Good Morning, Vietnam-Indeed-The Trials And Tribulations Of One Adrian Cronauer

By Si Lannon     

I knew from the minute I picked up this guy Adrian Cronauer from the airport that no way was he going to last in our outfit. You can take it from me Eddie Garlick even after all these years, maybe because of all those years and the changes I have seen in this man’s, oops, just Army, that he had a “misfit” target written all over him. Our outfit if you could call it that was producing, well, hell, producing propaganda and glad tidings to the increasing number of troops coming in-country and in need of some easy listening on the Armed Forces Radio Station-Vietnam edition. You may think that once I laid that tag on you that I was some kind of radio personality myself or helped with production. No, how I got into that job, that mostly very good and “safe” job, safe as anything was in Vietnam in those days when even office help like was liable to be spraying M-16 ammunition out into the night sky just like the grunts was a fluke. Fortunately I got out of the country before the “shit really hit the fan,” excuse my language, when Mister Charlie owned the day and night. (Everybody for a long time said that “the night belonged to Charlie” what they didn’t tell you but you could figure out pretty quickly the day was his too but that was later) See my MOS, my training when I signed Uncle Sam’s papers, when I enlisted, was radioman, radioman not like what Cronauer and the others were doing but combat radioman out in the boondocks. Somehow the General, General Taylor, now long gone, said he needed a radio man and I was the one they picked or really I was there when the General said he needed a radio man and that was that. I was there and so I got that soft, well, kind of soft job after they found out I wasn’t any radio personality or a production guy they made me the driver, the go-fer. That is how I wound up at the airport greeting a real radio personality that the General had heard about, had heard do his thing and desperately wanted for his soldiers to listen to and take their minds off the fucking war (the General’s words not mine so you know he knew something was wrong from the beginning).               

So the minute I saw the bleary-eyed son of bitch come down the stairs of the plane all disheveled and looking like he had been on a three day drunk (it had actually been four) I knew he wouldn’t last and in a split second before he did his comedy thing to impress me I guess I started to panic that maybe this guy would take me down with him and I would wind up out in Pleiku where the other guys I came in-country with were located. So I started kind of stand-offish, tried to tell him about the “book” about regulations. It wasn’t like his was a brother, you know a guy from the neighborhood, from the “hood who you could tell what was what if you didn’t want to get your sorry black in a sling. The laugh was on me as you damn well know, or will know once I get through with this story. 

First of all Cronauer, nobody called him Adrian (and he told me once we had gotten to know each other that nobody but his mother called him that and he would usually not answer to the name even from her. I wouldn’t answer to Edward either from my mother knowing that I was in deep doo when she laid that name on me for some transgression) came over from some good awful place, Crete, or someplace like that and was Air Force whereas the rest of us were strictly Army, Regular Army. Second of all from minute one he had me both splitting a gut laughing and looking at him sideways like he was some guy from outer space. But see the General, General Taylor had heard him like I said he said the guys needed to hear a guy like Cronauer to get through as best they could.         

The real reason though, and I proved right in the end even though I did everything in my power to try to save him including getting the grunts, you know the guys who were going in and out of the boonies looking for Mister Charlie to send fan mail to get him back on the air was Sergeant Major Dickerson, the “Dick” as we called him behind his back. (I didn’t do any fighting although I did face gun fire and bomb explosions in my tour of Vietnam like a lot of guys not on the line, it was that kind of war, but I had nothing but respect for the enemy and would not call him the derogatory Charlie but always prefaced it with the honorific Mister to show my respects). Sergeant Major was all spit and polish, all rules and regulations, all-lifer, all the only good commie is dead commie so you knew, I knew the minute I saw Cronauer half out of uniform, hair too long and with a laugh a minute that he wasn’t going to go the distance, would fuck up somehow and made hash out of everything.

But while he was riding high one Airman Cronauer was beautiful was like a breath of fresh air in the Black Hole of Calcutta. The only thing I didn’t like in the few months that he was around was that he would always kid me about my turning the key to start the engine of the jeep when it was already running that I used to transport him around to his various doings. Being around him made me nervous and forgetful, always in the back of my mind figuring I was the fall guy, the expendable black guy. See General Taylor had personally assigned me to “look after” Cronauer since even the General knew he was loosely put together, a loose cannon. I guess even he didn’t know in the end how big a can of worms Cronauer would be after the Dick got through with him. 

You have to know something about Armed Forces Radio back in ’65, maybe any time but mostly the thing was about presenting “happy” news, maybe cover a press conference of some important figure who was in-country to see what was really going on (and never taking the blinders off to find out, never leaving MACV headquarters and definitely never asking the soldiers, the grunts, what the hell was going on while they were doing their whirlwind three day tours in-country while the guys were out there bleeding away) and play music like Ray Conniff, Percy Faith, I don’t know Guy Lombardo stuff our parents would did, would find appealing. And the guys, good guys really, who took their shifts, usually four hours unless they were covering for somebody, and gave what the Dick and Army regulations dictated to read and play. They even had two donkeys, two brothers who must have been orphans because no mother could love them (or have carried them in her womb) who red-penciled everything especially KIAs, and the lack of progress against Mister Charlie that was apparent to anybody except those idiot VIPs who had come in-country to see what it was all about and thought things were just fine-thank you.

Day one on air, no, minute one, Cronauer blew all of that away. Started off at six o’clock in the morning with his signature call-“Good Morning, Vietnam” but he would stretch those three words out for what seemed like an hour so you couldn’t help even at deadhead six in the morning smiling that this was something very different. Then he would do “mock” news reports, total bullshit of total bullshit, and then play something like James Brown, can you believe it, Brother James Brown. Needless to say the Dick blew his top, complained to General Taylor who told him to “fuck off” then because the men liked hearing Cronauer, and he did have a big breath of fresh air following. The General as you can gather was what you would call a soldiers’ General if you know what I mean mixed with the men, went out in the boonies to talk with them (unlike those General Staff guys who never came out of the bunker).          

What did Cronauer in, what did a lot of guys stuck in Vietnam then before there were too many guys hanging around in Saigon and everything got whorish was a girl, a beautiful Vietnamese girl who I told him was off-limits, was a no go. But Cronauer wouldn’t listen, spent every waking hour trying to figure out how to get next to this beauty, this Trinh. Including getting close to her brother Tran something I forget his full name, and it doesn’t matter since that was not his real name, his real Mister Charlie name as it turned out. As young as he was he was a cadre as we, meaning everybody including Cronauer found out-too late.  Although Cronauer didn’t see it that way he was basically asking this Tran to pimp for his sister. Nothing good could come of that, and nothing did despite the extensive wooing that Cronauer did.The cultural gap was too great unlike with the good-time girls who hung around the GIs at Jimmy Wah’s whoI will tell you about in a minute.

When push came to shove though nothing could save Cronauer. He had been too friendly with the natives as they say and the native had bitten him, had used his as a cover to blow up Jimmy Wah’s famous Saigon gin mill where GIs hung out. Blew up Jimmy’s place in broad daylight and this in 1965 so don’t tell me about what was what even then save that for the schoolboy histories, not the real deal. This Jimmy Wah was a character in his own right. Back in the hood, back in the 1960s hood anyway we called guys like that, black guys too on the low, Marys, maybe you called him a fag or “light on his feet,” a fairy or something although you couldn’t, wouldn’t and maybe shouldn’t get away with that these days at least in the public sphere of the all-volunteer Army where the gays and lesbians are crying out like crazy to be recognized for what they are and not discharged for their sexual orientation. The thing to know about Jimmy and Jimmy Wah’s joint was that he was “connected,” had some general who was his boyfriend and protector. A famous general too if I told you the name who Jimmy was “playing the flute for” if you know what I mean. That is why you could find good-time girls aplenty and GIs there at all times. That is why it was such an inviting target for Mister Charlie. And Cronauer with that beauty on his mind dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s for the whole mess.              

Not good, not good at all. Got me mixed up in it and almost ruined my career except the General had the Dick’s number and it was him that was hung out to dry not me. Cronauer, well, bad boy Cronauer got kicked out of the service for the good of the service as they say. Never did get too far with that Trinh before he became persona non grata in-country. Sent his young ass back to the States quick as a jack rabbit. End of story.   

Not quite. I heard that they are going to make a movie out of Cronauer’s crazy stay in Vietnam, going to get the comic Robin Williams to play Cronauer. I hope that it does okay but I will tell you nobody, nobody get it, could pull the antics that Cronauer did just out of the blue. I suppose when it comes out, they say next year, they say 1987 I will go to some theater not on base and watch it but I will know what the real deal was. Hey listen some nights I still wake up thinking about some antic that mad clown did on the air or out in the streets of Saigon. Always think even though I am a Sergeant Major myself here at Fort Meade with twenty-two down and eight to go about that last gift he left me. His farewell tape to the troops which I delivered on the radio. Got to do my own version of his Good Morning, Vietnam war cry, and got to feel for just one moment what it was like to have the world in your hands. Yeah, Cronauer was one hell of a guy, was a piece of work no question. You can take it from somebody who was there.