A recent issue of The New Yorker (June 29, 2009) included a short piece on a City College professor who has studied “the role of music in military recruiting, combat, interrogations, and morale” during the ongoing conflict in Iraq.

Of course, even Garry Trudeau has caught on to this. The Doonesbury character “Toggle”–a trooper in Iraq–routinely “got crunked” on heavy metal not only before, but during missions. (By the way, the current story arc that has him coping with Traumatic Brain Injury or TBI incurred in a roadside bomb blast is one of the best the strip has run in a long time).

Of necessity, the profile only scratched the surface, but it prompts the following scattered reflections.

Historically, there are lots of precedents for soldiers psyching themselves for operations with music. Cromwell’s Ironsides sang hymns as they went to into battle. French Revolutionary armies roared the sanguinary lyrics of the Marseillaise as they defended France and poured across its borders in the name of liberte, egalite, fraternite. Union troops marched to “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the Civil War.

Besides the fictional Air Cav unit in “Apocalypse Now” that flew into battle to the strains of  “Ride of the Valkyries,” Michael Herr reported in his classic Dispatches how Vietnam grunts kept Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane high up on their personal playlists.

In my own experience, soldiers frequently prepared themselves before high stress operations by pumping up the volume. “Guns ‘n Roses” and Metallica were particular faves then, as apparently they are today.

Mordant parodies also abound. Long before the Jimmy Buffet take-off (“Mortaritaville”) described in the New Yorker article, Vietnam-era soldiers crooned a variant of the Lennon-McCartney ballad “Yesterday” that included the lyric “Blown away/I’m not half the man I used to be/A Claymore [type of mine] just got through with me…” It was still around when I went on active duty in the 1970s.

The piece also describes soldier-created music videos coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq that marry lurid images with angry, loud music. In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, I recall seeing a soldier-produced and circulated bootleg video that combined the track to Lynyrd Skynryd’s “That Smell” (“Ooooh that smell/The smell of death surrounds you”) with raw footage of the so-called “Highway of Death’ leading out of Kuwait City–miles of burned out vehicles and charred corpses created by our airpower as the terrified Iraqis fled north.

And an analog, of course, exists in just about every weight room and locker room where young men with elevated testosterone levels prepare themselves for violent sport by listening to ear-splitting music.