Why aren’t The Beatles more strongly associated with the Vietnam War? Was it licensing?
I’ve been thinking about something odd: The Beatles were one of the biggest bands in the world during the Vietnam era, and their songs were absolutely part of the broader soundtrack of the 1960s. Soldiers in Vietnam were listening to the same pop/rock music everyone else was hearing back home, so it seems unlikely that The Beatles were somehow absent from the actual lived experience of the war.
But in movies, documentaries, and pop-culture memory, Vietnam is usually represented by CCR, The Animals, Hendrix, The Stones, Buffalo Springfield, etc. “Fortunate Son” practically became a cinematic button that says “we are now in Vietnam.”
My guess is that this is partly because Beatles songs have historically been expensive and difficult to license, especially for film and TV. If a Vietnam movie can get CCR or The Animals more easily and cheaply, those songs get used more often. Then decades of repetition turn those songs into the “official” sound of Vietnam in the public imagination.