Grounding the Troops: Music, Place, and Memory in the Iraq War

This article examines how American troops use music to navigate complex associations of place during deployment. Since 2005, I have been conducting interviews with veterans of the United States military who served in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, exploring their memories of musical engagement, specifically listening to music, during their deployments. Though I did not originally think to ask questions related to place, as I poured through interview transcripts, I gradually realized just how frequently people described their musical listening in relationship to place, sometimes associating a particular type of musical engagement with a specific physical setting, linking songs to memories of locales, or alternately describing using music to psychologically remove themselves from an environment. Technological transformations coupled with the particularities of war make musical listening especially salient in the day-to-day existence of contemporary American troops during wartime. Examining relationships between musical listening and place with a focus on the memories of veterans who were deployed to the Iraq war yields insight both into the critical role that music has for many contemporary troops involved in the physically and psychologically demanding context of war and to scholarly understandings of how music can operate in complicated processes of location and dislocation.