Protest Songs 4 - Vietnam and the Broadcast Century
The glass between viewer and atrocity was the real memorial, a barrier that let us watch without touching or being touched.
As I write these pieces, I hope you can see that it is a set of work with interacting themes, artwork and music which I use to get across the message that we are living in precedented times.
We should not lose hope, because we have been here before and there are solutions.
The camera became proof that we were facing history honestly, even when we were only consuming it. The glass surface of the TV screen (later the PC and phone) became a kind of memorial in its own right. We could stand in front of horror, safely separated by a few millimetres of plastic, and tell ourselves that watching was the same thing as acting.
This is the world in which these protest songs had to live. And two of the most interesting ones, The Doors’ “The End” and Paul Hardcastle’s “19”, only make sense inside that broadcast and media environment.
They aren’t songs about war.
They are songs whose meaning depends on how war was shown.
From camps to living rooms: what the Broadcast Century actually did
In the original Broadcast Century piece, I argued that the second half of the twentieth century didn’t solve the problem of organised cruelty; it changed the way we watched it.
The Holocaust was filmed, catalogued and shown to the world. We turned those images into school lessons, memorial days and museum exhibits. The machinery of bureaucracy that enabled the killing reappeared as the machinery of remembrance.
Television replaced the pulpit and the town square. Every evening, a smiling presenter reassured viewers that, despite the arms race and the occasional crisis, things basically worked.
The Cold War was managed as a long, slow broadcast: airlifts, missile tests, moon landings, proxy wars. The 50 year long crisis was something you tuned into at 6 p.m. for an update
By the time Vietnam escalated, the methods were set. The war did not just happen “over there”. It arrived in living rooms: body bags on the news, helicopters over jungle, protests and deaths on campus, adverts for soap and cars spliced in-between.
The question wasn’t just “What is happening?”
It was “What does it look like when it is happening on television?”
That’s the environment The End and 19 belong to.
“The End”: a song that needed a camera and a film making genius
On the 1967 album, “The End” is messy and ambiguous. It’s part breakup song, part myth, part psychedelic self-destruction. There are no explicit politics in it. No reference to Vietnam, no commentary on foreign policy, no diagnosis of anything larger than one man’s head.
What changes is not the way Jim Morrison sings it, but where the song is placed.
When Coppola opens Apocalypse Now with:
jungle treetops
orange napalm blooming across the screen
helicopter blades sliding through the frame
Captain Willard staring at the ceiling of his Saigon hotel room, drunk and broken
…and then drops that guitar drone and that voice on top, the song and it’s meaning is rewritten for the rest of time.
The track stops being a private spiral and becomes the interior monologue of a system that has lost control. We’re not just watching a man with PTSD, we’re watching an empire having a breakdown, and the music is our way into his head.
On its own, “The End” is open to interpretation.
Inside Apocalypse Now, it becomes a diagnosis.
This is important for my wider argument:
The protest is not in the lyric sheet.
It is in the pairing of sound and picture.
The anti-war meaning is created after the fact, by the film, not by the band. Without the camera, without the machinery and context of the Broadcast Century, “The End” would be remembered as an overlong, theatrical album track. It took Francis Ford Coppala’s genius, an edit suite and a cinema screen to turn it into an anti-war landscape and soundscape.
“19”: a song built from and by TV
If “The End” is a song that was rewritten by film, “19” is a song constructed from television.
Paul Hardcastle’s 1985 hit is not a standard protest single with verses and a chorus. It is an audio collage. Almost everything that gives it force comes from broadcast media:
The staccato narration.
The statistics about average age and trauma.
The phrasing around “post-traumatic stress disorder”.
The documentary tone of authority.
He sampled an American TV documentary about Vietnam and built his track around it: snippets of commentary, fragments of voiceover, archival audio of soldiers. The famous hook, “Nineteen… nineteen…”, is the number that the newsreader repeats.
It’s protest, but protest in the pre-existing grammar of the news bulletin and the public information film.
Where Apocalypse Now uses a pre-existing rock song to express the internal catastrophe of one soldier, “19” turns the camera itself into a musical instrument. The medium isn’t just carrying the message; it is the message.
That dependence is absolute:
No documentary, no statistics.
No news voiceover, no hook.
No TV archive, no song.
Again, this protest can only exist inside the broadcast system.
Trauma you can measure, trauma you can’t
Put the two together and you can see a shift in how trauma is allowed to appear in public.
“The End” / Apocalypse Now shows the interior collapse of one man. It’s the subjective, hallucinatory side of Vietnam, what it feels like when the war has already taken root in the brain. There are no numbers. The audience is invited to inhabit a mind that can’t cope.
“19” moves to the exterior, statistical view. It names PTSD, cites percentages, emphasises how young the soldiers were. It packages the wound in documentary language and forces it back into the news cycle, but this time as a problem.
Both are about the same conflict.
Both rely on screens.
Both are talking about what we now call PTSD.
What’s interesting is how quickly that framing solidified. By the time later conflicts came, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, the “Vietnam veteran with PTSD” had become a recognised figure in our culture. The broadcast system had created a template for what trauma from a modern war was supposed to look like.
But the numbers kept rising
And the pictures kept coming
Nothing changed.
From Vietnam to Ukraine: the broadcast wound
The wars that followed Vietnam inherited that media logic.
The first Gulf War was sold as a clean, surgical campaign, complete with night-vision footage and briefing-room graphics.
Iraq and Afghanistan arrived via embedded journalists, 24-hour cable news and the constant tick of casualty counts.
Ukraine is the first major European war to be documented continuously by soldiers with smartphones, drones, bodycams and Telegram channels.
The pattern is familiar but accelerated:
Atrocity happens.
Cameras record it.
Clips circulate.
Commentators explain.
The audience absorbs, and moves on.
The glass between viewer and atrocity is still there now. It’s just smaller now and fits in a pocket.
For people in combat and under bombardment, PTSD is about direct experience: shells, missiles, torture, loss. For the wider population, there is a different kind of damage: constant exposure to images of suffering, a sense of helplessness, the feeling that the world is permanently on fire somewhere.
The Broadcast Century trained us to process horror as content.
The post-broadcast world has not yet unlearned that reflex.
Why these songs still matter
So why go back to “The End” and “19” ?
Because they sit at two key points in the story:
Apocalypse Now shows the moment when cinema discovered that it could turn an existing piece of music into a vehicle for moral collapse. The song’s meaning was completely transformed by editing and framing. It’s a case study in how the broadcast system can overwrite an artist’s original intent.
“19” shows the moment when pop music openly admitted that it was borrowing its language and authority from television. It’s not a singer confronting power; it’s a producer remixing the evening news.
Together, they explain why so many of our images of war feel second-hand, even when they are new. Our emotional vocabulary for conflict is already pre-loaded with helicopter blades, burning tree lines, newsreaders, captions and statistics rolling under the screen.
PTSD is not just a medical term; it is a symptom of living in a world where the mind is forced to host more images than it can safely process. These songs are artefacts from the phase where that process sped up.
The glass, again
Museums, documentaries, anniversary specials, carefully curated playlists of “Songs of Protest”: all of these can be useful. They keep memory alive. They offer context.
But they can also become part of the barrier.
We can listen to The End on a streaming service, admire how well it fits the opening of Apocalypse Now, and never ask what it would mean to see that kind of breakdown in someone standing in front of us.
We can nod along to “19”, recognise the samples, and not connect them to the real, ongoing lives of people still dealing with nightmares, flashbacks, addiction, homelessness and suicide decades after their war officially ended.
That’s what the subtitle is really about:
The glass between viewer and atrocity was the real memorial.
It kept us safe from the blast.
It also kept us safe from responsibility.
If the Broadcast Century taught us anything, it’s that “awareness” is not the same thing as solidarity, and that watching from afar is not the same thing as helping.
The Statistics in Full
Millions of U.S. children have grown up in post-Vietnam military/veteran households with elevated risk of trauma, anxiety, depression, and PTSD-like symptoms. It is plausible that hundreds of thousands to a few million American children have, at some point, had PTSD or near-PTSD symptom levels linked to a parent’s deployment and/or PTSD.
Directly impacted veterans (PTSD + subthreshold): ≈ 3–4M
Spouses/partners significantly affected: ≈ 1.5–3M
Children with serious trauma impacts: at least hundreds of thousands, plausibly another 1–3M
So a defensible, reality-based statement is:
Since Vietnam, on the order of 5–10 million Americans have been significantly affected by war-related PTSD or PTSD-spectrum conditions – either as veterans themselves or as close family members living with that fallout.
Since 2014, Ukraine has become one of the most traumatised societies on the planet. National surveys of civilians during the full-scale Russian invasion find between 15 and 30 per cent of adults meeting criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder at different points, with even higher rates among internally displaced people and refugees.
Applying those rates to today’s adult population suggests that millions of Ukrainians, on the order of five to seven million people, have developed war-related PTSD since 2014, with several million more experiencing serious sub-threshold symptoms. If you include close family members living with those symptoms, you are easily in double-digit millions of people whose lives are being shaped by trauma.
If you need help, you are not alone
In the United States, veterans, service members, and their families can contact the Veterans Crisis Line 24/7:
Call 988 and then Press 1
Text 838255
Or use the online chat on the official Veterans Crisis Line website.
You don’t have to be enrolled in VA care to use it.
Anyone in the U.S. (veteran or not) can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.
If you are in Ukraine and struggling with what you’ve been through or what you’re seeing, there is help.
You can call Lifeline Ukraine any time, day or night, for free, confidential mental-health support on 7333.
Veterans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and their families can also call the Ukrainian Veterans Fund crisis hotline on 0 800 33 20 29 (24/7, free of charge).
If someone is in immediate danger, please call 112 for emergency services.
You do not have to go through this on your own.
If you’re elsewhere, please check your local health services or veteran organisations for crisis lines and support.