Good Morning, Vietnam: A Presentation by Adrian Cronauer

On November 11, 2006 – Veterans Day – famed Vietnam disk jockey Adrian Cronauer addressed the American Veterans Center’s Ninth Annual Conference in Arlington, Virginia. Mr. Cronauer, who was portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie Good Morning, Vietnam, spoke to an audience of several hundred students and fellow veterans. The presentation was carried by C-Span television. In this issue, we print the transcript of his speech.

How many of you have seen the movie Good Morning, Vietnam? Well that does wonders for my ego, probably doesn’t hurt my bank account either. Because of the ubiquity of that film on late night television, my 15 minutes of fame has stretched well beyond 15 years. And over that period of time I have found that there are certain things people always want to know; about Good Morning, Vietnam, about Armed Forces Radio, and about Vietnam. And I thought that I would, before I get into the meat of what I wanted to say, the serious stuff, answer some of those questions. And the number one question people always ask, is how much of that movie is real? Well I see a number of uniforms and a number of people I am sure are veterans, and anybody who has been in the military or has had any connections with the military would know, that if I did half of the things that Robin Williams did in that movie I would still be in Fort Leavenworth. There’s a lot of Hollywood exaggeration and outright imagination in the movie. For example, yes there was someone there named Adrian Cronauer, and yes he was a disc jockey in Vietnam, and yes I did teach English during my off duty time. I did not teach my class how to swear and use New York street slang and I wasn’t teaching because I was trying to meet this particularly beautiful Vietnamese girl, at least not one particular beautiful Vietnamese girl. I did try to make it sound like a state-side radio station, and I did have trouble with censorship, and I did start each program with yelling “GOOOOOD Morning Vietnam!”

Now I did not get thrown out of Vietnam. I stayed for my full one-year tour and was honorably discharged, thank you. None of the characters in the film are based on actual people for legal reasons like invasion of privacy and slander and so forth, so they are all stereotypes. But as is true with any good stereotype, you name any character in the film and I could probably think of half a dozen people that I knew during my four years in the Air Force and I suspect that any of you could too. In the movie it shows bags and bags of fan mail coming in and a whole bank of telephones just ringing off the hook with requests. Never happened. I mean think about it. There just aren’t telephone booths out in the rice paddies. Where are they going to call? But I did find out when I went out into the field to do interviews that sometimes people would recognize my name, other times they wouldn’t. I would say “GOOOOD Morning” and they would say “Oh yeah, how about playing a record for me?”