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“And I was thinking, Oh man, so this is a rice paddy, yes, wow! when I suddenly heard an electric guitar shooting right up in my ear and a mean, rapturous black voice singing, coaxing, 'Now c'mon baby, stop actin' so crazy,' and when I got it all together I turned to see a grinning black corporal hunched over a cassette recorder. 'Might's well,' he said. 'We ain' goin' nowhere till them gunships come.' ¶ That's the story of the first time I ever heard Jimi Hendrix, but in a war where a lot of people talked about Aretha's 'Satisfaction' the way other people speak of Brahms' Fourth, it was more than a story; it was Credentials. 'Say, that Jimi Hendrix is my main man,' someone would say. 'He has definitely got his shit together!' Hendrix had once been in the 101st Airborne, and the Airborne in Vietnam was full of wiggy-brilliant spades like him, really mean and really good, guys who always took care of you when things got bad. That music meant a lot to them. I never once heard it played over the Armed Forces Radio Network.” — Michael Herr