Saigon in the 1960s was the place to be. The Vietnam War was at full speed. Hundreds of thousands of Americans and Australians swarmed across this small farming nation. Mighty rivers of American greenbacks poured into what had been the elegant, quiet, devoutly Catholic city of Saigon. As Paul Ham wrote in his definitive book Vietnam: The Australian War: “Along the grand, poinsettia-lined boulevards the Vietnamese rich held parties of obscene ostentation … while people in the backstreets huddled in shanties fashioned out of flattened Coke cans and nibbled on handfuls of rice … ”
The Vietnam War was a musical, TV war to the soundtrack of The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place. All the big stars flew in and out to perform there, feet barely touching the ground. Meanwhile, hundreds of working musicians – many girls and young women – stayed for weeks and months at a time. They were shot at, assaulted, had grenades hurled at them on stage, but they stayed, living embedded in a war zone. This is their story.
“Everything is groovy when you’re 16,” singer Maureen Elkner, who did three tours of Vietnam, tells . “You think about the beautiful beaches and rolling down the hill on a great big tyre. And the men were really good looking. Everything was an exciting first for me. First time on a
