The "origin story" of Letters To You's beloved Veterans Day contributor, Doug Bradley

November 11, 2025

Since Letters To You was launched back in 2023, each year we've featured a special Veterans Day contribution to the website from my friend Doug Bradley. Doug is a Vietnam veteran and the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone, and author of DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now also available as an audiobook.

Click here to read Doug's 2023 Veterans Day essay for Letters To You, and click here to read his 2024 Veterans Day essay. In 2024, he also wrote another great piece for us on the 40th anniversary of the Born in the U.S.A. album, which you can read by clicking here. Unfortunately, this year we are unable to feature a 2025 Veterans Day essay from Doug, as he continues to recover from some recent health issues, but I also know that my pal is one tough, positive dude, and we're looking forward to featuring more Doug Bradley contributions here at Letters To You as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I strongly recommend to all of our readers Doug's latest book, The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir, published just a few months ago. As I wrote after reading it and being asked to contribute some advance praise for the book, “We fans of Doug Bradley’s writing already know that, both on his own and in collaboration with Craig Werner for We Gotta Get Out of This Place, he is one of our most honest, insightful, and eloquent chroniclers of the tragic complexities behind the Vietnam War, its aftermath, its veterans’ experiences, and the equally complex role that music has played in those experiences. What most of us don’t know yet, however, is exactly how Doug became this person – his ‘origin story,’ if you will. The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir finally provides us with that. More important, at its heart lies a tale of someone struggling to maintain the best of his humanity in a society bent on the destruction of others, as well as itself. Thus, a book that’s filled with such vivid, moving (though also at times gallows-humor funny,) and ultimately life-affirming recollections simultaneously becomes extremely relevant to our current circumstances.” (It also doesn't hurt that my friend spent his childhood with his working-class family living in a Philly rowhouse, as did yours truly with my own family and Philly rowhouse, albeit two decades later.)

So please click here to check out this excellent book, filled with references to so much great music, as well as the evocative and inspiring memories of a guy who played basketball with The Miracles (while Smokey Robinson wrote a letter in the bleachers,) shared a joint with Grace Slick, and told Dionne Warwick the heartbreaking news that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. Growing up, Doug watched his doo-wop-singing brother and World War II veteran father battle over the birth of rock-and-roll, and encountered a high-school teacher who - despite struggling with some demons of his own - gave to Doug "the courage to find myself in words, to discover and lose and recover my voice." Doug brought the beautiful music and musicians of Stax and Motown to a small college in the West Virginia hills, and he soaked in the sounds of Creedence, Joplin, and Hendrix as an Army journalist in the “air-conditioned jungle” in Vietnam. And - equally important - he's still got some stuff to do and say, thank you very much.

Doug's story and insights, like those of so many of our nation's veterans, need to be shared as widely as possible. Best wishes to all of our veterans and their loved ones for a peaceful, comforting Veterans Day 2025.