by Michael Staelens
It was Vietnam, 1969. I was on my way north, flying in a noisy, shaky cargo plane ready to report to my new assignment. Marines, soldiers, and airmen were strapped to ribbon seats along the fuselage and we glanced at each other surreptitiously. Some of us knew what was coming, others, like me, were starting from scratch. This tour not only made a man out of me, it set the course for the rest of my life. I squinted out of the porthole window and watched the South China Sea coastline recede.
10,000 miles from everyone I knew, and immersed in a strange foreign culture, I became suddenly aware of life in a war zone. We landed at Tuy Hoa Air Base late in the morning, the immense rear hatch groaned open, and we stepped off the C-123 in file. Near the passenger terminal Vietnamese workers squatted, balanced on flat feet in flip-flops. They dined from metal containers with chop sticks or fingers while smoking foul smelling cigarettes, laughing and speaking rapidly. I shouldered my duffel bag and stepped forward wondering what came next.
Inside the hangar, a Staff Sergeant wearing starched jungle green fatigues with black rank insignia looked at my blue and white name tag. He directed me next door to the Base Operations center. “Better get over there quick Airman, they’ve been waiting for you.”
I crossed the sand and met Master Sergeant Darryl. He sized me up and down and shook his head. “We expected you a couple of weeks ago. We’re short-handed so I need you to start work tonight.”
He told me to report to the dorm chief, who would help me get situated. My first day in-country was a true learning experience, but I survived. I worked with Diz, an Airman from Colorado, and took a lot of notes. Outside, the flight line was a bustling place; F-100 Super Saber jets, AC-119 Shadow gunships, and HH-43 Husky helicopters took off and landed constantly. Maintenance crews raced from plane to plane with efficiency and dedication. Crew chiefs were proud of their aircraft and had their names stenciled on the nose. Some of them lived in our barracks.
Forty airmen were housed inside each metal quonset hut. Between the hooches were dug out, sand bagged, hardened shelters which provided cover from incoming barrages. I was usually at work in Base Operations when mortar shells flew. When klaxons blared, we donned helmets and flak jackets before loading M-16s, ready for whatever came. It was an education in Combat Airfield Management. The job was demanding. Supporting air crews with professional ground support and air to ground radio contact was vital to the mission. We gave them what they needed and more. I settled in.
Every morning we inspected the runways. I brought along a hand-cranked field radio and wound it up to contact dispatch for anything we couldn’t handle. Once I noticed an unusual mound of sand that wasn’t there the day before. I turned the crank as fast as I could and nervously reported it to Security Police. They were on top if it within seconds and roped off the area. I never knew what they found.
During the heaviest monsoon I ran into a grade school chum who was an Army PFC, on his way back to his infantry unit. After we caught up on old times over a pint of scotch, he complained of wet socks and jungle rotted toes. I gave him the five pair of new socks I’d received from home in a Care Package that day and he stuffed them into his pack, beaming like I had just given him the key to Fort Knox. We had plenty of amenities on base to make our lives better while he was usually out on some trail or sleeping on ant infested ground. Dry socks might have given him a little comfort but soon I’d find a unique way of helping a lot of troops.
I enrolled in my first college course at the base recreation center where the new path opened. It was a large, air-conditioned oasis in the middle of the base. Donut Dollies (Red Cross volunteers) made us feel like someone cared about us with smiles and good humor. We grinned right back. The rec Center was a lot cleaner and nicer than I expected. A few musical instruments lay on tables in the corner next to a piano waiting to be played. Shelves of books and magazines lined the walls and folding tables provided spaces for board games, study, letter writing or discussion. The aroma of hot coffee and donuts emanated from a lounge where you could sit on padded chairs and watch the local American Forces TV Network. Besides seeing Army Specialist Pat Sajak give weather reports on the nightly newscast, old movies and stale TV shows brought a touch of home. New shows arrived weekly and were scheduled as closely to stateside times as possible. The film reels were then “bicycled” to the next base with an AFRTS station for airing.
I was glad to have a place like that to relax in and, after enrolling in a Political Science course, I browsed the reading materials on the shelves. When I passed a bulletin board I noticed a 3×5 note card with a red border: “Announcers wanted for FM Tuy Hoa. Call Lieutenant Ray.” I found the nearest phone and dialed. An airman answered and put me on hold. Soon the photo squadron commander greeted me and said to come over to his shop as soon as I could. When I told him where I was, he said I should step inside the radio station if I had the time. I did.
The entrance was an audition suite used for show prep and production. There were turntables, tape recorders, microphones and a broadcast control board. A complete library of records, left behind by Armed Forces Radio when the station was decommissioned, lined the walls. It was a history of music supplemented by a lot of donated albums and 45s. The studio was perfectly equipped and acoustical tiles ensured sound proofing. A red and white ‘On Air’ sign hung over the door. Stereo speakers overhead played the radio signal and I marveled at the clarity. An announcer boomed, in a deep, resonant voice, “You’re listening to FM Tuy Hoa and the hits just keep on coming.”
I opened the control room door and a gust of ice-cold air hit me. Joe Cass was in the middle of reading a spot from a typewritten card. When the door opened, his head snapped toward me and his left arm gesticulated wildly. He pointed to the illuminated On-Air sign above the door and shooed me out. I knew I’d made a critical error and sat in the audition suite dejected, waiting to be chastised.
The door opened and Joe walked toward me. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what it means.”
“He calmly told me “It means the mic is open and everyone in-country heard the door squeak when you came in. Next time wait until the light goes out.”
He told me the lieutenant had called and said I might be coming over. He introduced himself and began filling me in on the life of a disc jockey and the mission of the radio station. I sat with him in the control room and watched him create magic on the radio, just like the guys I listened to at home.
“Welcome to pirate radio. We’re using old Armed Forces Radio equipment left behind when they bugged out last year.” An Army broadcaster named Paul Berry had worked to have the equipment and transmitter transferred to recreational services for morale purposes.
As a long record played, we stepped back into the audition suite and I watched him cue up a tape. “This demo reel is disc jockeys from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles We want to sound like them and talk about the kinds of things that they do, only make it local. Listen to it and flip it off when you’re through. Come into the control room when you see the light go out and we’ll talk. Also, there’s no smoking in there and it’s always cold so make sure you bring a sweater or a heavy shirt if you work here. The equipment has been known to overheat.”
I listened to the tape and wanted to sound just like the guy from Los Angeles; concise, conversational, and irreverent. Later I met with Lieutenant Ray at the photo lab. We talked for a while, and then he assigned me a mentor. I was ready to begin my volunteer gig as a radio announcer. My trainer let me sit in on his show the next day and explained how the controls worked and how everything linked together. I watched him expertly manipulate the complex professional equipment. He even let me cue up and start a couple of records. They were the first steps of a grueling learning curve.
I rapidly learned about platter chatter, a term we used to define what happens between records, and about when to give time and temperature, proper pronunciation, how to avoid dead air, how to back-time records and meet air deadlines. We listened to how our favorite DJs performed and tried hard to follow. I read up on diaphragmatic breathing and how to use my bass tones to their fullest. Lieutenant Ray held meetings to help us learn the profession. He esteemed Dick Clark and pointed to him as the paragon of voice and diction. He emphasized how every word Clark used was enunciated crisply and pronounced according to a dictionary or style guide.
After a week of training and observing, I was ready for my first solo shift. My trainer went over all the equipment again, told me he expected great things of me, and walked outside for coffee. I looked up at a Petula Clark poster smiling at me next to one of the Kinks scowling. A few people in the rec center pressed their noses to the studio window. I looked down. Needles jumped on yellow dials, toggle switches were arrayed over potentiometers, records were cued on turntables, and tape decks were threaded. It was a far cry from the hand-cranked radio at Base Ops and even further from the crystal set with an ear plug I used as a kid. I was now wearing broadcast-quality head phones, abandoned to my own devices in the On-Air booth.
In a few seconds the AFRTS network news cast would end and my first live show would begin. My neck tingled, my stomach felt queasy. I held my breath. I waited for the system out cue, ready to say hello to the world, and started my first record, Edwin Starr’s “Twenty-Five Miles to Go,” which had a long instrumental lead-in. I flipped the mic switch to the left and began: “Gene Michaels here, live, in person, and ready to rock on F-M Tuy Hoa, 89.1 on YOUR dial, in stereo.” Edwin Starr’s voice started a beat after mine finished. I felt pretty accomplished. It sounded good in the headphone. The door opened and my trainer peeked in and calmly showed me that I’d turned the mic switch the wrong way so no one heard a word I said, just the music. He gave me a few more pointers, said “welcome to radio,” and walked out.
I didn’t have long to feel sorry for myself, the record was fading and I needed to slap myself in the face and give it another try. The two hours seemed like two days but I paid close attention and maneuvered the controls properly the rest of the way. Gene Michaels was born. We didn’t use our real names for security reasons. We had “air names” like Joe Cass, Randy Bishop, Green W. Dragon, Bill Keen, Larry Charles.
There were very few limits to how we could present our shows or what we could play. I never knew such freedom on the air again. We all had different styles and tastes and spoke to the audience in our own ways. We carried the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service feed when Neil Armstrong took “one small step” on the moon. Sometimes we invited callers, but kept a tape loop running with a seven-second delay to censor profanity. It seemed strange since we were in the middle of bloody combat, but our listeners could get carried away. On July 4th I played all Christmas music and said it was snowing in Vietnam. Troops called in giving ski reports, school closings, and Santa sightings so I put them on the air over the music. I realized people listened to me so it was a fun show.
We all had different jobs that we held down concurrently: I worked the midnight shift at Base Ops, one fueled aircraft, another worked as a medic. We also had a radar operator and a “Red Horse” construction specialist. Off duty, we hung out around the station whenever we could, talking about radio or Randy Bishop’s band that played at the clubs on base. We shared experiences and tricks of the trade. New rock star posters hung on our walls every week. We kept up with the latest industry news because monthly issues of Broadcasting, Billboard, and the Columbia Journalism Review magazines were always in the station’s inbox. I read them over and over again because they set the standard I was trying to achieve.
We learned tricks of the trade from each other, recorded promos and other announcements, and swapped stories about local radio back home. We were home town radio for Tuy Hoa Air Base. Although our transmitter barely covered the Base and the Army Airfield, as representatives of the English language in a foreign country, Lieutenant Ray insisted that we hold ourselves to the highest standards. We all made air check tapes to take back with us by recording our shows and editing out the music, leaving only our talking parts. They sounded like the professional tapes we received each month from stateside.
I had some one-of-a-kind experiences as a result of being a DJ, too. A “sniper” (or so he claimed) from the Army Airfield liked to drop by on Sunday afternoons, even though visitors were prohibited in the control room. We patiently listened to his BS stories because he was a Sergeant First Class and told them like an old cowboy sitting around a campfire. Once he told us about shooting toward what he thought was Viet Cong infiltrators in the brush. He came to realize that he’d killed a water buffalo. After that story, he invited us all to a barbecue put on by the Phu Hiep Airfield Commander. We let the lieutenant know about it.
We soon were off to party with a bunch of worn out, overworked, Army aviation dogs. Lieutenant Ray drove us over the rutted dirt road that separated the bases and we all scanned the area for IEDs. It’s hard to explain how out of place and unwelcome we felt at first. The CO thought we were civilian DJs since we never gave a rank on-air but he laughed when he realized we were merely airmen. He said he always listened, and told us we were doing great things for morale. The food was delicious, like Grade A beef. None of us had the nerve to ask where it came from but we wondered if water buffalo tasted like steak. We got a taste of Army life and they learned all about the on-air staff at the station.
When USO shows passed through, we often brought them to the station to promote the performance. Lieutenant Ray once interviewed Chris Noel, a beautiful blond disc jockey from stateside who had the most popular show on Armed Forces Radio, “A Date with Chris.” Afterwards we swarmed him like a pack of hungry puppies wanting to know all about her and inhaling the remains of her perfume in the studio. One musical group asked me to transcribe the words to a Fifth Dimension song so they could play it at the Officer’s club. I was invited to their final rehearsal and they sounded just like the record.
My next assignment was coming up fast, England Air Force Base near Alexandria, Louisiana. I began to grow glum because FM Tuy Hoa might be the last radio job I would ever have, and I knew I loved the profession. I found an obscure tome in the base library which listed all the radio stations licensed in the United States along with their addresses. I only had one tape, and I recklessly sent it to the first station I could find in Alexandria..
My departure date came and, just as in my case, my replacement had a reason to report late, so I stuck around for two more weeks. In March, 1970, I left the country from Cam Rahn Bay. The C-141 Starlifter roared toward the night sky as I sat strapped to the fuselage and I propped my combat boots up on a crated jet engine and opened a folder containing my orders, a couple of award certificates, and the last letter I received at mail call. It was postmarked Alexandria, LA:
Dear Michael,
We listened to your demo and were excited to hear that you would like to work for KALB. Your voice will sound good in our line-up and your pacing is right for our audience. Please see me upon your arrival and we’ll get something started. Bring your FCC license with you.
Regards,
Bruce Rainey, Program Director, KALB Radio
On the hop from Honolulu to San Francisco, a Marine sitting next to me said “Don’t expect anyone at home to believe anything that happened in-country.” I realized that a week later when I took my uniform to the dry cleaners down the street from my parents’ house. I told the cashier that I had just come back from Vietnam. She looked at the Air Force blues with the big, baggy “Captain Kangaroo” side pockets and asked, “What are you, a bus driver?” I pushed them toward her and smiled.
I studied up and tested for my license when I got home and soon began my weekend job at KALB. I worked part-time commercial radio jobs at my next three duty stations before being accepted to Defense Information School, where I formally studied radio and television broadcasting and journalism. I couldn’t keep in touch with the other announcers but I later found out one of them was on the air in New York and another in South Carolina. Bill Keen posted an hour of his FM Tuy Hoa show on YouTube.
My years in broadcasting and media production have been a thrill I never expected on my flight to war. I’ve been fortunate to work with actors, musicians, and business giants. I’ve been able to interview politicians, war heroes, astronauts, athletes, and civil rights leaders. I had a crazy, popular radio show in the Philippines and served as a spokesman for the Air Force Military Personnel Center. I traveled the world for AFMPC and made many stops. On one of them I stood behind Dick Clark at an LAX airport kiosk and told him what Lieutenant Ray said about him many years before. He laughed and said “If you boys used me as an example, you were all in big trouble.”
I watched media evolve and change and struggled to keep up with it. I kept learning and trace my obsession with the communications industry to that red-bordered card on a cork bulletin board in a recreation center in Vietnam. It was a different war in a different time but I still think about my Band of Brothers at Base Ops and the radio station. I remember the long shifts we pulled, the bombs we dodged, and pirate radio. Old Bernie, my dad, once said: “Join the service, it’ll make a man out of you.” I think Vietnam finally did, and it helped me find a voice I use to this day.
–
–
–
Michael Staelens is a retired Air Force Master Sergeant who also served an incredible 20-year career in Corporate Media with USAA. His current passions are ravenously consuming the prose, poetry, and artwork of veterans and their families, and living life to the fullest in the beautiful Texas Hill Country.
–
–
–