Did US Military in Vietnam really listen to "Creedence Clearwater Revival"? What kind of music did they listen to?

/u/LordHussyPants' answers in the thread "In many Vietnam war films, Credence Clearwater Revivals Fortunate Son can often be heard, but was the song popular among the soldiers? Was music like that allowed to be played on helicopters?" are great and provide some context for just how much radio people stationed during the Vietnam War might be listening to.

Quite a bit of music we would now consider anti-war or bad for morale was popular during the Vietnam War! One example I've encountered a couple times when researching this topic is the Animals' "We've Gotta Get Out Of This Place" -- not only its account of working-class disillusionment but the chorus:

We gotta get out of this place / If it's the last thing we ever do

In a context that makes it pretty clear "this place" wasn't just the ghetto but Vietnam. This wasn't just on the radio but being performed and sung along to by groups of soldiers. Music played a pretty big role in recreation during the war, which certainly affects morale -- permitting individual recreation/group bonding, and allowing soldiers to group up along subcultural lines. Doug Bradley and Craig Werner's book We Gotta Get Out of This Place describes a fairly firm division between the recreational spaces of white soldiers (country and western, folk) and the recreational spaces of black soldiers (R&B, funk, rock, and soul) with occasional moments of crossover -- both musical crossover with artists of color like Jimi Hendrix, and literal crossover when black soldiers ventured into primarily-white social spaces and vice versa to listen to some music they might not have otherwise listened to.

Protest songs and anti-war songs of all stripes were popular -- songs like "I Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag", "Alice's Restaurant", "What's Going On", "A Change Is Gonna Come" -- though some songs were banned from official airplay, either due to their lyrical anti-war content, the anti-war stances of their performers, or the way service members were responding to them. These songs were also popular back in the States, but the experiences of individual soldiers lent them resonance as well as irony. In terms of "what did people listen to?" in a general sense -- a lot of people strove to listen to the same music they listened to back home. This often followed racial lines, both in obvious ways (the popularity of songs like James Brown's "Say It Loud, I'm Black And I'm Proud" that directly addressed the social conditions back home in America that led to unequal conditions abroad for black servicemen) and in more low-key ones. Bradley and Werner connect the popularity of country music and its trappings among white soldiers to that sense of identity linked to being back home, even among soldiers who had no ties to the traditional demographics associated with country music listening.

It would be wrong to characterize all the music making up the informal soundtrack to the war as being searing countercultural commentary, or even the entirety of popular music being produced "back home" as being unilaterally anti-war, especially early on. (I'd need to dig a little deeper to find some sources on music with an explicitly conservative pro-war bent, but they absolutely did exist and if you're interested in that I'd be happy to do so.) There were songs with no weighty social commentary in the lyrics themselves that were popular -- love songs, frivolous pop songs, songs like Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer" -- and plenty of pop songs that addressed the war in fairly inoffensive ways, songs like Martha and the Vandellas' "Forget Me Not". Plenty of people were listening to music to be comforted by the familiar, not to have their consciousness expanded, But other people did found themselves connecting to the counterculture and its music, either reaffirming a tie to their old hobbies and interests back home or exploring something that was new to them, new ways of thinking and talking about the war and about their own identities. For black servicemen, on top of all other functions of leisure and nostalgia, music could be a way of participating in civil rights movements even at a distance and of recognizing the unequal conditions they experienced during combat. I'm sorry to speak in such broad strokes! In general, so many people -- not only men but also women, not only black and white servicemen but also Latino, Asian, and Native -- were listening to so much music during so many discrete phases of the war that there's a lot of ground to cover. I think of myself as listening to a lot of music now in 2018, equipped with services like Spotify, but the sheer ubiquitousness of radio airplay among other ways of tuning in to music made for a pretty dense sonic experience.

A lot of the sonic landscape of the Vietnam War in pop culture is drawn from movies, even movies made by people for whom the Vietnam War was not a contemporary experience even as civilians -- off the top of my head I'm thinking of the way 2017's Kong: Skull Island uses specific popular music on its soundtrack to immediately signify "hey guys, you're watching a war movie set in the early 70s". Looking at the tracklisting for Skull Island, you've got Jefferson Airplane, CCR, The Stooges, The Hollies, Black Sabbath... and the effect in the film itself (full disclosure, as someone who did not particularly like Skull Island) is of a whole bunch of musical cues being struck that are referencing other films, not any real person's firsthand idiosyncratic experience. So some of those indelible associations with specific bands -- Creedence, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane -- have been undeniably reinforced by media in the corpus of Movies About Vietnam, films such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born On The Fourth Of July, etc.. (Hell, even just Apocalypse Now has had a pretty indelible impact.) They've become cliches, used to immediately situate a film at a certain point in time and a certain stance on the war even to viewers who were not necessarily alive and listening to music at that point in time. But many songs popular among American servicemen and women during the Vietnam War have an element of social commentary or conscious irony that was appreciated at the time and not just in retrospect. Even among soldiers who voluntarily enlisted rather than being drafted, sentiments regarding the war and how it was playing out could be complicated.

Some sources:

We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, Doug Bradley, Craig Werner
"Paint It Black: Rock Music and Vietnam War Film", Douglas W. Reitinger in the Journal of American Culture (Reitinger also mentions the role of music in Michael Herr's account of his time as a wartime journalist, Dispatches.)
"“If Ya Wanna End War and Stuff, You Gotta Sing Loud” — A Survey of Vietnam‐Related Protest Music", H. Ben Auslander in the Journal of American Culture.
The Newseum had a pretty cool feature in 2015 associated with their Reporting Vietnam exhibit where they went through week by week and constructed a playlist of songs associated with the Vietnam War, both songs that experienced popularity among soldiers, protest songs, and songs otherwise trying to address the experience of the war. You can find it here.