In the 1980s, when Robin Williams was at the height of his popularity and Good Morning, Vietnam was still in the Blockbuster rental shops (remember them?), Adrian Cronauer went on the road. After all, the hit movie was based on his experiences in Vietnam. Loosely based. Very loosely based. And the movie was still showing on HBO and Showtime. So why not tour and give some speeches on college campuses?
On his way around the country, Adrian Cronauer stopped in Arkansas and gave a couple of speeches and more than a couple of interviews. Some of us were lucky enough to have met him.
He was a humorous man, but not Robin Williams-funny. Nobody is Robin Williams-funny. Adrian Cronauer said if he was Robin Williams-funny, he'd be Robin Williams. And he'd make movies and do standup and generally make a million dollars a year. That wasn't him. In the movie, Robin Williams played Robin Williams.
Adrian Cronauer was a radio man. And his mission was not to go full nutzo on the radio (Da Nang me! Da Nang me! They outta take a rope and hang me!) but to bring a more modern atmosphere and sound to Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam.
The only part of the movie that was dead-on accurate, emphasis on dead, was the opening scene in which men debarked from planes and, in the background, the only radio allowed on base featured dishwater-dull DJs, talking in monotone and trying not to wake anybody--should anybody be listening at all. Adrian Cronauer said he did come up with Gooooooood Morning Vietnam! in the mornings, but mostly his job included making commercials sound like real advertisements. That is, give the grunts a taste of home.
So he updated the music, created a few characters and bits, and tried to make radios in Vietnam less . . . militaristic. After all, these kids coming from America needed something that sounded like home. Or as Adrian Cronauer told a group years later:
"Along came the military and literally picked [young people] up, took them halfway around the world and dropped them into a totally alien environment. Culture shock would set in with a vengeance. And it was our job--or as they like to say in the military, our mission--it was our mission to be an antidote to that culture shock by giving them something familiar to listen to. And what I tried to do is to make it sound as much as I could like a stateside radio station."
Adrian Cronauer died this week at 79 in Troutville, Va. He did a lot to make an impossible situation more bearable for untold number of soldiers, airmen and Marines. There's something to be said for one man who could make such an incredible impact on the morale of a whole theater of operations during a war. But he did.
Call it mission complete.
Editorial on 07/21/2018