References to the music that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan listen to as they head into combat have showed up everywhere from Doonesbury in the form of wounded veteran and Alex Doonesbury boyfriend Toggle to Iron Man. And given that ubiquity, it's well worth reading Spencer Ackerman's excellent review of Jonathan Pieslak's Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War. I won't try to recap the piece at any great length here, since you really should check it out in its entirety, but I think this point Spencer makes is very well-taken:
There’s no reason why it ought to be surprising that a group of mostly-white soldiers in their 20s should have a soft spot for classic rock. That’s what they grew up listening to on the radio in their parents’ cars, for one thing. But what do their musical tastes tell us about these men? The idea that such preferences are a revealing fact of identity is a painfully overdetermined subject of study: not all that much follows from the fact that someone likes a certain band or a particular song. Some people go for the familiar when placed in front of the karaoke microphone. Others do the same when they find themselves in a strange country, under fire, asked to confront an enemy that isn’t easily distinguished from the civilian population. Anyone who wants to understand a war is wasting time by looking at a soldier’s iPod.And the stuff he writes about the music soldiers are making, instead of what they're listening to, is fascinating.