“Go-o-o-o-d morning, Vietnam!” Most people over fifty will remember that catchy phrase from the 1987 movie of the same name starring the late Robin Williams. It portrayed—rather inaccurately—the life of U.S. Air Force Sergeant Adrian Cronauer, an early morning DJ on Armed Forces Radio in Saigon in 1965-66, who greeted his listeners with that phrase every morning at 0600 (6 am). For reasons I am at a loss to fully understand, every July (the month of my birth, and the month that my first tour in Vietnam ended in 1969) that movie comes to mind.
I kind of understand it—maybe. I missed Cronauer in Vietnam. My first tour started in early August 1968, but I heard that signature ‘Good morning, Vietnam,’ because the DJs that followed him adopted it. I saw the movie when it came out and was thrilled by it, even as I wondered how an air force sergeant could do what Williams did in the movie and not get court-martialed.
And then, in 2006, I met the man who inspired the movie, Adrian Cronauer. That was the year I was assigned to the Department of Defense as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs. Cronauer had been the special advisor to the DASD, as my title was called, since 2001 (coincidentally, he and I both left the organization in the same year, 2009).
While he still had the deep, resonant voice of a radio DJ, and did have a rather wry sense of humor, he was nothing like the character Williams portrayed in the movie. I learned that other than the greeting and the fact that he played music that resonated with the young GIs in the fire bases and jungle rather than the old fashioned, boring music preferred by the senior leadership of Armed Forces Radio, the character in the movie bore no resemblance to him.
A life-long Republican who was originally from Pittsburgh, PA, he’d gone in to broadcasting after his time in the Air Force, and had even learned a law degree. As my advisor and spokesman with veterans organizations, he was sober and rock solid, and not one to ‘rock the boat.’ His office was right next door to mine, and we frequently spoke of Vietnam in the 60s, and our various adventures as young men (I was 23 when I first went and he was 27) in a war zone.
I also learned that the catch phrase for which he became famous was not invented in Vietnam. He’d in fact served a tour in Crete before Vietnam and had come up with it there. Somehow, though, it just sounded better in the Vietnam context.
He and I kind of lost touch when I left the Defense Department to become ambassador to Zimbabwe, and he retired to Troutville, Virginia, but I never forgot him, and when I received word in 2018 of his death, it felt as if I’d lost a member of my family, which is kind of true. Men (and women) at war develop a kind of kinship that is often stronger than the blood bonds of your birth family, and they’re bonds that are never broken, no matter how long the separation or how great the distance. The bonds that are forged in fire endure. | NWI
