From the Revolutionary War to Iraq, The Music & Books That Shaped American Troops

From Civil War sheet music to Vietnam radio and Iraq-era digital media, the entertainment that became morale equipment.

War has always had a soundtrack. It has also had a bedside table.

In every major American conflict, from 1776 to Iraq, U.S. troops relied on music and books not just for entertainment, but for morale, identity, and emotional survival. What changed over time wasn’t the need — it was the medium.

Here’s how pop culture traveled with American troops, from tavern pamphlets to MP3 playlists.

Revolutionary War: Pamphlets and Patriotic Hymns

There were no headphones at Valley Forge. Obviously. What Continental soldiers encountered instead was a print-and-song culture built for memorization and recitation.

The closest thing to a viral hit was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Published anonymously in January 1776, the 47-page pamphlet made a bold case for independence at a time when many colonists still hoped for reconciliation. Written in plain, sermon-like prose, Paine attacked monarchy as irrational and unbiblical, arguing that government should be representative and grounded in popular sovereignty. Read aloud in taverns and reprinted in newspapers, it turned independence from a radical idea into a mainstream demand.

Music was communal. “Yankee Doodle,” originally sung by British officers to mock colonial troops, was reclaimed by Americans and transformed into a badge of pride — famously played when the British surrendered at Saratoga. William Billings’s “Chester” carried a similar patriotic force.

Soldiers also read sermons, broadsides, almanacs, and newspapers. Revolutionary pop culture lived in pockets — and in memory.

Civil War: Sheet Music and Sentimental Ballads

The Civil War was America’s first truly mass-media war. Industrial printing surged. Railroads moved newspapers quickly. Sheet music became a national commodity.

Cheap fiction exploded. Beginning in 1860, publishers like Beadle & Adams flooded the market with dime novels — frontier adventures, crime tales, melodramas — small and cheap enough to carry in a haversack. Story weeklies like The New York Ledger circulated serialized fiction and war correspondence that could be read aloud in camp.

Even literary heavyweights reached soldiers. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, published in 1862, became an American sensation, its themes of justice and revolution resonating in a divided nation.

Music remained the emotional bloodstream of camp life. “Dixie,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Lorena,” and “Home, Sweet Home” rallied, comforted, or reduced hardened men to tears. For the first time, you could plausibly build a near-universal wartime playlist.

Spanish-American War and World War I: Mass Media Goes to War

By 1898, the “yellow press” had turned war into a serialized spectacle. Illustrated newspapers and patriotic sheet music shaped how soldiers and civilians experienced the Spanish-American War. Songs like “There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” circulated widely, while John Philip Sousa’s marches framed parades and send-offs.

World War I scaled everything up. The U.S. Army launched Stars and Stripes, written by and for soldiers. Tin Pan Alley produced hits like George M. Cohan’s “Over There,” while Irving Berlin’s “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” captured barracks humor.

Entertainment was no longer incidental, but organized.

World War II: Engineered Morale

World War II marked the moment when American troop culture became fully industrialized. Entertainment was no longer incidental to deployment; it was treated as logistical equipment.

Two massive distribution systems defined the era. The first was broadcast: the Armed Forces Radio Service and special V-Disc record programs delivered music to troops across Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. V-Discs — specially pressed records sent overseas because commercial recording strikes had limited domestic releases — featured top artists of the day and were explicitly labeled “For the Armed Forces Only.” Swing, big band, and vocal harmonies dominated the soundscape. The Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and the steady orchestral pulse of Glenn Miller became synonymous with wartime rhythm.

The Armed Services Editions program, launched by the Council on Books in Wartime in 1943, revolutionized reading for troops. It produced lightweight, portable paperbacks designed to fit in cargo pockets. From 1943 to 1947, over 120 million copies of more than 1,300 titles were printed, featuring mainstream American literature by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, along with contemporary hits like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Soldiers actively traded these books and built informal libraries in foxholes and ship holds.

Comics were influential, with characters like Captain America and Superman providing clear, morally simple stories during a complex war. Magazines like Yank — the Army Weekly — combined photography, cartoons, and frontline reporting to entertain and inform enlisted readers.

By 1945, the U.S. had established a strong morale-boosting system, featuring music on military frequencies, celebrities visiting remote bases, portable books, and magazines in soldiers' languages. Culture was actively shipped and strategically deployed to support the troops.

Korea and Vietnam: Broadcast Companions

The Korean War inherited World War II’s morale infrastructure, but the cultural mood shifted. Armed Forces Radio and Television Service continued to standardize programming overseas, and for the first time, television began to edge into military life, though radio still dominated daily routine. 

The music troops heard in Korea largely mirrored early-1950s American mainstream pop: crooners, vocal harmony groups, country ballads, and emerging rhythm and blues. Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” and The Weavers’ “Goodnight, Irene” carried tones of longing and softness that fit both barracks listening and celebration. Unlike WWII’s brassy swing era, Korea’s soundtrack often felt quieter — less spectacle, more homesickness.

Reading culture remained heavily paperback-driven. Drugstore novels, westerns, detective fiction, and humor paperbacks circulated through military libraries and exchange racks. The postwar paperback boom made books cheaper and more portable than ever, and soldiers continued the long-standing practice of swapping copies until covers detached. Religious tracts and devotional literature still flowed through chaplain networks, reinforcing a moral framework that had long characterized American military culture.

Vietnam marked a sharper break. By the mid-1960s, portable radios and tape players transformed listening from communal to semi-private. The American Forces Vietnam Network broadcast Top 40 hits, soul, country, and rock directly into firebases and base camps, creating a daily sonic connection to home. Music was no longer simply performed for troops; it was ambient, constant, and contemporary.

Certain songs became emotional shorthand for deployment life. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals resonated with its blunt articulation of confinement and escape. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” captured resentment toward class inequities and draft politics. Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” carried psychedelic distortion into jungle nights. 

These were not officially sanctioned morale songs. They were hits from the American charts — but in Vietnam, they were reframed through lived experience.

Reading in Vietnam also reflected the war’s contradictions. Mass-market paperbacks thrived, from westerns to hardboiled crime novels. Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, published in 1965, offered a heroic narrative that circulated even as the war’s complexity deepened. Meanwhile, glossy magazines like Playboy became ubiquitous barracks currency — part fantasy, part boredom management, part reminder of civilian normalcy. Soldiers also read mainstream magazines, newspapers, and, increasingly, reportage that tried to explain the conflict unfolding around them.

Vietnam’s defining pop culture feature was not a single anthem or bestseller. It was saturation. Music, magazines, radio banter, taped mixtapes from home — culture as constant background noise. Not engineered spectacle, but emotional atmosphere.

Desert Storm to Iraq: Headphones and Hard Drives

Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm unfolded at a media inflection point. Troops deployed into a world of Walkmans, cassette swaps, and 24-hour cable news. For the first time, soldiers and their families could watch the same footage of the conflict almost simultaneously, thanks to networks like CNN broadcasting live from Baghdad. The war was not just fought overseas; it was televised in real time.

Listening habits reflected this transitional era. Portable cassette players allowed for semi-private soundtracks inside tents and vehicles, even as boom boxes still powered shared gym sessions and maintenance bays. Early-1990s hits such as Madonna’s “Vogue,” Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” circulated through headphones and shared tapes. Hard rock and metal often fueled pre-mission adrenaline; pop hits anchored troops to a civilian world that felt increasingly immediate through satellite television.

Reading culture in the Gulf War era remained largely physical — paperbacks, magazines, newspapers flown forward — but the nature of information consumption was changing. Clipped news articles and mailed periodicals competed with broadcast news cycles that refreshed hourly. The war was shorter than previous conflicts, but it was the first American war fully embedded in the modern media ecosystem.

By the time of the Iraq War in 2003, that ecosystem had gone digital. MP3 players replaced cassette decks. Burned CDs and shared hard drives replaced dog-eared paperbacks as common forms of exchange. Laptops, early Wi-Fi setups on larger bases, and email access shrank the psychological distance between deployment and home. Social platforms like MySpace and Facebook allowed service members to maintain their identities, relationships, and self-expression in ways no previous generation of service members could.

Music became intensely personalized. Unlike WWII’s centralized morale hits or Vietnam’s shared radio playlists, Iraq-era troops often curated individual libraries — hip-hop for aggression release, country for emotional anchoring, metal for intensity, R&B for nostalgia. Songs like 50 Cent’s “In da Club” and Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” illustrate two distinct but coexisting emotional registers: swagger and affirmation. One channeled energy; the other reinforced identity.

Entertainment also expanded beyond passive consumption. Downloading movies, burning DVD libraries, and playing video games such as Call of Duty became common downtime rituals. The irony was not lost on many: soldiers in a live combat zone sometimes played digital simulations of war between patrols. Leisure culture now includes interaction, not just reception.

The Iraq generation became the iPod bridge generation — the first to carry thousands of songs in a pocket, to read news on screens, to email home nightly, and to exist simultaneously in a war zone and an online social world. TikTok-era troop culture would emerge later, defined by smartphones and algorithmic feeds. But Iraq marked the decisive shift: morale was no longer broadcast downward. It was curated individually, streamed, downloaded, and shared peer-to-peer.