Informal Communication Systems in the Vietnam War: A Case Study in Folklore, Technology and Popular Culture

Popular culture and folklore are interdependent. As part of a matrix of expressive activity and meaning in the lives of the rank and file, they mediate between the discrepancies and help to integrate the individual into the fabric of military life. (Cleveland, Dark Laughter, 3) The men and women who served in Southeast Asia were daily exposed to the many different levels of culture that coalesced around war: official military culture, domestic popular consumer culture, occupational folk culture, vernacular cultures of various sorts ranging from United States regional and ethnic cultures to indigenous Vietnamese and other Asian cultures. They needed to somehow mediate among this array of intersecting, often clashing, cultures, to make sense of them, and, most importantly, to find their own voice to speak about them, and to create their own channels of communication. With classic Yankee ingenuity, this first generation of techies coopted as much as they needed of the official hardware and networks and made them their own, in order to tell and preserve their ow