What did you do in the war, Daddy?

I'm going through old photos to jog my memory about topics that might be interesting to my children and friends. I came across this one, which reveals a shopworn tear at the bottom from the days WAY before digital photography. This might have been taken by Matthew Brady (oops, wrong war), but it captures the "Wild Child" at work - yes, the clock does read 03:15:24 and I was live on the radio in Ubon, Thailand. So, the war wasn't civil at all, but it was my war and the only one available in my generation.

The show was called "the Night Owl" and I didn't name it, I inherited it from somebody anxious to work more traditional hours. I came on the air at midnight, stayed "live" until 0400 hours - which is Four Freakin' A.M. in the morning for the non-veterans in this reading audience. It was the middle of the night, but well after those much older and higher in rank had collapsed, sober or spirit enhanced, into bed and were sleeping soundly. My audience was young men, fueling F-4 Phantom II's, or up-loading ordinance (bombs, rockets, etc.). Most requested song of that era was Eric Burden & The Animals singing "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place". Most amusing story of that year - the censors who decided which records we were to be sent never sent us a number one song, which topped the charts for weeks. It was from the movie "The Graduate", and you'll remember it - Simon & Bullwinkle's "Mrs. Robinson". There was this lyric in there that went "Jesus loves you more than you will know".........they weren't sure if that was pro or anti religious so they punted. Well, most of us had friends back in "the World" and soon pirated copies - indeed albums from Simon & Garfunkel provided us a copy to play.

Military radio was sorta like real radio - that's a real (actually reel to reel) tape recorder in the picture. Good stuff too, AMPEX, and those are real turntables (another to my left, but not seen in the picture), and we had cart machines (an early 8 track, if you are old enough to know what an 8 track looked like) too. My work day (or night, should you wish to be accurate) was arrival at the station around 10:30 PM, with a couple of hours to drink coffee and pick records from the quite expansive library, and arrange all the "spots" (think commercials) that featured Command Information announcements. We were there to entertain, but also to inform. Remember, this was well before cell phones, texting, the Internet, Twitter and Facebook. We actually had a monopoly on the audience, and each station in Thailand (we had six bases that were not made public at the time) had it's own station, and we radiated a signal clearly enough to be heard across the base, and into the nearby town. Unless, of course you knew how to turn up the power on the transmitter after midnight, and THEN you could be receiving requests from fire bases in the Republic of Vietnam. Like I said, most of the authority figures were sound asleep while I was working with my enlisted peers, saving the world for democracy by playing decadent rock and roll. At four in the morning, everybody apparently was deemed to have had enough rock and roll, as the fighters were fueled and loaded, and the pilots were awakening to start their day over Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor, in a nasty little neighborhood called Route Pack Six. So at 04:00:00 I ended my live show, and went to the Network news on the hour. At five after, a transcribed disk (canned program) started, with another to follow at 5:00 AM. At 6:00 AM, another live show started, with the morning man Buffalo Bob Palmer. Bob lived in town, and rode to work on his motorcycle, so sometimes he'd get caught in traffic and I got to start his show with a record of MY choosing. Sorry, Buffalo

To learn more about those years, I would direct you to www.bobwertzcm.tripod.com where you'll find the home page of the American Forces Thailand Network. If that doesn't work for you, just Google AFTN Radio, you'll find it. You'll even find a picture of me and Buffalo Bob 35 years later, taken in Florida. Lots of other good stuff in there, so click on Ubon, the base in the SE corner of the country.

I did this for twelve months, but not always in Ubon - toward the end of my tour of duty I was reassigned down south to a large base at U-Tapao on the Gulf of Thailand, to help open a television station. But military television is fodder for another blog entry, as my TV career then extended into Germany.