John Fogerty claims he wrote “Fortunate Son” in just 20 minutes. But the music he made with Creedence Clearwater Revival has soundtracked visions of the Vietnam War in pop culture for what feels like an eternity.

It was 1969. The war had reached its bloody apex. Nixon was bombing Cambodia in secret. More than 11,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam that year. Most of the draftees were from working-class or poor backgrounds; a disproportionately high number of them were black.

Meanwhile, in the ruling class, Nixon’s daughter Julie had just married Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson, David. Fogerty read about the nuptials and seethed. “You’d hear about the son of this senator or that congressman who was given a deferment from the military,” he wrote in his 2015 memoir. “They weren’t being touched by what their parents were doing.” Full of righteous fury, he wrote “Fortunate Son.” The song snarled at the class disparity of war: “It ain’t me, it ain’t me/I ain’t no senator’s son.” “Fortunate Son” is “really not an anti-war song,” says Creedence drummer Doug Clifford, who served in the Coast Guard Reserve between 1966 and 1968. “It’s about class. Who did the dirty work?”

But the track established a commonly perceived cultural connection between Creedence and Vietnam, which music supervisors still can’t seem to let go of nearly half a century later. It’s a relentless cinematic cliché: If the scene takes place during the Vietnam War, Creedence’s music must be playing. Remember Forrest Gump? There’s a Creedence song in there. Born on the Fourth of July? Tropic Thunder? More Creedence. If your knowledge of the Vietnam War comes from the movies, you’d be forgiven for assuming there were massive speakers blasting Creedence nonstop throughout the Mekong Delta the entire time.

The latest offender is The Post, Steven Spielberg’s well-oiled dramatization of the Washington Post’s 1971 battle to publish the Pentagon Papers. The opening scenes take place in Vietnam in 1966. The musical backing is Creedence’s “Green River,” from the 1969 album of the same name. The Post received fairly gushing reviews, but the Creedence cue drew eyerolls from perceptive cinephiles. “Only a few minutes into The Post but I smell a Least Outstanding Use of Creedence in Nam Oscar,” tweeted “Community” creator Dan Harmon. “Did The Post really open with Creedence blasting over soldiers in ‘Nam? That is some sub-Gump-level hackiness,” added AP writer Andrew Dalton.

By this point, setting a war scene to a Creedence tune is a spectacular failure of imagination. It’s like using “Let’s Get It On” to dial up the horniness in a sex scene, or tapping “Walking on Sunshine” for a party montage. It is overused to oblivion.

How the hell did America’s best swamp rock band become the de facto soundtrack to the Vietnam War?

The phenomenon began with a movie quite literally named after a Creedence song: In 1978, Nick Nolte and Michael Moriarty starred in Who’ll Stop the Rain, a drama about a war correspondent trying to smuggle heroin from Vietnam to the U.S. The film’s soundtrack uses three Creedence tracks: “Proud Mary,” “Hey Tonight,” and, of course, “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”