Book Review

Hot Mics and TV Lights
By Marc Phillip Yablonka with Rick Fredericksen
Double Dagger Books Ltd (September 12, 2023)
346 pages

By Jim Morris

There’s scarcely a single Vietnam vet who cannot remember starting more than a few days listening to Adrian Cronauer or Pat Sajak or a couple of other DJs shout “Goooooooood Morning, VIETNAM!”, leading into the news and Top 40 music. My first dose was shaving in the latrine at Camp Goodman, in Saigon for a meeting at the Embassy at which I learned that my best Montagnard buddy had just been killed. That’s not the point of this review, but I’ll never forget it, and I bet more than a few readers will have similar memories.

Marc Yablonka, who has written quite a bit for the Sentinel, and Rick Fredericksen, a Marine, and an AFVN broadcaster who went on to a career in broadcast journalism have done a great service to the participants and history of that conflict with this terrific story of AFVN. It is well worth a read by anyone who fought in Vietnam or has an interest in broadcast journalism. It’s a crazy story and a lot of it is very funny.

It also has its share of sudden death and bureaucratic frustration.

AFVN started in 1962, and its daddy was Navy CPO Bryant Arbuckle, who was also the entire staff for the first three months of its existence.

But when other people joined it that staff became a most interesting mix of professional broadcasters, like Sajak, who had been drafted and somehow properly assigned. The “Somehow”, in Sajak’s case involved writing his congressman, who also owned the radio station where Sajak worked prior to being drafted. He was a finance clerk at Long Binh who wanted to work in his actual field and got it. He also extended six months in Saigon to finish out his time in the army doing work he loved and living a relatively cosmopolitan life, as opposed to policing up pine cones Stateside.

There weren’t supposed to be any servicewomen in Vietnam, but there was one, Air Force sergeant Laurie Clemons, who volunteered and somehow made it through the culling process. She wasn’t supposed to be there, but there she was. She loved it, went to the range with the guys, and proved to be an excellent shot with both rifle and pistol.

There were other women who volunteered for AFVN, Bobbie Keith, the weather girl, who worked for USAID, and Donut Dollies like Bobbie Lischuk and Barbara Dorr. Dixie Ferguson was another Donut Dolly, who has a couple of pix in the excellent photo section. I didn’t know Dixie in Vietnam, but she was on staff at the Red Cross Rec Center at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Aurora CO when I was a patient there, and a great chick she was.

The best known AFVN DJ was Adrian Cronauer, played by Robin Williams in the movie Good Morning, Vietnam. He and Bob Moses wrote the story from which the movie was made.

The book’s chapters are laid out chronologically and told as the staffer’s individual stories. Cronauer was almost blown up in 1965 in a terrorist bombing at the My Canh floating restaurant in which more than a hundred casualties, Dick Ellis worked full shifts as a producer, and volunteered to fly on gunships on week-ends to interview the crews, and bootleg time on the guns.

These are stories well told by people with stories to tell.