‘Goooooood morning Vietnam’ DJ no more

Adrian Cronauer, who inspired a character played by Robin Williams in the film Good Morning, Vietnam, has died at 79.

Mary Muse, the wife of his stepson Michael Muse, said Thursday that Cronauer died from an age-related illness.

During his service as a US Air Force sergeant in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966, Cronauer opened his Armed Forces Radio show with the phrase, “Goooooood morning, Vietnam!”

Williams made the refrain famous in the 1987 film, loosely based on Cronauer’s time in Saigon.

“We were the only game in town and you had to play by our rules,” Cronauer told The Associated Press in 1987. “But I wanted to serve the listeners.”

The military wanted conservative programming. American youths, however, were “not into drab, sterile announcements” with middleof-the-road music, Cronauer said, and the battle over the airwaves was joined.

Cronauer said he loved the movie, but he said much of the film was Hollywood makebelieve. Robin Williams’ portrayal as a fast- talking, non-conformist, yuk-it-up disc jockey sometimes gave people the wrong impression of the man who inspired the film.

“Yes, I did try to make it sound more like a stateside station,” he said in 1989.

“Yes, I did have problems with news censorship. Yes, I was in a restaurant shortly before the Viet Cong hit it. And yes, I did start each programme by yelling, ‘Good Morning, Vietnam!’”

The rest is what he delicately called “good script crafting.”

Cronauer was from Pittsburgh, the son of a steelworker and a schoolteacher. After the military, he worked in radio, television and advertising.

In 1979, Cronauer saw the film Apocalypse Now with his friend Ben Moses, who also served in Vietnam and worked at the Saigon radio station.

“We said that’s not our story of Vietnam,” Moses recalled Thursday. “And we made a deal over a drink that we were going to have a movie called Good Morning, Vietnam.”

It wasn’t easy. Hollywood producers were incensed at the idea of a comedy about Vietnam, said Moses, who coproduced the film and wrote the original 30-page story.

“I said ‘It’s not a comedy – it’s the sugar on top of the medicine,” Moses said.

Writer Mitch Markowitz made the film funny, and director Barry Levinson added the tragic-comedy aspect, Moses said. Williams’ performance was nominated for an Oscar.

Moses said the film was a pivotal moment in changing the way Americans thought about the Vietnamese and the war.

Muse, the wife of Cronauer’s stepson, said the movie “helped open dialogue and discussion that had long been avoided.”

“He loved the servicemen and servicewomen all over the world and always made time to personally engage with them,” she said.

“I always was a bit of an iconoclast, as Robin (Williams) was in the film,” Cronauer said in 1999.

“But I was not anti-military, or anti-establishment. I was anti-stupidity. And you certainly do run into a lot of stupidity in the military.”