ibid). Lightening, he finally asked Scott to repeate his greeting to Greg (the couple’s one-year- old) for him as “I don’t think he’ll recognize my voice right now” (ibid.).

278 My grandmother describes herself as now parenting “ten children rather than five” (Gunby, 1967, T3). 279 Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard, “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife,” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1705AU1715, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1715”). 280 At a later point, Sheppard describes the rules of this game as a co-construction by he and his son that ostensibly involves a football, but otherwise little resembles that sport. This an also a good example of a familylect referral. 212

In a more playful example, Gene Day’s brother attempted to “wrangle” a “roundtable,” repeatedly beckoning one child (who sounds to be out in the yard) while asking another to “turn the TV down” (its volume subsequently rises, rather than falls), finally getting the children’s attention by indexing an even higher authority, “This is my house … we’re gonna tape somethin’ here in a minute, y’alls confession … now c’mere.”281

As discussed in Chapter 1, the 19th century saw greater access to public education and the highest rates of literacy yet in the nation’s history, in which primary school epistolary practices played a major part. At the same time, and in co-constructive development, proper penmanship and facility for written self-expression became hallmarks of bourgeois membership and thus an aspirational model for the un-moneyed to strive for. As families were increasingly separated by westward expansion, a parent’s involvement in their children’s religious and moral development increasingly took place in the context of letter-writing. During the Vietnam War, the same became true in audio letters: parents were able to accurately judge and aid their children’s diction and expressive capacity. As Joe Tarpley noted in his memoir, “I reacted intensely to the sound of

Lee’s pleasant voice and highly articulate speech mannerisms. The speech therapy … had done wonders.”282

Offspring

As the median age of recruits dropped precipitously at the height of the draft, many recordists’ primary correspondents were their parents. Like Dale Fillmore above, Thomas Bowe, in recording a rather routine Christmas tape to his parents, had sequestered himself outside the

281 Day Family, “Audio Letter from Specialist Gene Thomas Day,” Gene Thomas Day Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1685AU1701, Undated. 282 Lt. Col. Joe F. Tarpley, “Memoir - My Vietnam: 1967-1968,” Joe F. Tarpley Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 23540101001, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Tarpley, TTU, 23540101001”). 213 ongoing festivities283 to find some privacy, where he started describing the details of his recent

“Op” and his likely Bronze Star-worthy contributions. As a scout, he spotted a broken twig; suspecting an ambush, he called a halt right before both sides of the trail opened fire on him and his unit. Describing the resulting firefight in detail, his rapid diction iconically capturing the chaos and rush of the scene, he was nearly bubbling with enthusiasm by its conclusion, saying “I just kept shooting but I don’t think I hit anything!” (Bowe 1968). Beaming with pride, he described the fancy new duds (a Christmas present to himself) on which he intended to pin his star, assuring his parent that it wasn’t “that big a deal.” He literally said at one point that he was

“invincible”— like every teenager, perhaps believing it (ibid.). According to the tape’s publisher,

Bowe’s nephew, he died in combat two months later.

This affective “bright spot” in the midst of a series of monotone lists of daily duties, highlights the importance of seeking praise for one’s accomplishments from those most capable of providing it, especially in a context over which one had little control. Other younger recordists emphasized the importance of speaking to their parents in the latter’s native tongue, especially for holidays. Vytau Virskus recorded all tapes to his parents in Lithuanian, complete with untranslatable aphorisms and proverbs, indexing the phrases’ broader cultural salience and their specific usage in the Virskus familylect. Arturo Garcia’s tapes referenced a similar “border” mentality, the older generation switching effortlessly between Spanish and English, while the younger generation (both Arturo and his siblings) spoke almost exclusively in English (Anzuldua

2012).

283 At one point on Bowe’s recording, one can hear “Hava Nagila” clashing with “Jingles Bells” on two competing radios, each slightly ratcheting up the volume in response to the other, nicely indexing the military’s attempts at multicultural representation, as well as the importance of musical control as a site of service member agency (Bowe 1968). 214

Siblings & Friends

More common were tapes which, like mini-roundtables, sought to capture the dialogical character of the recordists’ everyday interactions. Some involved several levels of playfully reflexive construction. One of Fillmore’s tapes284 began with a clip of his mother saying “Hello,

Dale. Do you think a nicely raised son should accuse his mother of cheating?,” followed immediately by Dale’s temporally-delayed and creatively-spliced response, “That’s affirmative,

Mom [chuckling].”285 This introduction was followed by another experiment:

Right now, I’m sitting up on top of a bunker with Mike enjoying the cool air, watching everyone drive around in the night, Big Six in the sky has to be looking after them … and I guess what we’re going to do, is just sort of shoot the bull here for a while, and that should be an interesting change of pace (Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0944).

Accompanied by the sounds of helicopters lifting off and landing, trucks roving the base, and shouted orders, Dale and Mike began an awkwardly formal approximation of a “real” conversation, grinning their way through it:

Dale: “Did you see Dong Ha blow up yesterday?” Mike: “Yes, I saw Dong Ha blow up yesterday. I was riding with Tom and we decided to take pictures …” (ibid.).

After a few more awkward question/answer response pairs, the two loosened up and Mike told an entertaining story about getting “twenty-five feet of the most beautiful film that I will ever have a

284 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0944, June 1968 (Hereafter, cited as “Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0944”). 285 Dale did the same trick on an earlier tape, creating a telephonic “response pair” with his father. The tape opened with his father saying, “Hello Dale,” followed immediately by Dale’s “Hello Dad” (mimicking his father’s cadence, tone, and heightened formality in a classically appeasing tonal gesture). This gesture was followed by Dale’s calling out his own cleverness, saying conspiratorially, “Well, that was pretty sneaky, wasn’t it?” ( Dale Fillmore, “Audio Letter from Dale Fillmore to family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0940, December 20, 1967). 215 chance to get in Vietnam” before realizing that he’d failed to put any film in his camera (ibid.).

Both laughing now, Mike continued: at that point I “didn’t know whether to just jump out of the helicopter or throw the camera out” (ibid.). Returning to base, Mike was stopped by his commanding officer, “I hope you weren’t out there shooting film!,” to which Mike was able to honestly reply, “No, sir! … I’d never do anything like that” (ibid.). The two continued the conversation, smoking cigarettes and drinking, discussing how many months of service they had remaining286 and the skittishness of on-base Vietnamese workers with regard to film and photography (due to the possibility or reprisals by the NVA or VC if the fact of their working for

"The Americans” was widely disseminated).287 After about ten minutes, Mike, aware of Dale’s audience, gesturally indicates that he’s going to “take a piss;” Dale, having missed the gesture, says “…taking a what? Oh! Wait a minute, don’t say it” and abruptly shuts off the tape (ibid.).

In another example, Dr. Sheppard’s wife, Judy, and her sister, Jeanie, both of whom had husbands deployed and growing families, having just gotten the kids to bed, set up their recorder in “the middle of the room [where] we think we sound better … and we’re gonna have a conversation [so] you’ll know what our lonely nights are like while you’re gone.”288 Judy corrected herself, saying “My lonely nights,” to which Jeanie responds, “Mine are too!” as both start laughing and crying simultaneously. Soon, falling into familiar sisterly dialogic patterns, the two traded and cooperatively constructed shared stories, alternating between talking to each other and directing their speech toward the recorder, indicating this shift in perspective by referring to each other in the 2nd person.

286 Dale: “That’s all I’ve got, 22 months” Mike: “I thought you were a lifer” [laughing] Dale: “C’mon now, you’re messin’ with my mind” (ibid.). 287 Mike: “I took [another] film … tooling down Highway One and that, and that Vietnamese girl ducked and the dirt … they’re just worried ya know” (ibid.). 288 Sheppard Family, “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife,” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1705AU1716, Undated (Hereafter, cited as, “Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1716”). 216

The sisters recounted one embarrassing incident involving three-year-old Stu. The family car pulled up alongside a military vehicle crammed with Lieutenants at a stop light, wearing the same uniform as Stu’s father wore. Stu leaned out of their window shouting “Doody! Doody!

Doody!” (his best approximation of “Daddy” at that time). Before Judy was able to offer an explanation to the visibly confused officers, the light changes and she was left with an apoplectic

Stu, shouting down the street. At this point she exclaimed, “Thankfully, we didn’t know any of them!” (Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1716).

The highlight, however, occurred later that day, when the two families stopped off to get some snacks. Judy provided the setup for the story, saying, “we went to the Texaco station and

Jeanie had to go the bathroom and got locked in the john!” Jeanie picked it up from there: “Well

… Scotty went with me, and I was going to take him to the men’s [but] the men’s was locked

…,” so she decided to try the Women’s (ibid.). “Anyway, ... [T]he handle was off the door and when I went in, I shut the door there was this hole were the handle belongs” (Sheppard, TTU,

1705AU1716). When she’d finished,

I tried to get out but since there was no handle and just this hole, I could see out through … and I said “Scotty, are you there? Come here.” The doorknob was just about his height … and he saw me and … said ‘Jeez’ … What are you doing in there?” … And I said …”Scotty, go get your mother, I can’t get out” (ibid.).

But, instead of going to grab Judy, Scotty continued interrogating Jeanie, asking, “Why do you want mommy?” and ‘Why can’t you get out?’” (ibid.). After five minutes of back and forth, Scott retrieved a disbelieving Judy, who, after another crouched back and forth between the sisters, through the hole in the door, got someone to help. “Finally,” the service station attendant asked

Jeanie to stand back and “kick[s] the door open!” (ibid.). The two women talked for half an hour, veering between high drama and subdued depression, finishing each other’s sentences, swiftly

217 changing topics, including Sheppard both directly and as a backchannel participant, (“Ya here that, Thomas? She doesn’t believe me!”) before closing the conversation with a shared salutation and well wishes.289

Romantic Partners

First and foremost, romantic partners are just that, partners, and thus figure prominently in every facet of a correspondent’s life. Though the majority of the content exchanged between couples engaged each other as aides in daily tasks and emotional turmoil in a “first responder” capacity, everyday talk was often essential in making a partner feel needed. In my grandparents’ tapes, for example, a great deal of their asymmetrical dialogue was dedicated to answering questions and solving problems posed in prior tapes and letters, from Jim’s attempt to diagnose a mechanical issue with Joan’s bicycle to Joan’s advice concerning the mediation of an ongoing dispute between Jim’s sister and mother (Gunby 1967, T1). Joan also frequently emphasized the importance of Jim to the functioning of the family, describing her week as “full of problems; problems that wouldn’t have been problems if you were here.” In sharing the details of her recent shopping trips, she stressed both her role as current provider and the importance of his opinion concerning her selections (Gunby 1967, T5). In closing the tape that began my Introduction, she explicitly described his place in the family’s daily consciousness: “Our whole day revolves around our feelings and thoughts for you, honey. You don’t have to worry about that. You’re our life, together” (ibid.).

In the same way “the world” in the minds of a service member serving in Vietnam could become a monolithic fantasy of “anywhere-but-here,” its specificities difficult to conjure when

289 Tim Sikorski recorded two tapes to his brother, capturing a different form of sibling interaction, “ribbing” and “giving shit.” When he set up the recorder and asked his hoochmates to “Say howdy to my brother,” they immediately launched into raunchy insults of his brother (and Tim). Tim playfully reproached them while also joining in the fun (Sikorski, TTU, 2936AU2808). 218 divorced from it for too long, a romantic partner’s idiosyncrasies could be swallowed up by the totality of their absence. An individual’s contributions to the unique contour of a couple’s co- constituted lifeworld could be difficult to recognize or articulate until its defining feature, extended co-presence, was interrupted. As Fillmore noted in responding to a tape from his wife, the auditory frame provided him vivifying access to elements just two months of service had occluded,

…your tapes really, just really uh, hey I getcha laughing and I getcha, kinda lovey, and all kinda things and it … just brings it so clear, of our memories together and, sometimes ya know … uh, not getting reminded of things, or havin’ little devices or things that you recall and used to, uh, be part of somebody, you kinda forget some of the nicer things that uh happen. Of course you don’t forget entirely but just your little giggles, and your little, uhhhh, things that you do and say and characteristics of yourself … really, really bring some life into me, they really do, and, wow, it’s really somethin’ else (Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0950).

Though temporal intimacy is built on mundane minutiae and shared responsibility, recordists also valued the opportunity to dialogically share the brightest spots in a relationship’s intimate history. Recognizing his growing ambivalence regarding his upcoming leave in

Bangkok, Sheppard noted, “I guess I’ve gotten to the point now where if you’re not going along with me [laughing] I don’t care to go” (Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1714):

Well hon, I’ll tell ya I’m right up to here with nostalgia right now. I’d like to just sit and, uh, reminisce with you. I wish you could talk back to me off this tape right now. I’d like to say such things as “Boy, remember when we packed that green Buick and we pulled out of Chickochee early in the morning and headed down to El Paso. You remember when we pulled into El Paso and went over to see [your cousin] and spent the night in the double bed which was kinda damn small for the two of us and I was glad when we finally get up so we could go and

219

get a motel … Aaaand … well, I just remember … I remember every single minute of that vacation and it was marvelous (ibid.).

As Dennis Tedlock explained in “Phonography and the Problem of Time,” the temporal gaps of silence or “noise” between spoken utterances that are generally erased in the resulting transcript are often key to the dramatic tension of a narrative as well as iconically representative of passages of time and distance within the “storyrealm” (Tedlock 1981 [1973]). These moments, more than any others on the tape, seem to “materialize” the contingent ruptures and phenomenal serendipities of the everyday that are lost with distance.

In the above example, the elliptical pauses after “motel,” and before “every single minute,” index Sheppard’s momentary dive into an embodied, multisensory, memory of (likely) sexual activity he was either unable, or unwilling, to verbally articulate on tape.290 In another example, Fillmore utilized the affordance of his battery-operated recorder to make a tape291 in the midst of a power outage:

I’m sending this tape to you under candlelight and you can just not believe how moody this place here is under candlelight. I am all by myself in my room, with two candles going, talking to you on the tape recorder when you could be sitting in my lap or something like that and were kind of hugging on each other [dramatic inhale, followed by a pained “hooooo” that disrupts the flame]. I see the flicker in the light in the softness of the light the kind of dingy darkness.

290 His choice to frame the interchange as a future dialogue, presenting his own contributions as “reported speech,” could also be interpreted as an interesting distancing tool, the scene itself indexing all the risqué content he is comfortable revealing on tape. It also seems to be an imagining of a face-to-face conversation, his delight in “saying such things” derived from the imagined changes in her expression and bodily comportment. 291 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0959, June 27, 1971 (Hereafter, cited as “Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0959”). 220

Ohhhh, such a fantastic atmosphere, it’s only too bad we can’t enjoy it together (Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0959).292

The “Ohhh,” in this example is what Goffman calls a “response cry,” a seemingly self-directed,

"exclamatory interjection,” often interrupting one’s own speech, rather than an interlocutor’s, and generally commenting on or revealing one’s affective evaluation of the object of discourse

(Goffman 1978).

In another, related example, Sheppard, after returning from the Bangkok trip mentioned above, described his relaxation at the hotel after a long day of shopping and sight-seeing. After settling in, he said, “That’s when I thought, “Boy, wouldn’t it be nice if you [Judy] were here. We could sit around that pool and have a few drinks [Humn!]” [big inhale, followed by a dramatically long sigh] “Anyhow….”293 Difficult to transcribe, this “Humn!” is halfway between a satisfied grunt, denoting an expression akin to “Wow, that’s good!” and the cliché bon appetit gesture; kissing one’s fingers, then extending them out in a presentational yet invitational manner.

Occurring right after describing, and thus likely primed by, his last meal of the trip, the utterance was principally a spontaneous, emotive outburst, underscoring the degree to which he misses his wife. This expressive sound would be unlikely to occur in any other medium; it is impossible to transcribe and too interiorized to be appropriate in direct discourse.

292 On the same tape, Fillmore continues, saying “I guess I’ll get kind of mushy now, did I ever tell you how much I love you, sweetheart? [Awkwardly laughs]. I was kidding then but I really love you, I really do and R&R, it’s going to be more than just to see each other again. It’s going to be reunion of heart and soul and bodies and the whole bit, I can hug you in my dreams and think about how it was and everything else it’s not bad but it’s not the best is not like the real thing and will be back together again and will be able to dig on each other and just enjoy what love is all about and until then … I’ll give you a couple of kisses [two “smooch” sounds] (ibid.). 293 Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard, “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife,” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1705AU1717, Undated. 221

For most couples, overt, verbal declarations of love and longing were also important. As

Sheppard highlights, in our culture, expressing one’s love “out loud” constitutes an important, romantic speech act.

Well hon, looking over the top of the tape, right at your picture … It’s funny [pause]. I just, uh … I just wanna tell you I love you so much and yet I know I write it to you every single day, and yo- you know it, and yet it’s important for me to tell you (Sheppard, TTU, 1705AU1713).

He continues in a more physically amorous fashion, saying, “And I just do love you so very, very much and I can’t wait ‘til I get back to just whisper that right in your ear, and scratch your chin a little bit with my whiskers and then chase you arou-,” cutting himself off with slightly sheepish laughter (ibid). These excerpts highlight the facility of the auditory frame for describing effusive affection, and, especially when imagining imminent reunions, the ease with which recordists veer into the physical, though rarely becoming overtly explicit. In addition, they demonstrate the importance of tailoring one’s environment and comportment, from hanging aide-mémoires, including photos, scarves, souvenirs, greeting cards, drawings, and handwritten letters, to lying down294 or sitting in dyadic proximity, the recorder occupying the chair beside them, the microphone resting on their rising and falling chest, all to help them conjure a multimodal presence to speak to, inches from their face.

In their access to previously shared spaces, walls already covered in photos, layered memories populating every space in the house (Bachelard 2014), apartment, or rented room, stateside partners had more flexibility in multimodally constructing their environments. One of

294 Many military recordists made tapes at the end of long, grueling shifts. The ability to simply be as immobile and supine as possible while recording was a welcome affordance of the medium. 222 the most popular practices was carrying the recorder into the couple’s shared bed, metonymically situating it in the position of their absent lover. One recordist began a tape to her husband, saying,

Hello, are you there yet? I think you are. [adjusting tape recorder]. I just finished a tape for ya, it’s a buncha nothin’ on that first one. And ya know what I’m gonna do now? I’m gonna cut the light, and have you all alone to myself in the dark, hang on a second. [socks on the carpet, sliding across the room]. Okay? How’s that. Ya happy now? Well, ehm, come, get a little closer so I don’t have to talk too loud [getting down to a whisper; sheets and pillows ruffling as she adjusts them]. Alright, it’s an X-Rated tape … strictly for my husband only. Mainly because, weeell, he’s, he’s just my husband, and he’s a neat guy so I’m just gonna talk to him, just crawl into bed and visit with him.295

After a lengthy pause, she returned, saying, “Well, I don’t know what to do here now that I never have ‘Property Of’ written on my bottom anymore. You’ve gotta remedy that, and I can’t look around and see who I belong to.” After bemoaning her recent lack of tapes from her husband—a complaint she quickly retracted, realizing she’d gotten one from him just yesterday296—and discussing “those pictures”—“[y]ou asked me what I was thinking when I made those pictures … well, I’m not gonna tell you … I never thought I’d be making pictures like that … oh sweetheart, you’re a dirty old man but I like you that way,” she eventually resolved, “Oh, I don’t know what to say to ya, I’m too shy and I don’t want to blush.”

Some of this recordist’s tapes from her husband are more explicit; but although they included discussion of sexual matters in great detail,297 their connection to the couple’s actual

295 While the “husband” in this quotation provided open, archival access, I have since learned his then-wife was not consulted in this decision. For this and future tapes from this couple, I will therefore obscure both of their identities. 296 Likely in the most indexically significant space, position and composure with regard to their prior physical intimacy, it seems as though her husband’s absence is felt so acutely as to render the moment a “time out of time,” making linkages to the realities of actual exchange rate less meaningful and intelligible. 297 For example, his attitudes regarding male contraception, the specifics of his early sexual awakening during puberty, and his prior sexual relationships and their impact on his current character. 223 physical relationship is often just tenuous and abstract, offering commentary about sex, rather than verbally (or otherwise aurally) simulating or imitating sexual acts with either partner as active agents. Possibly due to the always/already public spaces of audition in Vietnam, most tapes remain relatively abstract, those recounting earlier sexual encounters euphemistically glossed these moments as “memories” or “reminisces.”

For others, “heart-to-heart” conversations were more appropriately conducted through a higher power. Sandra Miller often felt closest to her absent husband Elza in the context of their church, and interactions with their new family. In one tape, she described going to their traditional Christmas Vespers service by herself:

I don’t know I just really wanted to go so that I could have some time to myself and just really think, and think about you and what Christmas really means to me this year and … just, for 45 minutes I just felt so very very close to you E [inhale] I feel close to you all the time but especially at that time, being by myself, and in church.298

After reading him another prayer, she fantasized about their upcoming R&R, repeating “I love you” over and over and threatening to “ to squeeze you soooooo tight!” as she iconically constricted her vocal chords, emphasizing the intensity of the “embrace” in her voice, and mimicking his likely “gasp” with a labored inhale (Miller, TTU, 427AU0437). She immediately apologized for “being silly,” but said she couldn’t contain her excitement.

When Gary and Kaye, only engaged up to this point, decided to get married on Gary’s leave, they reached out to their local preacher, Paul Smith, requesting the traditional pre-marriage interview via tape. Clearly uncomfortable with recording, the preacher nonetheless wanted to support two of his, long-time parishioners in their decision to follow their hearts: “I’m going to

298 Sandra Miller, “Audio Letter,” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 427AU0437, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Miller, TTU, 427AU0437”). 224 presume to say some things to you I hope will be beneficial. And if not, there is one distinct advantage of the tape recorder, you can always cut the thing off or break the tape or do one of a hundred other things.”299 Presaging a longer sermon, he says that in his time, “I discovered that when people want to get married, that’s when they should get married. They may be on opposite sides of the earth, but what difference does that make” (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1425).

While respecting pre-existing roles by maintaining relationship-specific bonds was paramount, recordists also responded to the auditory frame with a host of performative diversions, ranging from brief, framing conventions borrowed from other auditory domains, to trying their hand at established auditory genres, with varying degrees of success (though, as I will cover in the following section, flubs, mistakes, frame breaks and technical difficulties remained an important site for glimpsing “the real”).

Other Genres: Oral Storytelling, Reading, Parody, and More

As mentioned above, the most common discursive mode to arise out of the relative freedom of auditory composition was oral storytelling. In the course of “debriefing-style” reiterations of one’s daily activities—frequently delivered in rapid monotone, or rising intensity, denoting their affective blending-together, and/or crescendo toward an affective highlight—many recordists chunked their performances into “business” and “fun,” the latter presenting a site for free-associative storyrealms. Although most spoke primarily through words, others employed their voices in “radio drama” fashion, filling their stories with vocal sound effects, impersonations, and other aural approximations. Ernie Miller, responding to his girlfriend’s questions regarding the “noisy” jets in the background of his last recording, began a story about

299Paul Smith, “Gary Snead 39 (Feb 1969),” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1393AU1425, February 1969 (Hereafter, cited as, “Snead, TTU, 1393AU1425”). 225 his new job as a helicopter gunner. “See folks … I don’t haul passengers anymore, I fly the guns.

Da Da!,” these last two syllables imitating a Batman-esque, orchestral stab, and setting the scene for the vocal workout to come. 300

… you wanna hear some noise … go upcountry in a helicopter … along with the noise of [the engine] … you got six machine chattering, KA-KA-KA-KA-KA Pow! And, you got fourteen rockets down there in pods alongside of it [and] they take off out of there and they sound just about like that jet plane does, and they’re about a foot away from my foot… And I’ve got a machine gun in my hands and the crew chief has a machine gun in his hands and then mounted on the sides [are] four more machine guns and I ‘specially like…. going straight in on a dive attack .Whoosh! And all four machine guns on the side going Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa- Pa-Paw! … and every little bit they’ll be a Vowhhhh! That’s a rocket going off. BuhWoooom … Five times the strength of dynamite and all the shrapnel and little wire and springs blow all over the place.301

While many recordists employed a growing form of contextually-constructed pidgin

Vietnamese,302 Ernie is also the only recordist I have heard who frequently attempted to imitate

Vietnamese speakers303 in his storytelling. In attempting to discipline his much younger brother,

Lucky, who had recently taken to running away from home, Ernie relayed a story about procuring a gift for him that “I just won’t let Mom give you” unless you “cut that out.”304

300 For an excellent introduction to the history of the orchestral stab in sample-based, popular music, see Season 1, Episode 9 of Vox’s Earworm, “the sound that connects Stravinsky to Bruno Mars,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A1Aj1_EF9Y. 301 Ernie Miller, “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967,” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1857AU2256, 1967. 302 This pidgin was drawn equally from earlier military campaigns, French (post)colonial presence, English approximations of Vietnamese terms, and vice versa. 303 As these performances are all profoundly racist in both their intent and execution, it should be unsurprising that Miller’s tapes from his mother and girlfriend are also the only stateside tapes I encountered with casual use of racial epithets. 304 Ernie Miller, “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 2),” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1857AU2252, 1966 (Hereafter, cited as “Miller, TTU, 1857AU2252”). 226

I traded a little Vietnamese kid out of it. He was playin’ with it one day and I seen him and I said, ‘Oooh, I’d just like to have that to give to my little brother Lucky. So I went and got me a little can of C-Rations … and he gave me that little pistol and he said ‘I Likeeeey! [high-pitched whisper] and went runnin’ into the house, yellin’ ‘Ma! Ma! Hey look what I got Ma!’ … I think that’s what he was sayin’, it sounded like [gibberish, syllabalization approximating Vietnamese]. That’s what it sounded like … Ya know they don’t speak English over here, they speak slope, that’s what we call it; slope speak … I supposed we call it [that] because they’re eyes are sloped? You think? Could be… (Miller, TTU, 1857AU2252).

I include these examples because they represent, at least within my corpus, the extremes of vocal imitation for the purposes of differentiating and vivifying reported speech, whether human or machine. Almost all recordists plucked contextually-useful registers, accents, or quippy one- liners from shared, intertextual webs in order to develop their own individual sets of conventions in taming the open-ended, unruly auditory. As mentioned above, Lee Livingston and Dale

Fillmore frequently quoted or paraphrased their correspondents (especially their parents), adopting exaggeratedly cordial, formal, or “flat” affective tones to draw attention to and critique their correspondents’ performances, or in order to coax more “genuine” expression from them.305

Another interesting though underrepresented form was reading aloud. One of Kaye’s first tapes to her then-fiancé Gary was mostly precomposed, but this was relatively rare (Snead, TTU,

1393AU1406). More common was recordists’ practice of reading materials taken from other sources, including newspaper clippings,306 prayers (given to Sandra her by their pastor,307 and

305 Only once did Livingston directly challenge his parents in words, generally opting for the slightly less direct choice of parody. “I must say that your tapes are ‘number ten,’ as we say over here, really. Father gets on there and makes a public speech to his son, and, uh, that kinda turns me off. Mother whimpers and cries through the other side of the tape” (Livingston, TTU, 2212AU2486). 306 Richard Crane, “08 November 21st, 2 Dead VC,” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1787AU2126, Undated. 307 Miller, TTU, 427AU0438. 227 newly composed308), letters from mutual acquaintances,309 poems (Moorman, TTU,

1330AU1330), daily duty lists, often in the context of complaining about one’s level of responsibility,310 short stories (Moorman, TTU, 1330AU1330), stereo manuals,311 non-fiction books (Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, Norman Mailer312),

Bible readings (Moorman, TTU, 1330AU1330), and, significantly, letters from mutual friends,313 former comrades,314 and a service member’s former commander, writing to both him and his son

(Shelton, TTU, 1139AU0904). As a means of sharing one’s mediated world, some recordists grabbed what was at hand in order to read and then comment on its content. Others, unable to send the original, simply remediated the material in their own voice. The remediation of letters, either addressed to more one than one recipient or shared with the world via radio or television, had become, by this time, a fairly common occurrence. Many local radio shows, newspapers, and magazines reprinted or remediated through voice the content of letters donated by the families of the fallen. Given how frequently recordists struggled to fill up their “sides,” and the saliency of one’s loved one reading aloud, I was surprised to find only the examples listed above. Then again, given that many of these forms could be (and were) (re)shared directly, and the generalized preference of less, as opposed to more “mediated” performance in audio letters, perhaps surprise is unwarranted.

308 Miller, TTU, 427AU0456. 309 Richard Crane, “42 No Title,” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1787AU2161, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Crane, TTU, 1787AU2161”). 310 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife, February 1971,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0955, February 13, 1971 Hereafter, cited as “Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0955”). 311 Richard Crane, “24 Flair [sic] Mission,” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1787AU2142, Undated. 312 Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0959. 313 Gary Snead, “Gary Snead 26 (1 Nov 1968),” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1393AU1412, November 1, 1968. 314 Lee Livingston, “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents, 11 April 1967,” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2212AU2497, April 11, 1967. 228

Others, like Michael Baranowski, the aspiring reporter described above, delighted in send-ups of popular radio forms as a means of both entertaining him and his friends in-country as well those back home. Baranowski recorded the following parody of a Marine recruitment commercial, delivered in a pitch-perfect, patronizing baritone with accompaniment by his friend

Tim Duffy playing the Marine Corps Hymn on the harmonica:

Don’t be one of those unfortunates who suffer tragically from yellow-strip-ed fever, stup-, stup-, stupify your friends and maim your enemies. Exorcise your God-given right to kill or main at a distance. It’s a great feeling to know that you can wipe out your entire neighborhood. Yes! Be the first killer on your block to rule the world. See your Marine Corps recruiter today (Baranowski 1968 qtd. in NPR 2000).315

More common than full-fledged “bits” were brief excursions into other, recognizable genres, intertextually borrowing other modes of speech afforded by the audio frame, many of them falling into the domain of “radio talk” (Goffman 1981).

As avid about sports as they were about music, Gary Snead’s relatives used large portions of tapes to present play-by-play rundowns of games the speakers had just (or recently) attended.

One speaker typically started, then others in the room would join in, presenting dialogic summaries of highlights blended with commentary and occasionally breaking down a particular sequence into its component parts in pseudo-real-time coverage. In these latter moments, their enthusiasm was obvious and infectious (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1409).

315 A similar skit that took Reuters-esque journalism as its target, proceeded like this: “This the 35 Watt 4 voice of MOXE. broadcasting to you from the swamps, jungles, boondocks, and infected salad of Fort McCort, home of the fighting 1st platoon of Hungry Eye Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, defensive perimeter, just north of The Rockpile and just south of the demilitarized zone of Vietnam … this is Watered Concrete in New York with the Late World News … this portion of our programming is brought to you by 20-Round Burst Bar, voted ‘Best Tax Waste’ of the war” (ibid.). 229

Other recordists quickly developed “radio personality” intros mimicking those of AM radio in the states (also the model on which the AFVN was based). Timothy Staats began several tapes with a variation on the following,

Hello, hello hello! [rising pitch]. The beautiful town, downtown Vietnam [rising pitch again]. Ah, once again, it’s time to hear from your Far East correspondent, your man in Asia, etc., etc., etc. [rising pitch on the latter]. Find out again what’s going on this mixed-up, ridiculous war over here … supposedly tonight we’re gonna get hit by your friend and mine, the enemy, I guess that’s Charlie (Staats, TTU, 274AU0040).

With dozens of examples, both at home and abroad, to use as models, it is perhaps unsurprising that radio imitation was a particularly popular practice with younger, male service members.

Another example from Fillmore began, “Well, this is Ol’ Killer Spade One Zero on the Happy Go

Lucky Show here…,”316 while Ernie Miller, the orator behind the helicopter sound effects described above, categorized his family and friends, like Vogel’s example below, as a “fan club,” saying, “Well, hello again, let’s see here we are back in ol’ Vietnam. How are you all you people back there in the Ernie Miller fan club” (Miller, TTU, 1857AU2251).

Framing their tapes in this way could be understood as serving many purposes, from highlighting, and delighting in, their own creativity, presenting a relaxed, alert and engaged persona to their worried intimates back home, indexing local radio personalities in their and their intimates’ hometown soundscapes (and their shared modes of listening to them), and lending the recording itself an air of light-hearted frivolity, ironic detachment, or sardonic resignation, depending on the content to follow. George Joliff, a cinemaphotographer/audio recordist for the

Department of the Army Special Photographic Office (DASPO), pretended to be making a

316 Dale Fillmore, “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his family,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0943, May 10, 1968. 230 documentary: he began a tape with the sounds of a grandfather clock, then said, in a David

Attenborough-esque voice, “That is the sound of a grandfather clock,” before reverting to his normal voice to reveal that the clock was a gift he planned to send soon.317 Sometimes intentionally, but often inadvertently, service members also lapsed into various forms of “military speech,” ending sentences with official radio protocol (“Hi Mom, Over”).

Some made frequent use of Vietnamese/US pidgin, as well as genuine Vietnamese phrases or terms, such as “di di mau” (go away quickly), “buku” (a lot), “Arvin” (soldier in the

Army of the Republic of Vietnam), “gettin’ short” (see above), “tee tee” (very little), and “papa san”/”mama san” (an older Vietnamese man and woman, respectively). Whenever Frank

Kowalczyk uttered one of these terms on tape for the first time, his voice became animated and he proceeded to translate and contextualize each term, indexing both a confidence and comfort associated with using a local vernacular connected to strong comradic bonds, as well as pride in acquiring a new language. In discussing the latter, he referenced his mother’s attempts to teach him Croatian, bragging that “I can’t count in Croatian but I can count in Vietnamese” (“up to

999” he mentions later, as well as being able to tell time, “except for the half-hours”)

(Kowalczyk, NPM, 1969).

The Metamediative: Media Mistakes, Fidelity Fumbles and the Charming Contingencies of Taping

As discussed above, taping provided those with a greater facility for “just jabbering” a comfortable, cathartic space for free-associative expression, while offering their listeners a comparatively unfiltered glimpse inside the real-time machinations of their intimates’ minds.

However, when the ear piece was silent and the “listener” only an imagined, future participant in

317 George Joliff, “Letter to home, March 15, 1971 recording of Spec. 5 Jolliff,” George Jolliff Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1054AU0802, March 17, 1971. 231 the present conversation, the speaker’s practice had to shift to accommodate this absence, from

“filling in” the gaps left by absent conversational “turns” to explaining the unexpected interruptions in their recorded soundscape. In making tapes, recordists sometimes made these adjustments explicitly and verbally, but sometimes they simply "let the tape run” to see what would happen. This created an atmosphere of spontaneity and unpredictability unlike writing, engaging in this medium simultaneously taxed their patience while opening “spaces” for the minutiae of the everyday by drawing attention to features of intimacy a letter cannot reproduce.

These negotiations existed on three levels; voice, talk, and reel-to-reel; each providing a shared space for mutual recognition via misrecognition.

Alienation of the Acousmatic

For many, reel-to-reel offered them their first encounter with their own, acousmatic, disembodied voices, lacking the chest resonance, bone conduction, and everyday proprioceptive awareness of one’s normal speech experience. While the recordist did not need to rewind the tape to check levels and evaluate the content, and many did not do so, it was a very common practice.

As Kaye Snead noted, “Well Gary, I don’t know how this will sound. I recorded a little and played it back and had the common reaction of not recognizing my own voice” (Snead, TTU,

1393AU1406). Riffing on this universal alienation became a go-to performance disclaimer and source of humor for many. Robert Haldeman quipped, “I guess you know I played this tape back and it just doesn’t sound like my voice at all but I guess you’ll know it’s from me because I mailed it.”318 Timothy Staats opened one tape facetiously, saying, “Hey everybody, I bet you’ll

318 Robert Haldeman, “Audio letter from Mrs. Barbara Haldeman to Mrs. Elsie Guest,” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1912AU2296, January 20, 1970. 232 never guess who this is, ha ha. If you have to hesitate to think who it is then your memory’s a little weaker than I had hoped” (Staats, TTU, 274AU0037).

Many recordists articulated frequent worries about the extent to which their voices were communicating what they intended, for both ill and good. As Kaye Snead explained,

The tape made you seem so close and not quite so far away as you really are. It’s amazing how hearing someone’s voice can make them seem so near. I’m just glad we have the opportunity to do this. I’m sure the more we do this, the tapes, the more natural it will seem. It may sound as though there’s no emotion in my voice, it does to me anyway, but maybe the more we do this the easier it will be. It’s been fun making the tape, even funnier listening back to myself (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1406).

As my grandmother noted, the importance of speaking plainly and sharing their sadder moments ultimately overcame, but did not erase, her anxiety about the effect her voice had on my grandfather:

I felt a little bad tonight when I started listening to your tape because, honey you felt so down, you just sounded down, because you’d gotten letters from me where I sounded down and, of course, being like we are, being as close as we are, and having the understanding we do have, we do express our feelings and our thoughts to each other … at those times, I almost wish I hadn’t written how low I felt, but sometimes, it’s just the way it is and it’s no sense just holding off when we can talk to each other or write to each other but just talking to each other is going to help a lot (Gunby 1967, T3).

In both of these examples, the saliency of material voice, no matter the content, justified the emotional demands the channel placed on its participants.

233

Talk

As many other recordists quickly discovered, “talking to no one,” while potentially liberating, was also fundamentally “unnatural” for most, unless subvocalizing was already part of their generic repertoire or their job required public speaking. Adapting one’s expectations and devising new conventions became a necessity. In the first two audio letters from Joe Tarpley’s family, his son had begun his portion of the tape with the same opening, saying, “Hi, Dad. This is

Lee. How’re you doin’?,” before listing the series of activities he’d been involved in since their last taping encounter. Thinking he’d responded to all queries posed to him, Tarpley was surprised to hear his son, on the family’s fourth tape, begin slightly differently: “Hi, Dad. This is Lee.

How’re you doin’? I asked you twice before, and you didn’t answer me. If I didn’t want to know,

I wouldn’t have asked” (Tarpley, TTU, 23540101001). Realizing that his son “was not using an alternate term for ‘hello’ or ‘howdy’ or ‘good day,’ but instead meant exactly what he’d said,”

Tarpley answered “as simply as he had asked it,”

I’m doing remarkably well, Lee. I feel good. I work hard but that’s good for me … I’m reasonably happy. I’d rather be home with you and [your sister] and your mother, but that’s not possible right now … [And] I’ve learned that you mean it when you ask me how I’m doing (ibid.).

In Janice’s first tapes from her younger sister back in Texas, the latter reflexively noted her framing of her interactions with the device as inherently conversational. Beginning with a typical telephonic greeting, she says, “How ya’ll doin?,” immediately following up her own question with a next “turn” in a typical response pair, “Hope you’re doin’ OK” (Whitehead, TTU,

2166AU2450). Following this exchange with an extended filler, in this case a “Hmmmmm …,” during which the listener could easily imagine her eyes soaring upward as she tried to think of what to say next, she finally asked ”Oh, did y’all ever get the air conditioner…?” (ibid.). After a

234 few more seconds of silence, she chuckles nervously, her “ummm” filler flooding into outright laughter as she says,

What am I s’posed to [laughing] … I see what you mean Janice, about not knowin’ exactly what to say, it’s real strange … It’s so funny to ask a question ‘cuz you, it’s just natural to wait for an answer and … there isn’t one (ibid.).

Ending her segment a few minutes later, Janice’s sister closed, “And, let’s see … I guess that’s about all I have to say, so, ‘Talk more later’, I guess that’s what you’d say. In a letter you’d say

‘Write more later’. Anyway, goodbye for now y’all [laughing]” (ibid.).

As this recordist’s self-consciousness demonstrates, for every recordist like Cathy

Virskus who, when taping to Vytau, was generally “not aware” of what she was saying as she spoke to him, there was another who found the experience daunting and, in its performative reflexivity, eventually liberating and even thrilling (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019).

The pleasure of the performance was based in part on the exclusivity of the imagined presence to which one was speaking. In his first tape home, Ernie Miller began,

Hey, um. This is quite an experiment. Wait’ll you try to send me one of these tapes back. Sittin’ here, talkin’ to somebody, and nobody answers you. Feels kinda—I feel kinda funny, ya now I feel like I’m just sittin’ here talkin’ to myself [inhale] Heee. Hee, like I oughta … go see the man up at the ding ding ward [chuckle] (Miller, TTU, 1857AU2252).

As Janice’s mother noted, these hiccups formed part of the bonding of the experience:

I don’t know what to say, I guess I’ll feel stupid and, uh, I remember Janice said she felt stupid so, Ms. Alice says ‘She is stupid [laugh breaks up this last word]. [Still laughing] She feels kinda stupid. I was glad she chang- that she changed that (Whitehead, TTU, 2166AU2450).

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Expressing a similar sentiment, Kaye Snead noted that practice makes perfect, the frame itself allowing her to transition seamlessly (unlike her imagined self in the story she was relating), from her discussion of skiing by herself, to speaking with Gary:

I still haven’t been able to slalom real well. I can get up, but I just can’t seem stay up. I guess it just takes a lot more practice. I, like you, thought this would be rather hard, and kept wondering how I would ever start the tape, or keep it up. [smiling, recognizing her parallelism] I never thought I could talk for this long. Talkin’ to this microphone I know isn’t easy for you either (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1406).

Reel-to-Reel

Far more common, however, were moments that could be called “metamediative,” a term

I am using to refer to utterances specifically employed to describe, identify or comment on the relationship between the medium and its current user, similar to Barbara Babcock’s theorization of the “metalinguistic” (Babcock 1976). Prominent examples include instances in which both parties stopped and then restarted the tape to ensure they were actually recording (followed by a quick explanation of the prior, unexpected cut), disclaimers about the (un)likely sound quality of the foregoing recording and equivocations concerning the intelligibility of prior content, to comments concerning the quality of the sound, what kinds sounds were “making it through,” including emotional tones, non-linguistic “babbling” and the sound of rain hitting the window.

These explicit comments, along with unintentional quirks which highlight unexpected “excesses” of the auditory, constantly drew attention to the medium, rather than the performances themselves. In one tape, Fillmore started a tape to his wife with an uncharacteristic self- recrimination:

You’re not gonna believe what I just did. I just, uh, turned this tape over, and hooked it up and turned the machine on and started talkin’ and I talked halfway 236

through this tape without stopping, and I don’t remember a thing I said, and I wind it back to listen to it and I forgot to record. I was talkin’ to myself for the whole damn time but [laughs] oh my god I can’t believe it, I don’t even know where I left off on the other side it’s been so long since I flipped it over (Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0950).

After apologizing a bit more, he said he was going to go “contemplate” and then try again. About two hours later, he returned, saying, “Ok, I’m back … I’m gonna go ahead and see if I can recall what I said and uh, if I repeat anything I said before, just, consider the source [laughs], real doofus here [laughs]” (ibid.).

Describing the kinds of mishaps that necessarily come with relinquishing control of one’s voice, Livingston warned his listeners in a later recording that, “My tape recorder sort of muffed it up and this is why it works at a different speed … so just live with it and I think it corrects itself later on” (Livingston, TTU, 2212AU2484). After this disclaimer, Livingston’s cartoonishly fast voice comes on, proceeding for several minutes, before he can be heard banging the side of the machine (like one might do with broken television), then recursively mimicking his own cartoonish voice, “my voice isn’t that high” (almost squeaking) then, whacking the machine again, says “I still don’t think this recorder is working right I guess I will [begins speaking in an exaggeratedly slow and monotone manner] “talk lower and slower so it will sound better” (ibid.).

Though the sound is hilarious, Livingston notes that variable tape speeds could distort the “grain” of one’s voice on occasion and, depending on the sophistication of one’s playback system—i.e. containing speed controls or not—this may or may not be a remediable condition. This particular lack of control highlights a potential disaffordance of the medium: when reading a written letter, one’s imagination “fills in the gaps,” conjuring an idealized (or at least codified) imaginative presence of the absent. With a distorted tape, though other features, like prosody, cadence and

237 content may not “match up,” and the intrusion of an experience “against the grain” can be jarring and unpleasant.

Ultimately, however, these foibles and mistakes provided a space of communicative play for adult recordists, as well as for younger ones. Recording was a shared activity that made a record of their intentions and affective utterances but also of their shared time, like an asymmetrical game, in ways written letters seldom did in the context of crisis situations.

Section IV: Materiality

Compared to their written counterparts, audio letters did not develop the same level of object fetishization, their materiality as long spools of undifferentiated tape affording little in the way of metonymic purchase for recipients to construct them as extensions of their absent intimates.319 The medium was fragile: finger oil could obscure playback and gum up the works; shifts in temperature could wrinkle or weaken; and respooling by hand ran the risk of tearing or bending. This fragility meant tactile engagement was limited and even stressful. The difficulty of cueing particular moments, the irreducibly polythetic nature of the experience, and the compositional practices described above encouraged listeners to frame tape audition as an

“event,” dovetailing with the already latent cultural ontology of sound as inherently ephemeral.

For these reasons, combined with the comparative expense of the practice, most recordists used the same reels over and over. Proposing buying a single set of mailers in bulk, Vogel’s mother said, “I think this is a pretty good idea, because I’m sure there isn’t anything I say on the tapes that you want to keep so you might as well scrub it and send it back, then there’s no cost involved

319 The containing mailers were sometimes addressed or annotated by the sender in handwritten script. 238 for you either way.”320 This quote also highlights the common assumption that, while the presence of the intimate’s voice itself, and its subsequent audition, might be valuable, the linguistic content of any given tape was unlikely to warrant preservation. When recordists mentioned saving individual tapes, it was almost always accompanied by an apology; the recipient felt required to justify their selfishness. In sending her first reply to Gary Snead, Kaye reported that “this isn’t your tape; I bought a new one. I know we can’t keep them all but I wanted to keep the first one.” Gary’s first taped communiqué took on added significance, the

“first move” in an intimate exchange (Snead, TTU, 1393AU1406). Likewise, Elza Miller, cognizant of their first child’s imminent birth and the need to save every penny, was nevertheless loath to tape over any of his wife’s output. EIza thought she would

understand that there’s some of the tapes that I’m just gonna save for … I don’t know, that just really has, uh, that just means somethin’ extra to me like the last one that you sent with you singin’ and everything. I doubt if I’ll ever record over that and just keep it and play it whenever I feel like it.321

This exceptionality was likely the primary reason that of the relatively few stateside tapes that did survive, most contain holiday celebrations, singing, roundtables, children playing, intimate

“heart-to-hearts,” and other out-of-the-affective-ordinary occurrences that a lonely service member might wish to return to any chance they got.322 Though an equal number of “turns” occurred in auditory exchanges, far more tapes produced “in-country” survive, likely due to a variety of factors—most notably, the greater historical importance afforded epistolary accounts of

320 Vogel Family, “Audio Letter 1,” Carl Vogel Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1863AU2309, July 9, 1968. 321 Elza Miller, “# 39,” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 427AU0444, Undated. 322 Then again, for stateside recipients, while the voice of one’s intimate deployed abroad is of obvious salient value when directed toward the loved listener, as described above, the concomitant exposure to the belliphonic, unfamiliar environments, and forms of sociality in which one was often little more than a passive observer, may have prompted a willingness to erase the tapes. 239 wartime, especially those produced by service members who did not make it home. More practically, the itinerancy and ascetic nature of military life prevented most service members from maintaining much in the way of personal belongings: those tacking back and forth from “the bush,” frequently had to purge all “non-essential” materials. Jenny Hartley has dubbed this representational disparity in the military epsitolarium the “wartime female dross rate” (1999).

However, all this is not to say that forms of “materiality” did not inform the media ideology of reel-to-reel; it did, in three primary forms: the sounding body, the metonymy of the recorder itself, and the layered worlds made possible by the temporally-slippery, palimpsest-esque quality of redeployed magnetic tape in the hands of relative novices.

The Sounding Body

As described above, the individual voice not only carries its individualizing “grain” and socio-cultural markers of membership in a network of intersecting identities and ideational publics, but it also opens a paralinguistic window into the cognitive processes and emotional nuance of the utterances being expressed. The voice is also one of the primary mediators for unspoken states of the body. Due to rigors of military life, service members were often only able to make a tape after a grueling, 10+ hour day of work, giving their voices a “drug out” quality (as my grandfather put it), making many both more emotionally vulnerable, but also less able to concentrate on the communicative task at hand. After several attempts to tell a story about making a new dress for an upcoming military ball, containing multiple vocal flubs—“gween” for

“green,” and “knighting” for “knitting”—Frances Shea apologized, saying “I can’t talk tonight

I’m stuttering over my words,” and decided to just let the record she’d been listening to play while she tried to collect herself.323 Bringing together dozens of people from different parts of the

323 Frances Shea, “Trip to Madrid,” Frances T. Shea Buckley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1662AU1623, April 2, 1963. 240 world, and cramming them together in poorly ventilated offices, or overly ventilated hooches, meant frequent communicable diseases were a fact of life in Vietnam. Noticing his own nasal delivery, Fillmore explained,

[Loud sniffling] If you’re wondering why I sound kinda funny, I got a pretty bad cold now. It’s gettin’ down to about 60 degrees here at night, kinda not used to this stuff, this hundred degree weather … kinda grows on ya and, uh, after awhile, its no sweat but, it gets 75, 80 degrees you start catchin’ cold.324

Audibly shivering, teeth occasionally chattering, Vogel noted that most maladies picked up in

Vietnam didn’t go away until you left (“one way or another”): “I got a little cold now. Don’t know how I got it. But. Probably won’t get rid of it. Most of the guys over here they get a cold and they don’t get rid of it at all.”325

On the other end of the thermometer, most Americans had little experience with the levels of heat and humidity in Southeast Asia, as well as the rich ecosystem this climate supports.

Dozens of tapes include the sound of torrential rain, occasionally drowning out (as it were) the voice of the recordist as they cowered in their hooch, or if it was the first rainfall in weeks, allowing them an opportunity to run out and splash in the puddles (recorder safely sequestered inside but still running). The heat was often captured in its excess—verbal complaints, groans, audible lethargy, and the occasional drop of sweat on the microphone—but also its absence, the roaring of multiple fans, the hum of the air-conditioning unit in the Officers Club, etc. Several other organisms made their presence known, the “zoo” of unwelcome guests, including “big ol’ giant bull frogs that come in here when it rains,” thieving rats, giant cockroaches,326 swarms of

324 Dale Fillmore, “Audio Letter #3,” Dale Fillmore Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0941, February 1968. 325 Robert Vogel, “Audio Letter 2.” Carl Vogel Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1863AU2310, July 20, 1968 (Hereafter, cited as “Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2310”). 326 On the same tape, Kowalczyk later relates that “Auntie Helen was teasing us about puttin’ matchboxes on ‘em and let ‘em pull us around!” (ibid.). 241 mosquitoes, crickets, and the ubiquitous stray hooch dog327 (Head 1970; Kowalczyk, NPM,

1969).

More obviously, many service members (but also stateside recordists) took to tape while drunk or tipsy, stoned or lightly buzzed, some alone, others with company; some to overcome the medium’s affordances for self-conscious and rumination, others to share their joyful inebriation with their absent intimates. Richard Crane and his friend Charlie, partly for their own (future) amusement but mostly as a dyadic roundtable for Crane’s wife Joanne, recorded a tape of their getting stoned together.328 Packed with banter, observational humor, and navel-gazing hilarity, as well as frequent shifts in vocal tone, timbre, affect, and descents into song, the tape records the two enjoying each other’s company while hyperaware of their acoustic environment. Wondering if they should be able to hear their new, military issue watches on the tape, the two stopped the tape and went back to listen:

Crane: “I couldn’t hear anything but Led Zeppelin” Charlie: “Neither could I.” Crane: “Ya know what?” Charlie: “What?” Crane: [To Joanne]: “Joanne can you hear that watch ticking? [If you can] then we’ll know that we’re suffering from high frequency hearing loss caused by th- by the turbine engines… Charlie: “Flying the UH1 without holding your hands over your ears!” Crane: “Therefore, we’ll be intol-, entitled to the expensive, um, pearl heart, PURPLE heart!” Charlie: [Humming along with LZ; no longer paying attention to Crane]

327 At least at the Air Force base in Korat, nearly every hooch had one, and sometimes more than one (Gunby 1967, T5). 328 Richard Crane, “02 Napalm Sticks to Kids,” Richard Crane Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, 1787AU2120, Undated (Hereafter, cited as “Crane, TTU, 1787AU2120”). 242

Another tape, made by an unnamed service member to his recently released buddy, recorded an extended “hang session,” discussed making deals to send home “pounds” of “the good stuff,” while the sounds of crinkling rolling papers, billiards, pipe hits, laughing, and live and recorded music fill the available audio space.329 Throughout, the primary recordist, acting as the party’s master of ceremonies and recorder’s referee, brought over several other speakers, coaching them in recording messages. At the same time, he delighted in the drugs’ and tapes’ capacities to enhance his sensory awareness while also defamiliarizing himself with his own proprioceptive sensations (ibid.). Like Crane, and the children described above, the recordist “plays” with his own voice as a not-quite-mirrored extension of himself: “This is far out, if you put on the headphones you can hear yourself talk. Say [drrrrrrr, ehnnnnn, drrrrrrr]!” delighting in the labile pleasure of alveolar trills and the layered, buzzing, haziness of his multiply “fed-back” voice echoing in the room, his own skull, and the headphones—all slowed and made viscerally present by cannabis-induced time dilation.

Returning to Crane, later in the same conversation, after discussing a recent mission without divulging any “sensitive” information, Charlie describes a location “that’s up by the

Cambodian border, but don’t let the press know that!” to which Crane responds, directing his voice toward the recorder, and in a conspiratorial whisper “Joanne! We went into Cambodia last night!” (Crane, TTU, 1787AU2120). As the misrepresentation of the armed forces’ incursion into neighboring states was one of the most consequential lies of the Nixon Administration with regard to the war, I was surprised to hear this (and several other similar) exchanges regarding

Cambodia and other “official secrets” exchanged via tape. Most recordists emphasized the extent to which they were unable (or unwilling) to discuss the specifics of missions. Nevertheless,

329 This tape was posted on a public site but without the express consent of the recordist(s). Due to the sensitivity of the subject matter, I have chosen to withhold any identifying or citational information. 243 giving their intimates a “real” picture of the general state of the conflict, in contrast to “what you’re seeing on TV/reading in the paper,” was one of many functions of their wartime epistolary output. At the same time, expressing their emotional investment in the disjuncture between fact and fiction, nearly always seemed more important than efforts to repair the informational disparity itself. Especially for new draftees, survival became their quite literal raison d'être

(Marlantes 2010, 2012; Bradley and Werner 2015; Akers 2018). Already stripped of their agency and autonomy by the state, drilled into strict, hierarchical obedience, and dependent on their immediate unit for survival, attempting to “live through” their long, but ultimately limited, tour was all most could handle.330 Whether by chemically numbing, whole-heartedly committing, or some variation in between, service members sought to maintain some semblance of recognizable self as it necessarily fractured in the face of dozens of conflicting facticities.331 Preserving intersubjective and ideational integrity and coherence took precedence over larger political concerns (Marlantes, 2010).332 As the site of their most inimate “relational work,” this was especially true in their correspondence.

Similar to the metamediative foibles described above, in addition to more comedic episodes like Livingston’s smacking his recorder into functionality, tumbling microphones333 and

330 If the service member ultimately decided to go AWOL, they had to balance the possibility of death with the near certainty of lengthy imprisonment if caught. 331 See also, Marlantes 2012; Herr 2009 [1977]; Trương 1986; Hayslip, 2017; O'Brien, 2009; Nguyen, 2015; Bảo 1996; Terry, 1984. 332 Of course, there were both dissenters and protesters in Vietnam, acting from within the military itself (Cortwright 2017). In addition, many returning service members joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) after returning to “the world,” sometimes continuing projects, or reigniting affiliations, they’d formed while in-country. Aside from these momentary admissions and generalized discontent, the audio letters in my corpus do not present any pattern of organized resistance (though this does not mean this medium was not used for such activity). The political had more purchase in the underground papers, pirate radio and tape networks mentioned in Chapter 3, but much of this material was also focused on entertainment, making life bearable, and providing “safe” spaces for anti-war sentiment rather than active protest movements. 333 My two-year-old old Aunt Holly was particularly adept at tangling herself up in the microphone cable (Gunby 2012). 244 recorders (often preceded by a surprised yelp), trips, falls and other slapstick, the body was readily audible in the unmistakable sounds of hands or lips scraping the ball-cage of the microphone, the speaker’s breath flooding the immediate aural space with phenomenal “heat,” and the “presence” of the voice—here defined in audio engineers’ usage as the perceived distance of the voice from the listener’s ear—all indexed a subject’s, direct, embodied interaction with technology. When “too close,” breath, as both medium and the most salient sign of life, made itself heard in countless, distorted “blowouts,” from extended sighs to popped “P’s”, “B’s” and sibilant “S’s,” and exuberant screams, causing the signal to iconically “clip,” the medium unable to “handle” the emotional volume. When speaking from farther away, the intimate’s voice could resound in resonant spaces, trebling itself with multiple, layered copies, while also indexing its solitude in a large, empty expanse. In a similar fashion, as the winding reel approached the end of the magnetizable portion of the current strip, the voice took on a ghostly warble, its presence and physical solidity fading in parallel with the speaker’s access to available, utterable time. It is these multimodal evocations of the intimate’s body that allowed for recordists’ metonymic transfer of identification from the tape to the recorder itself.

As long as recordists remained close enough to the microphone or speaker, they were able to adopt any physical position they wanted, often “muting” other forms of sensory feedback—from bright lights to aching backs—to assume positions mirroring those they’d once shared with their absent interlocutor. Utilizing the recorder as a stand-in, many recordists took their portable recorders to bed, “cuddling up” like teenagers with telephones to recreate the feel and spatial proximity of intimate contact. Others, in the midst of recording, began to view their microphones metonymically. During another conversation with his friend Charlie, Crane thinks of a message he’d like to share with Joanne directly, saying “Joanne? Where’s Joanne? Oh! There you are! [grabbing the microphone] I’m gonna have to turn you off, and then turn you back on”

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(Crane, TTU, 1787AU2120). In coaching kids into speaking to absent parents or uncles, many uttered variations on “Say ‘Hi, Daddy!’ Look, [pointing to the mic], he’s right here” (in particular, the Elza Miller, Janice Whitehead and Frances Shea Buckley Collections). In my family’s folklore, the most popular taping story involves my then four-year old, uncle Richard. So convincing was the “presence” of his father during the family’s group listenings, Richard responded aloud and in time to each question his father’s voice asked of him, as if the radio sitting across the table represented an immediate, “live” connection. Resolute in his mission to connect, he would usually barrel right through the corrections of his sisters and mother (Gunby

2012).

As mentioned in Section II, tapes often contained multiple short “sessions,” strung together and linked by little more than sequential contingency for in-country recordists, or the demands of large social groupings for those recording stateside. In addition, most recordists

“recycled” their recordings, using the same reel again and again, reordering its magnetic alignment for new recordings and, often, for new audiences. If featuring one, primary orator, tapes often felt like a series of experiential “snapshots,” almost akin to a stack of postcards; the recipient was forced to listen through like an auditory flip-book (with several pages missing), knitting together their own unifying narrative from the disparate parts. For tapes containing multiple orators, often co-existing in the same, physical space, the resulting “narrative” often exemplified “The Roshomon Effect,” presenting multiple, differently-situated perspectives on the same event (Jackson 2008). However, depending on the sophistication of the equipment and the expertise of its user, each stop and start of the recorder opened temporal gaps. The longer the delay between hitting play and record simultaneously, or the slower the retraction of the tape head, the stronger the possibility that fragments of earlier recordings might reappear in the gaps.

The more times a given reel was used, the more such incursion of the “the real” within “the real”

246 could occur, exacerbating the already slippery temporality and giving the tape a palimpsest-like quality, producing in itself a microcosm of a correspondent’s total epistolarium.

At their most benign, these peeks into the past could act as “sampled” snippets of a correspondence’s intertextual history, mirroring the constantly shifting attentional intentionality of Bourdieu’s densely-layered “illusio.” Tapes might embody multiple streams of past, present, and future consciousness, hitting the temporal rapids for a bumpier, more affectively engaging ride (Bourdieu 2000). As their worst, they might afford glimpses into conversations the listener was never intended to be party to, their dinghy careening down an unfamiliar tributary (one recordist, whom I will not name, carried on audio correspondences with at least four women, who do not seem to have known about each other). The majority of these unintentional incursions simply added to the immersive, unpredictability of tape audition, or the unifying endearment of hearing one’s partner face the same difficulties with the medium as one did oneself. For others, as discussed above, these “mistakes” alerted them to or reminded them of the creative possibilities of sampled juxtapositions. As Cathy Virskus mentioned, while one technically could tape over a performance and start again, taming this “unruly” materiality to produce a “cleaner” product, most did not. This was partly due to the time constraints in producing the recording and the aforementioned, uncanny, alienation of hearing one’s own voice (and thus the relatively infrequent practice of reviewing a tape in full before sending), but also to the undue value placed on spontaneous “liveness.” When making a recording, Cathy told me, “you’re not as aware … of how you’re sounding to somebody else when you’re doing the tape because you’re just listening to yourself like you always do” (Vytau and Cathy Virskus 2019). In most the free-associative tapes described above, this was certainly true but, as Cathy—the creator of the most meticulously produced and deliberately controlled audio clips in my corpus—was also aware, careful curation of pre-existing material can also generate a potent performance.

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Section V: Letterness

As described in Chapter 1, “letterness” refers to epistolarity’s irreducible permeability to any and all genres in the pursuit of asynchronous interpersonal communication. As outlined in

Chapter 2, earlier wartime correspondents stretched textuality and photography to their limits in an effort to share their perspectives on what often seemed incommunicable in prose alone.

Employing cento poems and photographic collage, sheet music song parodies and singing telegrams, silk-spun scenes of wartime destruction and “lovelocks” and baby-tooth pendants, correspondents used what was “at hand” to craft personal messages, playable experiences, and wearable mementos. While Vietnam-era correspondents employed many of the same techniques, the most abundant renewalable resource of the “rock ’n’ roll war” (Herr 1977) was audible

American popular culture, which they “remediated” in their audio letters, both passively and actively, for a variety of purposes, from the mundane to the spiritual. As I have already described above, the auditory frame led many recordists to borrow “ways of speaking” from others genre to aid in developing their own hybrid conventions for self-expression. This section focuses on wholesale appropriation of pre-existing auditory entities.

Soundscape Incursions

Starting with the obvious, the vast majority of service members’ audio letters feature a never-ending radio soundtrack. As Doug Bradley and Craig Werner (2015), Meredith Lair

(2011), Lydia Fish, and several others have noted, the “rear echelon” of the US military presence in South Vietnam was saturated with music, coming from one of eleven different AFVN stations, dozens of Southeast Asian stations— (re)broadcast from as far away from Japan—the “Bullshit

Band,” pirate radio, and hundreds of personal transistor radios, tape recorders, turntables. Music

248 blared from loudspeakers in the PX, Officers’ and Enlisted Clubs, and bureaucratic common areas, every open hooch, and (nearly) every bedroom within officers’ housing. In a phrase, music was virtually inescapable, so much so that some recordists apologized when they were unable to accompany their recordings with music due to blackouts or radio breakdowns.

Like the rest of service members’ soundscapes, the ambient musical environment provided both a frequent distraction and a steady source of “content,” especially when “ad- libbing.” George Joliff began his first audio letter home with a very formal introduction: “To Jim,

To Cheryl, To Sarah and to Susan, I give you this, with my love, a letter,” and then a song dedication, featuring the guitar solo from a popular hit.334 Throughout the remainder of the thirty- minute tape, Joliff employed several more musical cues to introduce topics. Primarily, though, he used spoken radio as backdrop, mostly tuned to AFVN News, so that he could comment on current affairs, pausing often to hold the microphone up to the speaker, then turning the radio down to offer his opinion on the latest draft initiative, Cambodia, morale, and other relevant topics (Joliff, TTU, 1054AU0803).

In a letter to his wife, Crane was in the middle of discussing a current dispute between him and his commander regarding the size of LZs (“landing zones”), when he abruptly stopped: “

… we’re going into LZs with forty-foot diameter trees, with a forty-eight-foot rotor system, ya know, a foot on each side, which is kinda hard to do.”335 Crane let the music get louder in the background, revealing the middle of The Boxtops’ “The Letter” (1967) (Crane, TTU,

1787AU2121). After letting the first part of the chorus play, “Lonely days are gone, Ima goin’ home / My baby, she wrote me a letter,” he waited for the instrumental break to say “Ya

334 George Joliff, “Audio Letter to home from SP5 Joliff, 12 November 1970 / Letter from home, 22 November 1970.” George Jolliff Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1054AU0803, November 22, 1970 (Hereafter, cited as “Joliff, TTU, 1054AU0803”). 335 Richard Crane, “03 December 4th,” Richard Crane Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1787AU2121, December 4 (Hereafter, cited as “Crane, TTU, 1787AU2121”). 249 remember this?” [audibly smiling widely] (ibid.). The music rising again, Crane sings along with

Gary Talley, “Well, she wrote a letter, said she couldn’t live without me no more,” (though

Crane, not clear on the lyrics, awkwardly fades out half way through). After the following line,

“Give me a ticket for an aeroplane / Ain't got time to take a fast train,” Crane, almost giggling, says “That’s what I need is a [plane] ticket … that train’d never make it! [smiling so wide he descends into giggling]. Letting the rest of the verse play out, he turns the radio down, saying,

“…well, anyway, back to the story!” (ibid). In the middle of an irate rant, this song interpellated

Crane, who was immediately stopped in his conversational tracks, recalling a shared, musical moment with his wife so pleasurable that his irritation immediately melted away, plunging him into a fantasy of escaping his current predicament, but also joking about the ineffectuality of a train from Vietnam to “the world.” This song’s relevance also struck Crane in the context of an ongoing “scheme,” discussed on the tape just prior, for Joanne to potentially “fake” a nervous breakdown, a workaround to allow Crane to take his leave much earlier, giving highly personal and specific weight to the line “… said she couldn’t live without me no more.”336 These moments abound on Vietnam-based tapes, recordists using emotionally-resonant lines to underscore important points to constructing musical “conversations” out of disparate samples.

In another tape, Vogel “introduced” himself with an appropriated DJ cue: “Spotlighting the total hit sounds of music power, Now!” (Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2311). After saying his hellos on the tape, the reason becomes clear as he happily reported that he had received twenty-two birthday cards, “twenty one [of them] from Gail,” and relates a story about how the mail carrier

“...almost died when he saw all that mail in my area. [He] said to me, ‘Well, you must have some fan club, Vogel.’ I said, ‘Well, tee tee, tee tee…’” (ibid.) A few minutes later, after having gotten

336 Richard Crane, “01 First Month, First Tape,” Richard Crane Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1787AU2119, Undated. 250 up to get his fifth beer, he said, “I’ve been drinking a little bit tonight, so I feel pretty good” and then he abruptly cut the tape to catch the title line from Dionne Warwick’s “(And I Think I’m)

Going Out of My Head,” before cutting back to his primary message (ibid.).

Shared Listening

Others sought to share their own listening experiences, remediating whole songs that meant something special to them and contained a message they wished to share. In a tape to Ernie

Miller, his lover started with Country Joe and the Fish’s version of “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin’-to-Die

Rag” (1967), complete with a thirty-second outro of uninterrupted machine gun fire, before relating a particularly harrowing story about attempting to regain custody of her son from his increasingly violent father (only recently returned from Vietnam himself).337 Throughout, she emphasized how much easier things would be if Ernie were there with her (ibid.). This use of music is unusual in my corpus—although recordists were intent on self-expression, the primary purpose of musical remediation was comfort, familiarity, and escapism. Explicitly political musical material appeared, but these instances were few and far between—most often they occurred as a backdrop to a tape from the front, though typically recordists did not comment on their political meaning at the time.

In another tape from Fillmore, he played a song recorded by himself and others in his unit from a badly-scratched up record. (This tape is now part of the unit’s larger, official archive.)

[D]uring every period of hard times, there some songs, telling of those hard time, plus the good times, and some of these songs are just made up on the spot, from

337 Miller Family, “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 4),” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1857AU2254, 1966. 251

experiences or war stories … this is one such song called “The Ballad of the San Ray Valley.”338

In addition to their own songs, service members remediated other units’ live recordings, comedy skits, parodies, and other circulating occupational folk material from the era339 (Miller, TTU,

1857AU2255; Fillmore, TTU, 1154AU0955).340 Several also shared dozens of examples from the

Southeast Asian stations in the area, with varying degrees of cultural sensitivity, ranging from

George Joliff’s attempt to learn a Vietnamese song with a local woman, 341 to Ernie Miller’s offer:

“here’s some more slope music” (Miller, TTU, 1857AU2252).

Material shared from home took two primary forms. In the first, parents, siblings, spouses, or other family members brought their absent intimates along on important family outings involving relatives, including choir concerts, school plays, public speeches, talent shows,

Christmas pageants, and similar events. In these cases, the knowledge of the tape recorder’s being in the audience (or even positioned on stage), metonymic of the passive yet supportive presence of the absent parent, uncle, aunt, or spouse, seemed more important than the capturing of the event itself. Using another advertised application of the early recorders, many of these tapes also featured recordists practicing speeches, solos, school presentations, and other preparatory rehearsals. Many, though not all,342 were teenagers, sometimes recording for their absent parent to

338 Dale Fillmore, “Audio from Dale Fillmore to his wife, February 1971,” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1154AU0954, February 4, 1971. 339 MSgt Morris MacKinney, “Recording of an Americal Division (23rd Infantry Division) Sergeant singing in a hooch in Chu Lai, Vietnam,” Charles Scarborough Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1556AU1611, Undated. 340 Fillmore and Miller both presaged their offerings with warnings about the appropriateness of the content, Fillmore even going to so far as to suggest that his wife ask her father, or one of her brothers, to listen to it first. 341 George Joliff, “Vietnam, Television & Kim's Voice, 1970,” George Jolliff Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1054AU0816, Undated. 342 One tape from Dale Moorman’s parents included a lengthy Bible Study (another form of semi- performative event), followed by a “sermon preparation” session with local clergy (Moorman, TTU, 1330AU1330). 252 offer critique and advice, sometimes giving the themselves an opportunity to evaluate their technique with “neutral ears,”343 or, if younger, simply an opportunity to practice or show off for the adults operating the tape recorder (Whitehead, TTU, 2166AU2450; Moorman, TTU,

1330AU1330).344 Like the metamediative moments above, these sessions provided the listener access to the false starts, flat notes, voice cracks, and other features of preparing to face the world that only those closest would be privy to.

In the second, at the request of service members, correspondents were asked to tape specific material, including songs by particular artists, television shows, or radio programs. “You think you could send me a tape with the Crusaders on it?” (Vogel, TTU, 1863AU2310).

Unsurprisingly, these requests most often came from those in Vietnam. Despite the fact that (at least their rear echelon) service was saturated with American popular culture, the majority of what was available was sanctioned (and thus sanitized). What might be anachronistically described as “on demand” was only available through short-lived and hyper-localized hijacking of unused bandwidths by merry pranksters (like Radio First Termer). Importantly, while written letters might contain topical requests or an accompanying photo, only audio letters could contain these gifts within themselves.

More often, however, these moments came as a deliberate effort to give those absent a taste of home: stateside recordists captured pre-recorded songs, late night comedy skits, radio shows, and television shows (Gunby 1967, T4).345 On a few tapes, Arturo Garcia’s mother sent him “Mexican music.” On one of these tapes she prefaced the upcoming song by saying, “We

343 Janice’s younger sister, Judy, recorded a version of her upcoming solo, “Happy Talk” (incidentally from South Pacific) that she only later realizes was included on Janice’s most recent tape letter (Whitehead, TTU, 2166AU2450). 344 Judy Whitehead, “Pata Speech,” Janice Whitehead Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2166AU2458, Undated. 345 Livingston Family, “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents, # 13, 5 April 1967,” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 2212AU2496, April 5, 1967. 253 wanted to send you a little bit more music so you [could] flip up your heart a little bit, your latin blood, [laughs],” her tone a tad facetious but the note of worry in her voice also indexing a real desire to help him in any way she can.346 Importantly, in this and several other similar recordings by families whose radio or record player was typically located in the main living area, the tape recorder picked up the family’s vibrant participation (singing along, the sounds of dancing, kid’s shouting out “Hiya!”) and the echoing of the songs in a familiar space. Thus, in addition to acting as personalized gifts based on intimate knowledge of a listener’s preferences—and, in the context of radio/TV capture, access to the local news/business commercials, radio personalities, and other features of a local media world—they also transmitted the recognizable, lived spaces of collective consumption: the domestic equivalent of popular, collective communitas only possible in group settings. Tapes like these, in which the recordist has essentially “let the tape run” in the presence of radio, television, or home stereo play, did not simply serve to share personally-curated media with those absent (though this in itself was a vital means of conjuring presence). They also transmitted, often unintentionally, the sonic ephemera of daily life: the “primary signal” of a song or show was interrupted or subsumed beneath others’ layered “voices,” from the domestic to the bureaucratic.

Some compilations, however, did resemble what would soon come to be called a

“mixtape.” With thousands of songs at their fingertips—housed in their on-base audiovisual centers, floating on the disjointed airwaves, collected from home, or borrowed from friends, reel- to-reel provided the first real opportunity to compile one’s own carefully curated collection of favorite songs, unit favorites, event-specific “playlists” and others forms of “phonographic anthologies” (Lacasse and Bennett 2019). Just as many units or outfits had a resident

346 Garcia Family, “Audio Letter,” Arturo Garcia Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 712AU0030, July 30, 1968. 254 photographer, several also had a designated DJ, the go-to player for hooch party requests, birthday parties, or lonely songs at the wake.347 Although many service members did own portable vinyl record players, even lugging them into the bush, vinyl can melt. Large-format reels allowed one to record up to six hours of continuous music, though these reels also required large, immobile machines on which to play them. Smaller reels were explicitly intended for voice use, but many sacrificed quality for portability, taking their transistor radios and their recorders wherever they went.

I will return to these practices in more depth in my conclusion; here, I will highlight one instance of a distant lover attempting, through music alone, to offer her husband a relaxing journey through a worry-free theater of the mind. After thirty minutes of relaxing easy listening and Latin-infused instrumentals,” Kaye Snead closed her entirely musical tape, saying:

Hi Gary, I sure hope you’ve enjoyed the tape. I think you’ll really enjoy listening to it sometimes when you have a chance to rest and don’t want to have to think about anything. [Smiling] I know that, through your letters that things must be rough at times. I know that’s it’s not easy. I just want you to know that you’re in my prayers every day and think about you so often. I know that if we just stay strong, our faith- and keep our faith strong, it will keep us, and give us all the encouragement that we need. Well, I’ll write more later, the tape is nearly gone, so I’ll see you soon, and I love you. Goodnight.348

Conclusion

By capturing many audible phenomena, from unaccompanied breath to densely layered sociality, the marital bed to a “Huey’s” cockpit, recordists sought to entwine their own and their

347 Vytau Virskus fancied himself in this role, and was also the resident bartender, skills he combined to great and popular effect. 348 Kaye Snead, “Gary Snead 22 (28 Aug 1968),” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number 1393AU1408, August 28, 1968. 255 intimates’ lifeworlds. By creating pockets of shared temporality to reinvigorate, recite/site, but most importantly, re-cognize their shared ways-of-being, they struggled to preserve what they had left behind, while allowing their relationships’ space to stretch in the face of sociopolitical and personal rupture, where change, and often trauma, were inevitable. In the process, they expanded the possibilities of 20th-century epistolarity, employing new prosthetics of presence, and forging new modes of connection that would become integral to fin-de-siècle networked public intimacy.

In the final chapter, I will explore the role of audio epistolarity in shaping the DIY, amateur ethos of the American Underground through the lens of the mixtape, the aestheticized (and most mythologized) outgrowth of a network built on intimately connecting, countercultural, subaltern voices in the crisis of conformity that was Reagan’s America.

256

Conclusion: Legacies of Audio Epistolarity

By the end of major hostilities in 1972 (and complete US withdrawal in 1975), the audio letter had largely disappeared as cultural practice. The practice had arisen as a contingent adaptation of existing technology in the face of unexpected relational rupture; after the war, there was little need for the medium. Its primary users were reunited (or forever separated). Some members of the military extended their commitments or sought longer military careers. These were reassigned to other posts, likely still distant (if often stateside) from their intimates—but at least they had access to each other through the US’s rapidly expanding communications349 and transportation infrastructures.350 Though some tapes were kept, the absence of a need for a strong metonymic connection and thus little “heirloom effect” meant most tapes were not consciously preserved, often stored alongside prerecorded materials by accident. A large number of the tapes I collected from my snowball sampling were donated by recordists who were sure they had thrown them away. Although none claimed to have thrown out their written letters, the letters were often found right alongside their tapes. This recurring scene prompted my initial impression that tapes,

349 Struggling to accommodate a threefold increase in mail since 1940 (from 27.7 to 63.7 billion pieces a year), the postal system strengthened its network and budget (while at the same time facing new competition from FedEx (founded in 1975) and United Postal Services (UPS) which, in 1961, expanded its PNW-specific business, coast-to-coast) (“America’s Mailing Industry,” Smithsonion National Postal Museum, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/americasmailingindustry/United-States-Postal-Service.html.). 350 Between the mid-60s and mid-70s, households with telephones jumped from 78% to 92%, the volume of mail exchange by 30%, and the ratio of automobiles to US citizens rose from 1:3 to 1:2; all of which contributed to an increasingly mobile, yet connected, population (“Historical Census of Housing Tables, United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/phone.html; “Chapter 2: Moving People,” Bureau of Transportation Statistics, https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/transportation_statistics_annual_report/2016/chapter_2.). 257 though highly salient in the moment, like a phone call (which few would even consider recording), lacked the auratic quality of written letters.351

One genre that fell just outside the “audio letter” criteria for inclusion in my corpus (but more of which survived) were tapes intended to accompany projection “slide shows.” Slide photography became another popular practice in the early 1960s, offering a middle ground between the arduous and expensive dark room development of traditional photography, and the poor quality of Polaroid images. Then as now, the primary purpose of personal photography was to be shared, often as part of a larger narrative “performance” for friends and family, for which

Kodak provided the rotating “carousel,” released in 1964. Slides were a cheap and easy way to photographically document service members’ time in-country: many service members (including my grandfather) took hundreds of slides, often sending them home in numbered “batches” along with tapes containing the recordists’ narrations. The other form that saw sustained use upon return—and sometimes insinuated itself into family folklore and traditions—were musical tapes.

Many continued listening to their in-country compilations long after they returned. These recordings functioned in both their original capacity as self-curated collections of material derived from dozens of other sources, but also as memory triggers,352 each “mix” evoking its spatiotemporal context of creation and primary audition. Others, like Cathy Virskus.’s pseudo- studio produced ballads for Vytau, became a regular part of life-cycle rituals like anniversaries and birthdays. Most recently these ballads were remediated by Cathy and Vytau’s son as a tribute during his wedding last summer.

351 Liz Stanly makes a similar comparison between newspapers and personal letters in her Documents of Life, Revisited (2013). 352 See Bradley and Werner 2015 for detailed, ethnographic accounts of post-war audition of Vietnam-era music, especially the final chapter, "What's going on": Music and the Long Road Home” as it pertains to societal reintegration through musical means. 258

For US service members stationed abroad later in the the Cold War, taping still held some sway. For most, though, their tours of duty offered more flexibility, allowing for more frequent leave or the opportunity to have one’s family living in the same city with you. Other tours were entirely covert, a context in which no communication was possible.353 Always desperate for media, many serving in foreign posts “imported” records and tapes. These were often the first foreign media to arrive and, once distributed, they became a source of consternation for host- country cultural purists and a creative spark for local artists.354 These bases may have represented the farthest points in the fast-growing underground networks of “unofficial” audio exchange building in the late 1970s, mostly populated by the now ubiquitous medium of the compact audio cassette (Bailey 2012). Though this new medium proliferated all over the world,355 its most productive home was the United States, especially as part of the growing “American

Underground” music scene.

The tactical networks developed by the DIY pioneers of the American Underground represented a parallel “art world” (Becker 2008 [1982]), a map of isolated scenes, bright nodes in a dark world of top-down corporate control. The impresarios of the Underground were almost always musicians or artists themselves: in their heads existed a complex tangle of tour routes, punk squats, and venues, an alternative rolodex of willing bookers, engineers, producers, merch and ad artists, and distributors (Azerrad 2002). The Underground was less a scene than a conglomeration of interdependent counterpublics, mostly but not exclusively delineated by

353 As those serving in this capacity were often required to remain out of contact for very long periods of time, having little to no family was practically a requirement for recruitment. 354 See Campbell 2013 and Gunni 2013 for Iceland as an especially contentious, yet exceptionally productive case study. Given its size, Iceland’s contribution to the contemporary pop canon is disproportionate, a legacy due in part to its mid-way placement between Washington, DC and Moscow. 355 See Abu-Lughod 1999 for uses of tape in Bedouin love poetry, Manuel 1993 for the role of pirated tape exchange in the size and character of Bollywood musical production, Hirschkind 2006 for a more contemporary application of tape into religious ethical audition, and Novak 2013 for a description of tape as a primary medium in the alternative international distribution networks of “Japanoise.” 259 genre—punk, hardcore, riot grrrl—and representing a complex web of aesthetic affiliations and membership motivations. For many, participation was explicitly political and ideological; for others, it was simply best the way to get their music heard, their zines read, or their t-shirts sold.

But for nearly everyone, and especially those isolated in small, rural towns, or conservative enclaves, the Underground was primarily about finding one’s “people”—the other “weirdos”

(punks, goths, LGBTQ, feminists, etc.). These connections expanded one’s circle of support, while also helping to validate one’s constantly challenged worldview.

Operating on a shoe-string budget, Underground events were almost always small and

(noisily) intimate. Attendees were mostly the other bands in the scene (and thus friends). Growing out of tight-knit and often welcoming scenes, “promotion” often amounted to little more than handing someone a flyer, zine, or tape and promising them “Don’t worry, you’ll like it.” The latter might be a single-artist demo, but more often than not it was a compilation, designed to introduce its recipient to a “whole new world” of sound. In an atmosphere already defined by bonding through shared alienation356 and (non)popular culture, via forms already deeply schizophonic and thus ripe for remediation and recontextualization (Fox 2002; Novak 2010), and a DIY ethos, these compilations validated and valorized amateur agency and creativity. What de

Certeau has called “secondary production” flooded these networks: the line between “original composition” and bricolage’d tribute became functionally invisible. As de Certeau states,

“Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others” (xi-xii).

Once a connection was made, often through another intimate counterpublic, mixtapes provided a

356 Though outside the scope of this project, Riot Grrrl in particular represents an important space for amateur production via the creation of intimate publics, one primary form of which were “introductory mixtapes,” allowing young women, intimidated by the “fame” of a primary figure like Kathleen Hanna, to nevertheless reach out. See Kearney 2006, Piepmeier 2009, Schilt and Zobl 2008 for more on zines, music, and the Riot Grrrl “epistolarium.” 260 way to stay in touch, share one’s constantly changing cultural world, and bond in the playfully creative space in which the social circle had formed.

Mixtapes

As alluded to in Chapter 3, early adopters of reel-to-reel inaugurated the “art” of radio capture (Bijsterveld and Jacobs, 2009). Why buy a single when one could pluck the desired song out of the ambient airwaves? Of course, making a precise copy required a degree of attention few wished to expend. One of Bijserveld and Jacob’s interlocutors described their temporal reorganization of their day—eating meals quickly, ignoring errands—around a “neurotic” need to

“get it on tape” (35). Affectively and aesthetically, this impulse is similar to that of the

“obsessive” collectors of vinyl described by Evan Eisenberg (2005) and Amanda Petrusich

(2014), and the “crated-digging” practices that are essential to successful DJing or

“plunderphonic” creativity (Cutler 2000; Brewster 2000).357 As Melanie Lovatt describes it, collecting vinyl recordings was also a gateway practice for many self-described “mixtapers.”

An early love and habitual devotion to daily pop music audition was a helpful prerequisite for developing the audile techniques and patience necessary to produce a successful mix (2005). This is also how my own taping practices started; by the end of high school, resulting in a trunk full of tapes, filled to their edges with radio hits from a precise interval of time, many songs missing their opening ten to fifteen seconds or ending with the beginning of commercials or DJs’ verbal station IDs.358 I typically recorded songs while engaged in daily tasks,

357 This same desire arose in early peer-to-peer sharing networks. The need to find every song by a particularly valued artist required its own sets of skills, including searching with common misspellings, doctoring file extensions, and reaching out to other users for a hard-to-find, and thus coveted, “Japanese B- Side.” 358 My trunk was an official, military-issue foot locker, inherited, along with my first “boom box,” from my uncle Richard after his premature passing in 1988. The boom box, complete with CD player (a rarity in 1988), became my primary “mixtape” tool as it had a built-in radio and two tape slots. 261 accompanied by a radio soundtrack: I remember the distinct temporality of pausing my primary activity to direct my attention to the DJ’s preview of upcoming songs (thus previewing my affective engagement for next fifteen to twenty minutes). In case I had missed it, I would listen intently to every transition between a song and a commercial, in anticipation of having to run to the stereo to hit record for “that one song” that had, for whatever reason, come to define and organize my musical world for the duration of its radio run.

Like Lovatt’s interlocutors, I would not have called these recordings “mixtapes” at the time. They could more accurately be described as diaristic, flashbulb slices of biographical, teenage audition, and as affective resources kept for a later date. Much more than a “random collection of songs,” a true “mixtape” typically required an instigating spark, an organizing principle, theme, or message, a curated and sequenced flow, and, most importantly, an intended recipient whose imagined reception was the filter through which the previous elements were filtered.359

Ars Miscendi: The Art of the Mix

According to its increasingly mythologized history,360 mixtaping grew out of the

“outsider” mail and sound art movements361 of the late 1970s, proliferated along the backroads of

359 As I will only be discussing the cassette form of this practice, and its attendant technological restrictions, I will use this term over the more inclusive “phonographic anthology” (Lacasse and Bennett 2018) though most of the principles articulated here can refer to any physical or digital format. 360 See Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (2005) and Stephen Frear’s eponymous 2000 film adaptation; Thurston Moore’s curated anthology Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette, mixtape-themed (and structured) memoirs Sheffield’s Love Is A Mixtape (2007) and Jason Bitner’s Cassettes From My Ex (2009); and the still-active internet communities Art of the Mix, The Hollow Box Jockey Club, etc. For academic critique of this “nostalgia machine,” see Jansen 2011, Drew 2005, and the travelling folkloric art exhibition KassettenGeschichten: Von Menschen und ihren Mixtapes [“Cassette Stories: Of People and their Mix Tapes”], organized by the Institut für Volkskunde of the University of Hamburg in 2001. For the publication of selections from this exhibition, see Herlyn and Overdick 2005. 361 See Bailey 2012 for more on “underground sound”; Gangadharan 2009 for the role of mail art in establishing pre-internet, networked “art worlds”; and Kienle 2014 for discussion of Ray Johnson’s “correspondence art” oeuvre, a form of collective creation via anonymity of the post (each new recipient 262 the American Underground and, after peaking in the late 1980s, petered out in the early 1990s with rise of the CD and the mainstreaming of “indie rock.” Like the audiotapes sent by members of the military, mixtapes were short-lived, motivated by geographic and socio-cultural divides and economic precarity, and dependent on one-to-one intimate connections through amateur audio recording: mixtaping represents the next major chapter of audio epistolarity.362 In the following section, I describe the basic practices of “the art of the mix” before turning to its semiotically playful spin on auditory intimacy and relational communication in the “courtship,” or “amatory” mix.

On its surface, to anyone other than its recipient, a typical mixtape does seem little more than a collection of co-opted songs, organized by an obsessive fan onto a thirty, sixty, or ninety- minute cassette. But, as Thurston Moore notes, “no mixtape is accidental” (2004, 35). Nearly every mix starts with an “idea”—a clever conceit, a chance, yet perfect juxtaposition of songs, or a new friendship—accompanied by a “surge of energy” and passionate “enthusiasm,” which slowly develops into a unifying theme, purpose or message (Jansen 2009, 45; Lovatt 2005, 48).

Like audio letters before them, tapes recognizing special occasions, from graduations to births, breakups to anniversaries, were common but, as Lovatt notes, a generally intoxicating sense of

“fun” made the process intrinsically satisfying, making any (or no) occasion a worthy excuse to make a mix (2005).363 The impulsive, enthusiastic quality of mixtaping is an important feature:

“adding their piece” and then forwarding on) that created LGBTQ “communities at a distance” and founded pre-Stonewall gay rights networks. This mode of anonymous distribution was taken up by the Hollow Box Jockey Club, and other pre-digital “mixtape” mailing groups within which a member receives a mix and must then respond in kind, knowing nothing about the intended recipient beyond the information included with the originating mix (Godfrey 2003). 362 Paul Willis argues that “home taping” (by which he’s referring to both mixtaping, as well as DIY recording artists) was an inevitable outgrowth of early 1980s US recession (1990). 363 Art of the Mix founder Karten Januszewski’s "Taxonomy of the Mixed Tape,” lists hundreds of examples, from the innocuous “A-Z” to the curiously antagonistic “Scare Your Neighbors” (2002). 263 although I have completed roughly a hundred mixes over the last twenty years, I have started thousands, the spark fading quickly (or being replaced by another).

The outside of a mixtape was often beautifully and/or idiosyncratically decorated. Using the included “J Card” insert, most mixtapes included track listings and personalized messaging.

The more personal the gift or special the occasion, the more likely the gifter would employ all manner of bricolage techniques to create a unique “cover,” exemplifying its theme through magazine cuttings, drawing, cento scraps, and so forth. In the age of the CD mix, one of my primary gifters created elaborate pen drawings, eschewing any information on what was contained on the tape in order to fill all available space with beautiful illustrations.

To begin, the mixtaper assembled the corpus of potential elements in one’s eventual bricolage, a task that might be chaotic or meticulous, minimal or comprehensive, depending on the constraints of the mixtaper’s theme and personal approach to “flow.” With regard to the theme, Bas Jansen notes that many “hardcore mix tapers enjoy walking the fine line between a maximally challenging task and an impossible one” (47): choosing themes like “love is like falling from a height”: an achievable list, but one that requires the mixtaper to work hard to stitch together a musically (stylistically, narratively, autobiographically) coherent sequence.364

Next up, and by far the most time-consuming step, is sequencing.365 As Lovatt notes, some mixtapers were more cavalier, experimental, or haphazard, starting with the first song that came to mind and extemporaneously dubbing from there, more focused on in-the-moment self- discovery than continuity. This practice could result in wonky mixes with “terrible segues and bizarre mood swings,” but also allow for unexpected “beauty [to] emerg[e] with chance, enabling

364 Two of my favorite “challenges,” both competitions with friends of mine, were a musical “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (though I do not remember the starting and ending bands) and a “Seven Vices/Virtues” mix. 365 So much so that many contemporary “playlisters,” myself included, finish winnowing the “wheat for the chaff,” and then suggest their listeners just “hit shuffle and enjoy.” 264 you to discover something new about a song” only possible in its unconventional juxtaposition

(Daisy Wreath 2006, Brian Stosuy 2006 qtd. in Jansen 2009, 46). Others were more rigorous and deliberate. As Nick Hornby’s protagonist in High Fidelity notes, “making a tape is like writing a letter—there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again” (Hornby, 88). For this reason, both fictional “Rob” and real-life Jack Tripper advocated “tracklisting.” That is, they focused special attention on pre-planning every element, most importantly, the first song, which should be

“a corker, to hold the attention,” but also “can’t be too obvious, cheesy, or predictable” nor too obscure, potentially driving the listener away by making them feel alienated or out of their musical depth (Hornby 88; Tripper qtd. in Lovatt 2005, 55). Tripper explained that you “have to ease the listener slowly but confidently” and from there, be scrupulous about your transitions; even if your theme requires stylistic variety, you can’t just “leap from genre to genre without having any linking songs” (ibid.). Over time “loads” of largely unspoken “rules” (in Rob’s words) developed in the community (and have persisted through to today), the most famous (and frequently invoked) of which is “only one track per artist.” If the mixtape is properly executed, the result is the right “flow,” with the desired effect being to shape your listener’s emotional ride.

Like “jabbering” in my interlocutors’ tapes, many mixtapers have reported losing sight of their recipient while composing a mix, focused intently on sequential composition (Lovatt 2005).

Importantly, in the age of cassettes, mixes were necessarily constructed in real time. This procedure also entailed a variety of other technical constraints, issues and its own set of conventions, from filling all available space and adjusting to the “two-act” structure of Side

A/Side B, to precisely adjusting pauses between tracks. In addition, one had to worry about

265 equalizing inconsistent volume from track to track, as well as origin format quality (the transition from a scratched-up 45 to pristine CD could be jarring).366 As Lovatt’s informant Richard stated,

There’s something incredible about making tapes … because you hear every track as you’re doing it, you’re actually getting a feel of what’s going to be on there. You know exactly how it’s going to sound (Lovatt 59).

As discussed in Chapter 4, this shared temporality between recordist and listener was key to my interlocutors’ “mutual-tuning-in,” and also central to the “scaffolding” of musical memory

(DeNora 1999).

Mixes served a variety of intrapsychic and interpersonal functions from “educational” introductions to new bands to annual “keeping in touch” catch-ups, to “memory triggers” recording past experiences,367 and post-event “summaries,” the latter functioning like sonic photo albums.368 Mixes might be created for special purposes such as road trips or club openings.

Though self-directed mixes were common,369 the prototypical mixtape was a gift, composed with a singular recipient as focus and structuring presence, requiring a “tightrope” balance in composition between artistic self-expression (i.e. the creator’s ego) and attention paid to the recipient’s impressions and enjoyment. As Sara Bir notes, to some extent, all mixtapes are “self- portraits”: [e]ven when we make [them] for other people—especially when we make [them] for other people—we make them for ourselves” (Bir 2006).

366 In the days of early peer-to-peer sharing, the same issues persisted, especially concerning inconsistent playback volume and variable bit rate quality. 367 One of Lovatt’s informants, whose memory was “terrible,” described composing mixes before every vacation in order to give herself a pre-made soundtrack with which to imbricate her future experiences (2005). 368 This is a form I compose often. Following annual friend reunions, I often retrospectively catalogue “fan favorites” from the trip, new discoveries, or songs that sound-tracked moments of special significance. 369 This was also the norm in Vietnam, the majority of the purely musical tapes I discovered compiled from audio-visual centers for private, or barracks consumption, rather than as epistolary gift. 266

Addressing this negotiation between self and other, the organizers of the University of

Hamburg’s Kassettengeschichten project identify four relational “types” of mixtapers: 1) the communicator, whose primary goal is to establish a bond through a ritual of mutual exchange; 2) the provider, who only wishes to share great music as widely as possible; 3) the missionary, a more prescriptive version of the provider, whose goal is to lead the listener to “the right music,” and who hopes for enthusiastic “obedience” from the listener; and 4) the egoist, whose concern for the recipient is next to none (Lovatt 2005, 72-73). Although these categories are somewhat reductive, and any given mixer might fall into all of them at various times, the categories do highlight the tension between a mixtaper’s drive for aesthetic authenticity and musical autopoesis, with a desire to present themselves in a positive light while also entertaining the recipient and communicating a particular message.

The largest functional departure between audio letters and mixtapes is the shift from direct (relatively) unmediated utterance to the notoriously semiotically slippery medium of

(prerecorded) song as a communicative channel. Many mixtapes’ “messages” boil down to little more than “don’t we have similar taste?,” but others are far more specific, and their stakes much higher. On the one hand, individuals employ music every day as a resource to communicate

“emotions, meanings and intentions in a manner which is often much more succinct than spoken or written language could ever be” (Lovatt 2005, 46). On the other, no matter how careful one is in attempting to filter the culturally-specific affective resonances of musical cues, intertextual density of lyrical content, extra-musical associations, and a host of other potentially meaningful signs and signals, there is always the possibility of misinterpretation. This irreducible ambiguity is one reason for the mixtape’s frequent use, and default cliché categorization, as a “traditional courtship tool,” employed in dozens of rom-coms by “shy teenagers who are unwilling or unable to speak directly to their intended potential partner” (62).

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Linking the “amatory” mixtape to earlier forms of courtship ritual, including the carte de visite, Kamal Fox examines its function as a ludic “invitation to play a game,” its theme and intent comprising the central “riddle asked of the listener” (2002). Employing Gerald Prince’s narratological system and its “quadrumvirate of agents,” the narrator, the persona, the narratee and the reader (or, in this case, “auditor”), Fox describes the mixtape as “a lure that’s meant to draw the auditor into the narrator’s ken” by containing “just the right amount of sentiment”

(ibid.). In Prince’s system, the “narrator” is the mixtape author, who constructs a parallel representation in the form of an idealized “persona”: both entertaining and solicitous, the persona acts as a mask, a buffer between “vulnerability and consummation,” and it protects the narrator’s ego (ibid.). The author, through the narrative of the mix, also constructs the narratee, the “You” addressed by the persona; the mix is “the projection” of the “narrator’s desire” and the “narratee the personification of that desire” (ibid.). The auditor, i.e. the actual listener, must then make sense of the “polysemous and heavily encoded narrative” into which the narrator has placed conventional “anchorages,” or “signs of the ‘You,’” in the form of obvious song names, references to shared histories, favorite artists, and so on (ibid.). Ultimately, the auditor then decides if they identify with the narrator’s “proposed” narratee. If the answer is “no,” the author can feign ignorance or cite different interpretations of the cultural products employed. If “yes,” then a connection has been made, but through a constructed persona that will eventually need to be reconciled with the “true” author (as if there were such a thing). Fox continues by calling the mixtape “the eximious embodiment of the tensions” between “cliché and sincerity,” consumerism and consummation, in our current “love culture,” which is increasingly defined by constant remediation, irreducible intertextuality, and the fundamental fracturing of subjectivity (ibid).

According to Fox, the mixtape is

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a way of expressing oneself without pretending that there is some honest, unmediated ‘self’ to express … a cultural product made up of cultural products, a referencing system that references other such systems. Since all musical practices are based on this borrowing and quoting and this wish to build social bonds through cultural commodities, mixed tapes, in turn, are not about the disclosure of the ‘self,’ they are instead about creating a sense of availability.

When viewed narratologically, conscious identity itself, like a mixtape, is perceived as a linearly progressive sequence of salient moments, strung together by the individual into a cohesively structured “story, that, in its phenomenological unity, transcends a given experience to create a

“whole that is greater than its parts” (Cavarero 2000).

Charting the explosion of discourse surrounding cassette culture a decade after its demise, Bas Jansen attempts to differentiate the uniquely temporal character of re-encountering oneself via mixtape compared to other forms of folkloric collectanea, including photographs and diaries (2009). In discussing the latter two, he proposes the analogy of a “frozen mirror,” seeing a photograph of oneself akin to viewing a third person, an exterior approximation; and in the diary, a former, yet similarly static “state of mind” (44). In contrast, Jansen notes, many of those describing the experience of listening to an old mixtape employ more active, experiential, spatiotemporal analogies involving “going back in time,” or “being there, in that place” (45).

To differentiate the two, Jansen employs Paul Ricoeur’s theorization of the always ongoing narrative construction of subjectivity, which implies an unbroken coextensivity of one’s current and historical selves, as comprising two, intertwined processes, “idem” and “ipse” (50).

The latter, “ipseic self,” refers to the immediate, first person perspective: the “terrestrial and corporeal condition,” that, like “the real,” “cannot become the object of consciousness” until the moment is no longer bound up in one’s intentional “being-in-the-world” (ibid.; Merleau-Ponty

2002). The “idem,” for Ricoeur, recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “habit body” and Pierre

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Bourdieu’s “illusio”: it comprises an individual’s conscious awareness of “inclinations, habits, and identifications,” which form the lens through which new ipseic experiences are incorporated.

The narrative framework of consciousness drives one to constantly search for “meaningful causal connections” to construct a unity from perceptions of a constantly changing world; as Ricoeur states, “the contingency of the event contributes to the necessity, retroactive so to speak, of the history of a life, to which is equated the identity of the character” (1992, 147).

Listening to an old mixtape allows a person to reexperience, rather than simply recall, the

“heterogeneous elements of a past lifeworld” (49). Moreover, their ipseic encounter, partially bypassing their idemic construction, reengages their historical, assemblage-like “being-in- connection-with music, technology, and social relations” (51). This sensation is augmented by their previously hyper-interactive visual, auditory, and tactile, but most importantly, affective engagement with these elements at the time of the mixtape’s creation (51). Although music is particularly salient in the context of one’s own historical composition of “self,” all music has the capacity to engage similar temporal travel due to its irreducibly polythetic character. As Simon

Frith notes, songs

provide a vivid experience of time passing. Music forces our attention on the feeling of time; songs are organized (it is part of their pleasure) around anticipation and echo, around endings to which we look forward, choruses that build regret into their fading (Frith 1987, 40).370

Like an album or a band’s live set, a mixtape extends this process over the course of thirty to ninety minutes. Moreover, the songs are chosen, sequenced, and narratively constructed just for you, giving this procession of “momentary intimacies” an intimately interpersonal valence.

370 For more on the role of expectation and emotion in musical repetition and variation, see Huron 2006 and Meyer 1956 for Western art music, and “Part II” of Frith 1996 for popular forms. 270

In Music in Everyday Life (1999), Tia DeNora examines the myriad ways in which ordinary people employ prerecorded music as a resource for constructing “technologies of self,” agentic modes of self-regulation and awareness in the moment. This musical reflexive introjection also extends to the “construction, reinforcement and repair of one’s [historical]

‘thread’ of self-identity” (1999, 45). Through the filter of one’s culture’s values for personhood, one continually “compost[s] past experiences” in order to cultivate “self-accountable imageries of self” (ibid.). These “imageries” provide not only the materials of a coherent self-image, but also the phenomenological character and confirmation of highly emotional moments of one’s personal dialectic narrative. Through reliving these moments one can feelingfully reconstruct or recognize

“the sense of capacity within which one acted,” fusing ‘I am’ and ‘I can’ with agentic momentum to create active trajectories between past, present and future (ibid.).

While most cues to (re)member (such as material objects, scents, gestures) are symbolic of, or indexical to, the holistic character of a past experience, music’s temporal, polythetic, and affective nature often make it affectively constitutive of experience, rather than simply “co- present” with it. According to DeNora,

the creation of that “moment” as a heightened moment was due in part to the alchemy of respondents’ perceived/sensed of “rightness” or resonance between the situation, the social relationship, the setting, the music, and themselves as emerging aesthetic agents with feelings, desires, moods such that the music was the mood, the mood, the music (DeNora, 49).

This process by which music becomes “a container,” rather than mere soundtrack, “a grid or grammar for the temporal structures of emotional and embodied patterns as they were originally

‘experienced’,” creates a space and scaffolding for a form of intrapsychic bricolage, “a reflexive interlacing of experience (feeling, action) and the materials that are accessed as the referents of

271 experience, its metaphoric and temporal parameters” (49). It is in this way that Ricoeur’s ipseic moments are reconstituted as manageable forms, able to be idemically slotted into an individual’s self-narrative. Thus, musical examples can provide “prosthetic biographies” that, when operating as a cue, become icons of emotional and agentic identities and provide a “device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of a moment, its dynamism as emerging experience” and even a resource for “making manifest what may have been latent or even absent the first-time- through” (ibid. 48). When incorporated into longer stretches in the context of a mixtape, these can provide windows into other modes of being one’s past self but, more importantly, being-for- others.

One of Lovatt’s informants, Hannah Godfrey, provided a wonderfully evocative example, recalling a tape made while on holiday, one that changed her life. She described meeting an instant intimate while “strawberry picking in Denmark”:

It sounds ridiculous, but it did. And that tape was very much a part of it. And I made a tape of a girl who I made friends with, I went through her music collection and made a tape out of her music, and listening to that now, it’s a very sweet sort of melancholy. But I can’t listen to it all the time (Godfrey in Lovatt 2002; italics mine).

This example captures much of the interpersonal agency and emotional salience of this practice.

Deeply personal, the motivating “idea” not just clever or fun, but the evocatively metonymic phrase “of a girl,” the tape intended as commemoration of a place, time, activity and person, together comprising a deeply impactful “momentary intimacy,” already tinged with the knowledge that it won’t/can’t continue due to geographic separation (Maclaren 2014; Stewart

2007). Its curation and sequencing process is both deeply intimate—searching another’s music collection for personally salient toe-holds akin to climbing through another’s mind/heart/soul—

272 and also invigoratingly constraining,371 limiting oneself to a completely unfamiliar catalogue.

Selection, in this case, is personally transformative, allowing one to “find yourself” in another’s musical world (minor “momentary intimacies” in themselves), while also discovering new songs and anthological connective tissue, filling gaps in one’s own knowledge, and imagining one’s role in this only-recently-a-stranger’s life. The resulting tape was iconic in its short, packaged, polythetic temporality; and it was indexically resonant, a tangible memorialization of an exceptional shared experience, and a parting thank-you gift for accommodation and friendship.

During her travels homeward, Godfrey likely listened to the tape via a similarly personalizing technology, the personal stereo.

Personal Stereos

The new freedom to curationally control one’s listening world was accompanied by another new technology, allowing one to take that world anywhere. Released in 1979, the

Walkman did not “invent” mobile listening—transistor radios, portable record players and car radio and tape players were common, if not ubiquitous by this point, providing a convenient set of expectations for music-on-the-go and “privacy in public” that Sony used as a marketing platform.

Nevertheless, the personal stereo dramatically altered the relational character of this activity, offering a new degree of geographic freedom even as its users found control to be one of its most enticing qualities (Bull 2006).372

371 As Michael Bull (2006) has pointed out, one of the emergent practices arising from the combination of iPods and aux cables or tape adapters is shared DJing via mobile “domestic jukeboxes” at parties and on road trips. In the latter case, I have often been handed a friend’s MP3 player and asked to “put something on.” In such cases I have enjoyed relinquishing control, and thus the ever-present anxiety of my own ego or preferences steering the playlist off course; but I also relished the challenge to make something cohesive happen in unfamiliar waters, keeping the mood of the passengers together and afloat. Several of the handwringing articles I read on music blogs after Apple announced its decision to remove the auxiliary post from the iPhone cited and mourned the “death” of these and similar practices. citations? 372 As mobile music technology has proliferated, music has become an increasingly important resource for service members. Like their forebears in Vietnam, listeners employ music for mood regulation, affect 273

Based on ethnographic work with everyday listeners, Michael Bull described the personal stereo as offering a new form of “self-improvisation,” gaining power over one’s mood, thoughts, and socio-environmental interaction in an “accompanied solitude constructed through a manufactured industrialised auditory” (134). Bull’s interlocutors described a number of

“strategies” of transporting themselves into their own auditory world. Their reasons for using the technology were explicitly interactional. They used the device as a “boundary demarcator,” controlling one’s interaction with others to tame the chaos of navigating urban spaces; or they used earphones as a “do not disturb” sign, especially helpful for women on the subway. They also played music to “allay” a sense of isolation,373 “taming” one’s internal chaos by clearing a “safe space” in which the incursion of unwanted thoughts could be curbed; or they reclaimed “boring time” they had been robbed of by a long commute (ibid.). Some uses were even slightly fantastical: people creating their own “soundtracks” while traveling through unfamiliar spaces, aestheticizing the “journey” into an “audio-visual spectacle” starring the listener by “remaking” the urban “to fit in with their thoughts … a mimetic aesthetic impulse” (ibid.). Some listeners imagined transcending their “real” world entirely, using music as an “auratic mnemonic” to

“conjure up feelings and sensations from their own narratives” (135-136).

In all of these cases, the medium is viscerally present, yet almost completely occluded, the music now stereophonically “originating” in the center of one’s head. When the object occupying that space is an as-yet-unplayed “pocket symphony” designed specifically for you, the

diffusion, unit cohesion, folkloric composition, and home-front communication, among many other uses. The primary differences between 1960s technology and today’s are portability, variety, and thus the capacity to precisely personalize and musically accompany nearly any activity, with one’s aural sanctuary repositioned in the center of one’s head by noise-cancelling earbuds (Pieslak 2009; Gilman 2016; Daughtry 2015). 373 Bull relates this practice to other media users who turn the television on when they walk in the door to “create the feelings of a home inhabited” (135). 274 anticipation of the auratic “first listen” that will irrevocably color the song, the mix and your relationship with its maker, can be intense—so much so that some have trouble ever hitting play.

Postscript

Before donating his friend’s tapes to Lost & Found Sound, Tim Duffy, now a long-haul trucker, had been listening to them on repeat, his long dead friend, Michael Baranowski, keeping him company on his nighttime journeys, the road as black as a fighting hole, but not quite as lonely.

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Works Cited

Archival Collections

National Archives and Records Administration Ohio Historical Society (OHS) Texas Tech University Vietnam Center & Archive (TTU) Smithsonian Institution, National Postal Museum (NPM) Veterans History Project, Library of Congress Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection

Selected Primary Sources

Bowe, Thomas. “Christmas Eve, Vietnam 1968 (Part one) & (Part two).” Peggednyc, June 8, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtgTpmaFfEg&t=19s. Egloff, Christina, and Jay Allison. “The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Corporal Michael Baranowski.” All Things Considered. 2000. Gunby, James, Joan, Faith, Valerie, Richard, Lori and Holly. “Tapes 1-5,” Spokane, WA, USA and Khorat Air Force Base, Thailand. Harsh, Michael. “Reel to Reel Letter.” in AV 57 Michael Harsh Collection 1967-1968, Ohio Historical Society Manuscripts/Audiovisual Collections. Head, Steven. “Cassette Tape / Recorded in December 1970 From Phuc Vihn, Viet Nam.” Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 10:52 AM EST. http://vimeo.com/14452865. Kowalczyk, Pfc. Frank. “Just to Hear Your Voice.” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, 1969. http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/mailcall/2c.html#kowalczyk Virskus, Cathy. “Song For A Winter’s Night.” 1969.

Selected Interviews

Vytau and Cathy Virskus, Interview by Author, January 15, 2019. Jim and Joan Gunby, Interview by Author, December 21, 2012. Jim and Joan Gunby, Interview by Author, August 15, 2016. Steve Frankiewich, Interview by Author, July 13, 2017. Horton, Michael. Interview by Monty Alan Hostetler. Michael Horton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Item Number, OH0039, February 26, 1990. https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/37581.

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Conference Papers

Campbell, Matthew. “Gotta Keep It Loose": A Processual Performance Analysis of Live Band Karaoke in Central Ohio Paper Presented at Midwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology 2011 Annual Conference: "Music in Everyday Life", Bowling Green University, 9 April 2011. Campbell, Matthew. Affective Traces: Sounds of Intimacy and the Phenomenology of the Voice in Amateur Tape Exchange during the Vietnam Conflict, Paper Presented at IU/OSU Folklore and Ethnomusicology Graduate Student Conference, The Ohio State University, 17 February, 2012a. Campbell, Matthew. Reel-to-Real: Sounds of Intimacy and the Phenomenology of the Voice in Amateur Tape Exchange during the Vietnam Conflict, American Folklore Society Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, 24 October, 2012b. Campbell, Matthew. Affective Traces: Sounds of Intimacy and the Phenomenology of the Voice in Amateur Tape Exchange during the Vietnam Conflict, Paper Presented at British Forum for Ethnomusicology's 2012 Annual One Day Conference held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 24 November 2012c. Campbell, Matthew. Crossing the Concertina Wire: Icelandic-American Pop-Performance Relations On and Off Keflavik Naval Base During the Cold War, Paper presented at Music and Diplomacy Conference, Tufts and Harvard Universities, 2 March 2013. Campbell, Matthew. “’Not Soundin’ Like Yourself’: Distancing Through Vocal Play and the Terror of “Not Knowing” in Reel-to-Reel Tape Exchange, Paper Presented at IU/OSU Folklore and Ethnomusicology Graduate Student Conference, The Ohio State University, 23 April 2016.

293

Appendix A: The Vietnam Center and Archice, Texas Tech University

Crane, Richard. “01 First Month, First Tape.” Richard Crane Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2119. Crane, Richard. “02 Napalm Sticks to Kids.” Richard Crane Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2120. Crane, Richard. “03 December 4th.” Richard Crane Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 4. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2121. Crane, Richard. “07 UH1 Startup, 29 Days.” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2125. Crane, Richard. “08 November 21st, 2 Dead VC.” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2126. Crane, Joanne. “10 Joanne.” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2128. Crane, Richard. “24 Flair [sic] Mission.” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2142. Crane, Richard. “42 No Title.” Richard Crane Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1787AU2161. Cook, Michael. “Bien Hoa is Taking Rockets.” Michael Cook Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, February 26, 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1179AU1487. Day, Gene Thomas. “Audio Letter from Specialist Gene Thomas Day to Mr. and Mrs. M. L. Day.” Gene Thomas Day Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1685AU1695. Day Family. “Audio Letter from Specialist Gene Thomas Day.” Gene Thomas Day Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1685AU1701. Day, Gene Thomas. “Audio Letter from Specialist Gene Thomas Day to Mrs. Roxie V. Wise.” Gene Thomas Day Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, June 07, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1685AU1706.

294

Fenn, Forrest. “Audio letter from Forrest Fenn to Bill Griggs.” Bill Griggs Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=096AU0842. Fenn, Forrest. “Audio letter from Forrest Fenn to Bill Griggs.” Bill Griggs Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=096AU0843. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio Letter from Dale Fillmore to family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 20, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0940. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio Letter #3.” Dale Fillmore Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, February 1968. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0941. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, May 10, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0943. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, June 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0944. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 14, 1970. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0946. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 15, 1970. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0947. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 22, 1970. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0948. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 31, 1970 and January 01, 1971. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0949. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife and family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, January 06, 1971 http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0950. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio from Dale Fillmore to his wife, February 1971.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, February 4, 1971. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0954. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife, February 1971.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, February 13, 1971. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0955. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his wife.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, June 27, 1971. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0959. Fillmore, Dale. “Audio letter from Dale Fillmore to his family.” Dale Fillmore Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, March 21, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1154AU0962. Fish, Eddie. “On the Road to Con Thien by Eddie Fish.” Frances T. Shea Buckley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1662AU1621. 295

Garcia Family. “Audio Letter.” Arturo Garcia Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=712AU0023. Garcia Family. “Audio Letter.” Arturo Garcia Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, July 30, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=712AU0030. Haldeman, Robert Bruce. “Audio letter from Maj. Robert Haldeman to Barbara Haldmen.” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, January 11, 1970. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1912AU2258. Haldeman Family. “Audio letter to Maj. Robert Haldeman.” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 24-25, 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1912AU2273. Haldeman Family. “Audio letter to Maj. Robert Haldeman.” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, November 30, 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1912AU2285. Haldeman, Robert. “Audio letter from Mrs. Barbara Haldeman to Mrs. Elsie Guest.” Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, January 20, 1970. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1912AU2296. Haldeman, Robert Bruce. “Country Music by Bob & Robbie." Robert Bruce Haldeman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1912AU2298. Hirsch, Howard S. “Correspondence between Howard Hirsch and his family.” Howard S. Hirsch Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, May 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1472AU1537. Hirsch Family. “Correspondence between Howard Hirsch and his family.” Howard S. Hirsch Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1472AU1545. Hudson, Andrew J. “Audiotape - Recordings of a firefight on Highway 311, September 14, 1969.” Andrew J. Hudson Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, September 14, 1969. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2256AU2444. Joliff, George. “Letter to home, March 15, 1971 recording of Spec. 5 Jolliff.” George Jolliff Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, March 17, 1971. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1054AU0802. Joliff, George. “Audio Letter to home from SP5 Joliff, 12 November 1970 / Letter from home, 22 November 1970.” George Jolliff Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, November 22, 1970. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1054AU0803. Joliff, George. “Vietnam, Television & Kim's Voice, 1970.” George Jolliff Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1054AU0816. Livingston, Lee. “Audio letter from Lee Livingston to his parents, # 1, 27 December 1966,” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, December 27, 1966. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2212AU2484.

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Livingston, Lee. “Audio letter from Lee Livingston to parents, #3.” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, January 15, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2212AU2486. Livingston Family. “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents, # 13, 5 April 1967.” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, April 5, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2212AU2496. Livingston, Lee. “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents, 11 April 1967.” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, April 11, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2212AU2497. Livingston Family. “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents, # 15, 29 May? 1967.” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, May 29, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2212AU2499. Livingston, Lee. “Audio Letters from Lee Livingston to his parents.” Lee Livingston Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2212AU2510. MacKinney, MSgt Morris. “Recording of an Americal Division (23rd Infantry Division) Sergeant singing in a hooch in Chu Lai, Vietnam.” Charles Scarborough Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1556AU1611. Manes Family. “Reel 2: Manes' children.” Hugh Manes Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2270AU2472. Miller, Ernie. “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 1).” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1966. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1857AU2251. Miller, Ernie. “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 2).” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1966. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1857AU2252. Miller, Ernie. “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 3).” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1966. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1857AU2253. Miller Family. “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 4).” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1966. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1857AU2254. Miller, Ernie. “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967 (Reel 5).” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1857AU2255. Miller, Ernie. “Ernie Miller's personal letters to home, 1966-1967.” Ernie Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1857AU2256. Miller, Sandra. “Audio Letter.” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=427AU0437. Miller, Sandra. “Audio Letter.” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=427AU0438.

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Miller Family (and Friends). “Sam & Steph.” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=427AU0441. Miller, Elza. “# 39.” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=427AU0444. Miller Family. “Audio Letter.” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, November 26, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=427AU0455. Miller, Sandra; Terry, and Class. “Audio Letter.” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=427AU0456. Miller Family. “Audio Letter” Elza Miller Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=427AU0458. Moorman Family. “Dale Moorman Collection Tape 5.” Dale Moorman Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1330AU1330. Presgrove, Terry. “Audiotaped letters sent by Terry Presgrove to his parents during his tour in Vietnam, August 1968 to July 1969,” Terry Presgrove Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1968-1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2443AU2557. Shea, Frances. “Trip to Madrid.” Frances T. Shea Buckley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, April 2, 1963. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1662AU1623. Shelton, Larry. “[A]udio letter from Larry Shelton to his family.” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, July 1, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1139AU0890. Shelton, Larry. “[A]udio letter from Larry Shelton to his family.” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1139AU0891. Shelton, Larry. “[A]udio letter from Larry Shelton to his family.” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1139AU0892. Shelton, Larry. “Sounds of war - Under fire: gunshots, motors, explosions, machinegun firing, rocket blasts, voices, reloading." Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1139AU0900. Shelton, Larry. “Audio Letter home from Larry Shelton.” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1139AU0902. Shelton Family. “Audio Letter from home to Larry Shelton.” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1139AU0904. Shelton Family. “Audio letter to Larry Shelton from his family.” Larry Shelton Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, November 9, 1967. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1139AU0905.

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Sheppard, Dr. I. Thomas. “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife.” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1705AU1713. Sheppard, Dr. I. Thomas. “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife.” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1705AU1714. Sheppard, Dr. I. Thomas. “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife.” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1705AU1715. Sheppard Family. “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife.” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1705AU1716. Sheppard, Dr. I. Thomas. “Audio Letter from Major Thomas Sheppard to his wife.” Dr. I. Thomas Sheppard Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1705AU1717. Sikorski, Tim. “Tim, Binh Thuy March 28-29, 1970.” Tim Sikorski Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, March 28, 1970. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2936AU2799. Sikorski, Tim. “Tim, Corpus - San Diego.” Tim Sikorski Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2936AU2808. Smith, Paul. “Gary Snead 39 (Feb 1969).” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, February 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1393AU1425. Snead, Gary. “20 (July or August 1968).” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1393AU1406. Snead, Kaye. “Gary Snead 22 (28 Aug 1968).” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, August 28, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1393AU1408. Snead, Gary. “Gary Snead 23 (6 Oct 1968).” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, October 06, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1393AU1409. Snead, Gary. “Gary Snead 25 (31 Oct 1968).” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, October 31, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1393AU1411. Snead, Gary. “Gary Snead 26 (1 Nov 1968).” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, November 1, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1393AU1412. Snead, Kaye and Class. “Gary Snead 29 (25-28 Nov 1968).” Gary Snead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, November 25, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1393AU1415. Staats, Timothy B. “#1, 1968/11/21.” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, November 21, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=274AU0037. Staats, Timothy B. “#4 May 1969.” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, May 14, 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=274AU0040. 299

Staats, Timothy B. “#7 July 16, 1969.” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, July 16, 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=274AU0043. Staats, Timothy B. “#8 July 24, 1969.” Timothy B. Staats Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, July 24, 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=274AU0044. Tarpley, Joe F. “1968, Ba An to Mrs. T Cu An's Translation.” Joe F. Tarpley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1968. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2354AU2525. Tarpley, Joe F. “1968 Interviews.” Joe F. Tarpley Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, 1968. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2354AU2526. Tschetter Family. “Air Force pilot interview and letter to L. J. Chet Tschetter from children.” L. J. Chet Tschetter Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2573AU2605. Underwood Family. “Audio tape sent to Capt. Lonnie R Spivey.” Ellie B. Underwood, Jr. Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1965AU2348. Underwood Family. “Audio tape sent to Capt. Lonnie R. Spivey.” Ellie B. Underwood, Jr. Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1965AU2352. Underwood Family. “Audiotape sent to Capt. E. B. Underwood, Jr.” Ellie B. Underwood, Jr. Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1965AU2375. Vogel Family. “Audio Letter 1.” Carl Vogel Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, July 9, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1863AU2309. Vogel, Robert. “Audio Letter 2.” Carl Vogel Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, July 20, 1968. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1863AU2310. Vogel, Robert G. “Robert G. Vogel Audio Letter 3.” Carl Vogel Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, July 31, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1863AU2311. Vogel, Robert G. “Robert G. Vogel Audio Letter 4.” Carl Vogel Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, August 18, 1968. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1863AU2312. Whitehead, Janice. “Letter Recorded, Postmarked 15 February 1969, tape 1.” Janice Whitehead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, February 15, 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2166AU2450. Whitehead Family. “Annual Spring Concert 1969.” Janice Whitehead Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Spring 1969. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2166AU2455. Whitehead, Judy. “Pata Speech.” Janice Whitehead Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Undated. https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2166AU2458.

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