Meet the Rock Band the U.S. Enlisted to Help Win the Vietnam War

W
illiam Nevious had just grabbed his drum kit from the back of the truck when he saw the AK-47s poking out from the trees. Turning to his bandmate, guitarist and trumpet player Rick Linton, all he could think was, “What the hell?”

As the percussionist in the Screaming Eagles Combo, Nevious knew part of the reason he ended up in South Vietnam during the final months of 1967. When he and his fellow band members weren’t on kitchen duty, guard patrol, or setting aflame oil drums full of human waste, they’d be driven or flown to what Linton calls “bases and shitholes,” some in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle. Once on the ground, they’d grab their instruments and a portable generator, set up their gear, and play an hour or more of their repertoire: covers of Motown hits like “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” or soul numbers like “Knock on Wood.”

Today was different. “I think we’re in the right place,” Nevious had heard their second lieutenant say when they arrived. But the sight of the automatic weapons, as well as mysterious men wearing what looked like black pajamas, made them realize they’d crossed into the DMZ that divided North and South Vietnam. They were now in the north — enemy territory. The musicians always carried weapons (after all, they were soldiers), but this time they decided to leave them in the truck. “I said, ‘We just have to set up and play,’” Nevious recalls. “‘And let’s make sure we play a song that doesn’t offend anybody. I don’t want to die here.’”

He and Linton called out the song list and launched into a number. As was the norm, the locals looked at them oddly while the village kids would dance. When a song ended, the village chief would ask the people to clap. “It always seemed kind of strange,” Linton says. By the time they ended their set, the AK-47s and the men in dark clothing were gone, and Nevious, Linton, and the group were off to another “show.” It wasn’t quite what they’d experienced playing clubs back home in Illinois, but it was better than fighting on the front lines in a war that few of them understood.

IN JUNE OF THIS YEAR, SECRETARY OF STATE Antony Blinken announced the creation of the U.S. Department of State-YouTube Global Music Partnership, in which a slew of “global music ambassadors” — Jelly Roll, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Lainey Wilson, Herbie Hancock, and Kane Brown among them — would “use music to promote peace and democracy” around the world. Variations of that program have had a storied past. In the Fifties and Sixties, the State Department sent Louis Armstrong to Africa, and Dizzy Gillespie to the Middle East, to dispatch American music and values to less hospitable parts of the globe. In 1970, Blood, Sweat & Tears were infamously tapped by the state Department to tour Eastern Europe.

Nearly 60 years ago, a bunch of buzz-cut rockers, some from an instrumental group from Illinois, found themselves in a similar situation. It wasn’t meant to be that way, but they became one of the first pop-based bands to perform for American troops, and especially locals, in the jungles of Vietnam. Their goal, too, was to put a good face on the U.S. servicemen suddenly in the country, yet the Screaming Eagles Combo were never accorded the recognition of those who came before and after.

Stars and Stripes, the U.S. army publication, didn’t report on them, while John O’Brien, director of the Don F. Pratt Museum, home of the 101st Airborne Division, says he’s familiar with the band — one of the few rock-oriented ones in Vietnam — but wouldn’t confirm their missions. “I’m not aware of any specific instances of that,” O’Brien says, “but it would not surprise me.” Perhaps because the Combo was an offshoot of an Army Band and didn’t play USO shows, the National Archives has no record of any of their performances.

But the surviving members of the band, only a handful at this point, remember all too well how they ended up in Vietnam and how, within months, they went from playing prom dances and roadhouse joints in Illinois, and almost jamming with a Beatle, to strumming guitars as bullets whizzed by. As Linton says, referring to the mainstream comedian who played for the troops during that war, “We went where Bob Hope didn’t go.”

ONLY A FEW MONTHS after he’d started taking drum lessons, in the summer of 1960, Nevious, then nicknamed “Butch” and barely a teenager, was playing at a park bandshell in West Frankfort, Illinois. After his solo, three locals slightly older than him — Linton and two other guitar players, Lloyd Rainey and Charles Williams — approached. They needed a drummer, they said, and Nevious quickly signed on. With that, a Midwestern rock band was born.

Like most groups at that time, they were primitive. Rock & roll was still fairly new, and the members were learning how to navigate it just like everyone else. In their case, the nascent band took its cues from instrumental guitar-based hits of the day, like those by the Ventures and Duane Eddy. They learned to perform the songs by repetitively playing 45 singles over a sound system that Nevious constructed by pulling a speaker out of a jukebox.

In search of a band name, they tapped into a bit of Illinois lore. When the northern part of the state was overtaken by a drought in the early 19th century, locals ventured south to buy food. Someone connected those trips to the ones made by the Israelites into Egypt for sustenance, and that part of the state was dubbed “Little Egypt”: There were drug stores, movie theaters, and other business with “Egypt” in their names. Linton credits his father, who started overseeing the group, with suggesting the moniker the “Egyptian Combo” when the boys were being interviewed by a local reporter who lived next door to the Linton house. It made sense, at least to people in the area. “Kind of a weird name,” Linton admits now. “They asked how we came up with that and if we were American.”

For a few years, the Egyptian Combo worked a regular circuit of state fairs, teen dances, proms, Elks Clubs, and VFW halls. The lineup expanded to include saxophonists Lonnie Dixon and Nick Ridgeway and later a trombonist, Ellis McKenzie. In their matching shiny suits with lapels and ties, each with hair above their ears, they weren’t rock & roll crazies. But when Jerry Lee Lewis came through the area, the Egyptian Combo were hired as his backup band, and the kids watched, jaws dropped, as he kicked over his piano bench. They played the Playboy Club in St. Louis, but other shows were less than high-end: In the middle of a set at a dive bar, police stormed in and arrested the owners for running a prostitution ring.

To their later regret, they also passed up a chance to jam with a future legend. George Harrison’s sister Louise lived in Benton, where she’d moved with her Scottish husband, who worked for coal companies. When her brother was visiting in the summer of 1963 and went to see an Egyptian Combo show, Louise asked if he could sit in with them. But the band never heard of the Beatles and had had a bad experience with another singer who sat in, so they passed. “We said, ‘Never again,’ unfortunately,’” Linton says. When the story came out decades later, Nevious, then in the academic world, listened as students told him, “You’re going to be known as the guy who turned down the Beatles.”

The following year, the Egyptian Combo had its first whiff of success with “Gale Winds,” a galloping, Rainey-written instrumental that featured his organ and was inspired by the Tornados’ hit “Telstar.” First released on a local indie, the single was picked up by a larger record company and even made the Billboard singles chart. As was reported in the local press, the band was invited on The Ed Sullivan Show, then the leading TV variety series of the time, the one that launched the Beatles in America. But at the last minute, they were told, they were bumped for another new band from England, the Rolling Stones.

The band carried on, playing the same types of clubs it had before. But in 1967, another opportunity for fame arose. The Egyptian Combo cut another single, “I Don’t Care Anymore,” this time with a singer, and finally believed they had a commercial song on their hands. But once more, the musicians were thwarted — this time by the U.S. military.

Draft notices, conscripting those over 18 to serve in the Vietnam War, had begun arriving that summer; by then, most of the musicians had graduated from college and deferments were off the table. MGM Records, which had taken over distribution of the band’s records, stopped promoting “I Don’t Care Anymore.” As Nevious recalls, they were told, “You guys are not going to be available — you’re going in the service.”

Since they were still a performing band, Dixon had an idea to keep playing but avoid going to Vietnam. A local recruiter reached out in search of a group and eventually showed up at the Linton family home to watch the Egyptian Combo play. The musicians proposed enlisting and becoming the on-base entertainment at Kentucky’s Fort Campbell for the 101st Airborne, the air-assault division of the Army nicknamed the Screaming Eagles that was headquartered there. (In 1961, a Seattle recruit ultimately known to the world as Jimi Hendrix had been assigned to the same camp with the 101st; he practiced guitar in the barracks but didn’t play with a band before he was discharged after a year.) According to Nevious, “We struck a deal. He made us a promise that if we all joined together, they would keep us together at Fort Campbell.” Even the local newspaper, the Southern Illinoisan, reported that the musicians would be playing “in the 101st Airborne Division Band” at the base.

But not every member was inducted. Linton’s younger brother Doug, who’d replaced Williams, was still in high school, and two of the band members had medical issues that prevented them from serving. In the end, only Linton, Nevious, Rainey, and McKenzie were inducted as privates first class — for added promotion value, on live TV on a Harrisburg, Illinois, station — for three-year duties. On the bus to Fort Campbell, the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” blared on a makeshift sound system, but the idea that the young men could be transferred to southeast Asia was nowhere in their heads. “I was hearing about how they might send the 101st to Vietnam,” says Bob Perino, a trumpeter who’d also signed up for the army band at Fort Campbell. “But I thought, ‘Well, they probably won’t take the band over there.’”

Mere weeks after they had attended music school and started basic training at Fort Campbell, however, Linton and some of the others received a jarring bit of news: 10,000 troops in the 101st Airborne were going to be shipped to Vietnam, and the soldier-musicians would be among them. “Oh, Jesus,” Linton says, recalling that moment. “It was almost chaos. We’re like, ‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ Things just kept getting worse and worse.”

Linton later wondered if the Army had decided to nullify their original agreement given that the entire Egyptian Combo hadn’t signed up for duty, but by then, it didn’t matter. Even a local congressman and friend couldn’t keep the band at Fort Campbell. At one point, Maj. Gen. Olinto Mark Barsanti, who was in command of the 101st, approached Nevious, made him stand at attention, and, in the former soldier’s memory, barked, “Son, you’re 101st and first and foremost a soldier, and I guarantee you are going to Vietnam. I will see you on that plane with me.”

“We were going to be assigned to the Carolinas, but that lasted about five hours,” Nevious says. “Barsanti changed it back, and we were going to Vietnam.”

THE 101ST WOULD BE ENGAGING in missions in hostile North Vietnamese territory and would also have to defend Saigon and other major cities in the South. Toward that end, the plane with the Egyptian Combo landed at the Bien Hoa Air Base in South Vietnam in late 1967. “I watched those guys, the whole band, coming off the plane,” recalls Col. Danny Jaynes, the senior officer assigned to oversee the band. “Unusual expressions on their faces.”

Upon arrival, the four core members of the Egyptian Combo were assigned to the Army band, one of nine in Vietnam, with what Linton calls “Julliard-type musicians.” But when the Illinois musicians discovered that one of their new bandmates, a Black soldier and bass player named Elbert (or Terry) Stewart, had a robust voice that recalled Lou Rawls’, they brewed up a side hustle. With the larger ensemble, they’d play John Philip Sousa marches for the troops or the officers, but their offshoot band — a seven-piece outfit that soon came to include Perino and keyboardist Eddie Owen — would cover Motown and Ray Charles numbers, along with rock songs like the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” “The first sergeant didn’t want us to do that,” Linton says. “But when the division chaplin heard us, he said, ‘My gosh, these guys need to be entertaining the troops.’”

Jaynes himself doesn’t recall much resistance to the idea of a pop-oriented military band. “During that period, they recognized the need for something other than martial music,” he says. “And those guys could listen to the latest piece of music and, three days later, emulate and play that. You’d close your eyes and you wouldn’t know the difference.”

Gear technically should have been a problem, since military bands didn’t have guitars, or what James called “speaker systems.” But before they’d shipped out, the Egyptian Combo had stashed their instruments in large crates, which they’d labeled as ammo or other weaponry, then handed them over a fence to be placed on air transport vehicles. “I don’t think it was actually authorized,” says Nevious. “But we said, ‘What the hell are they going to do to us? We’re already going to Vietnam.’ So we just did it.”

The name was another matter. According to Nevious, one of the band members suggested “Sound Experience,” playing off the fact that the musicians weren’t newbies. But in the end, they became the Screaming Eagles Combo. Linton thinks military brass made them change the name “to promote the army,” although Nevious insists it was the musicians’ idea.

The plan to play only for fellows troops on the base changed, however. The band members found themselves loaded onto trucks and driven to local villages in South Vietnam in what Jaynes remembers as “missions that required music” — formally called a Pacification Program. Once there, they’d set up in the mud or dirt, or if they were lucky, on a makeshift platform. Their job wasn’t simply to entertain the locals but, it turned out, to distract them: As they cranked out their hour or so of R&B covers, U.S. soldiers would comb the village for North Vietnamese troops who may have been hiding out or waiting to take shots at them. “We wanted to reassure the local populace that it was secure and that we’d driven Charlie away from it,” Jaynes says, using the nickname for Viet Cong troops. “It was to reassure the locals that the Americans are on their side, put it that way.”

But conditions in the Vietnam jungle often made the band’s missions difficult. The humidity knocked the guitars out of tune, and direct sunlight wreaked havoc on Rainey’s organ. At least once Nevious’ bass drum ended up loaded with shrapnel. Sometimes they’d have to send someone to Hong Kong to buy replacement drum parts or guitar strings or replacement tubes for their amps.

Eventually, their work changed yet again. “They decided it was too dangerous after a period of time, and it was not effective,” says Linton. “It was one of those lame things that the military tried to do to win over the public.” Soon, the Screaming Eagles Combo were assigned to play fire bases — temporary installations that would provide firepower cover for troops in the field. “The helicopter would drop us out of the choppers, we’d set our equipment up, and start playing, and then we’d be under attack,” says Nevious. “Rockets would come in, and we’d scramble and come back and play again. So the joke with the helicopter pilots was, ‘Hey, we’ll be back and pick you guys up in a couple hours — if you’re still alive.’”

As the band emerged from a chopper at one fire base, an officer ran over to them, asking, “What the hell are you?” When they replied “a band,” he shouted, “Get the hell out of here — you make any noise, you’re gonna get us killed!”

Even when they were back at their base, Camp Eagle in central South Vietnam, the situation could be fraught. Some supervisors would snidely refer to them as “the golden boys,” since they were never in combat and would sometimes be gone for days at a time, performing. “We didn’t go face to face [in combat],” says Linton, joking, “They gave us a bronze star for hiding.” To express his resentment, one first sergeant would put some of the Eagles on all-night guard duty or assign them toilet-cleaning duty. “They’d say, ‘We may not be here when you get back, because we’re probably going to die while you’re out playing music,’” Nevious says. “There were always snide remarks.”

While drugs were rampant at the time, Jaynes says drug use among the musicians wasn’t prevalent: “You can’t really perform to the degree of proficiency that those kids did when you’re under the influence of drugs. And I think they knew and appreciated that.” But to numb themselves to the horror and stress of war, they, along with many of their fellow soldiers, would get high by way of weed or opium. Others opted for something even stronger: C4 explosive, a clay-like substance that some grunts would chew on to get stoned. “It doesn’t explode unless you have heavy impact,” says Linton, who says he himself never tried it. “I was concerned it would explode in my stomach.” Plus, it wasn’t worth risking their gigs.                               

TO THEIR RELIEF, THE Screaming Eagles Combo’s tour of Vietnam only lasted one year. But with two more years of duty to serve before discharge, they were shipped back to the States. When their transport plane arrived in San Francisco, anti-war demonstrators spit on them. The band was then disassembled and sent off to different bases to perform in different military bands. Linton, for one, became part of the 36th Army Band in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and was eventually awarded an ARCOM (Army Commendation Medal) for his band time.  

When members of the Screaming Eagles arrived home, an Illinois newspaper declared that the band, as a whole, was opposed to the idea of the U.S. halting any bombings in North Vietnam. Linton was quoted saying, “The enemy will take every advantage it can.” Looking back now, he says, “I guess I was trying to be as positive as possible. But I look back at it as a total fiasco. I don’t think the bombing was a good idea at all.”

Once they were finished, some continued to play music, others not. Moving to California, Perino joined the Spiral Staircase, which had an earlier hit with the pop-lounge single “More Today Than Yesterday.” Linton began working for an ad agency and opened a headshop in Herrin, Illinois, that sold waterbeds, incense, and candles. In the Eighties, after a few subsequent editions of the Combo had folded, he and his brother Doug enlisted in Gun Runner, a metal band who were, in Linton’s terms, “skinny and had super-long hair and played like Van Halen.” But as with the Egyptian Combo, Gun Runner ran into roadblocks of their own; they lost $50,000 worth of uninsured equipment in a club fire, and Linton left when he and his wife had a child. He wound up working for the Illinois tourism department.

Nevious, meanwhile, left music altogether. After earning a master’s degree in education, he switched over to education and is currently the president of the board of trustees at the Pinkerton Academy, a private high school in New Hampshire. Others, including McKenzie and Doug Linton, have since passed away. As for Stewart, the guy with the Rawls-like voice, none of his fellow Combo members has heard from him in decades. A Vietnam vet of that name died this past February, but the Veterans Legacy Memorial, a branch of the VA, was unable to confirm further information about that passing.

In the Nineties, Linton revived the Egyptian Combo with a new lineup, sticking with the Illinois circuit. Reunions of the original lineup were rare, but the four members did reassemble to play a get-together for Nevious’ high school graduating class. Along with their medals, one of the few souvenirs of their unusual tour of duty is a tape, recorded in a tent, with their covers of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and Lou Rawls’ “Love Is a Hurting Thing.”

For some of the Screaming Eagles Combo, elements of PTSD linger. Whenever he hears chopper blades over his house in New Hampshire, Nevious has nightmares about flying to fire bases in helicopters with open doors while taking fire from the ground. Linton, meanwhile, looks back on it all with cynicism. “We saw no logistical plan to what we were trying to accomplish,” he says. “They just waved the flag and said, ‘We’re stopping Communism.’ We accomplished nothing.”

Recently, one of Linton’s family members bought a ukulele. When it arrived, he noticed the country where the instrument was manufactured — Vietnam.