What They Never Told You About Playing Rock & Roll in a War Zone

Stephen Davy was drafted out of a Toys R Us toy gun department in 1967, joined the Air Force to avoid the Army, and ended up loading napalm, two-thousand-pound bombs, and 2.75 rockets at the Pleiku Air Base bomb dump in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. But the part of his story you've never heard is what happened on the weekends: Stephen and his buddy Tom Glenn formed a rock band that played Camp Holloway, Engineer Hill, Fifth Special Forces, and just about every Army camp within reach of Pleiku, often going AWOL to do it, and sometimes catching helicopter rides back to base from pilots who wanted to do loops with the band gear in the cargo hold.

In this episode, Stephen shares the close calls (rocket attacks, a tunneled-in VC sapper team, a leopard outside the rehearsal door), the absurdity (a pet macaque named Colonel Spiker who got drunk in the Airmen's Club), and the quieter moments that stayed with him most — visiting the orphanage outside Pleiku with clothes his parents shipped from the States. He also talks honestly about coming home to Andrews Air Force Base, the PTSD no one was naming yet, getting robbed at gunpoint multiple times working nights at a 7-Eleven, and how a Washington Post want ad eventually led him to a 50-year career as a master violin maker in Laguna Beach.

CHAPTERS

00:30 Growing up — Navy dad, Boonville to Florida to DC 

07:00 The draft notice

08:30 Basic training at Lackland — getting punched, losing a spleen 

12:00 Munitions school in Denver and meeting Tom Glenn 

14:00 Learning to load bombs, fuse rockets, and mix napalm 

20:00 Arriving in Pleiku — Central Highlands, Fifth Special Forces, MIKE Force 

26:00 First rocket attack and the bunker in the tall grass 

38:00 Forming the New Generations Band 

50:00 Pleiku City, the Montagnards, and the orphanage 

58:00 Going AWOL to play Camp Holloway and Engineer Hill 

1:08:00 Flat tire on the way back from a gig 

1:11:00 The colonel who saved the band from being broken up 

1:20:00 Two GIs straight out of the field singing "Hold On, I'm Comin'" 

1:25:00 Helicopter loops with the band gear 

1:28:00 Leaving Pleiku under ground fire 

1:32:00 Coming home — Andrews AFB, security details, and a bank robbery 

1:47:00 Apprenticing under violin masters Tom Nerado and Albert Mollier 

1:51:00 Vietnam, Agent Orange, and looking back 

1:55:00 Colonel Spiker the monkey

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