Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Mike Rowe

He spent his life trying to avoid doing hard labor, and has found his greatest success in doing... hard labor.

All right, to appease my readers, (a surveillance professional in Redford and a lady with a scar on her back in Ohio), I will now actually write an essay. Hopefully life will be less hectic than it was this Monday. It was just errands, running things to the rental place, going to the pharmacy... not interesting, but time consuming.

Ok, so in the last days of the Viet Nam war, soldiers who were fighting in a war that did not make sense to them in a place they had never heard of had very few choices when it came to entertainment. There were no Playstations in their Fire Base. They could not listen to their MP3s on their ipods.

They just had Armed Forces Viet Nam Network, which to be perfectly honest, was straitlaced and boring. A young man on the lookout for VC during the day and night thousands and thousands of miles away from his home needed a little more of a distraction than what was offered on official channels.

Into this vacuum stepped Radio First Termer. For 20 days over 63 hours, Dave Rabbit, "Pete Sadler" and "Nguyen" regaled their listeners with raunchy sex related jokes, anti-war commentary, skits poking fun at the United States Air Force, of which Rabbit was a Sergeant in, and President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the hardest rock you could hear on the Viet Nam peninsula.

Bands like Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, and Iron Butterfly were broadcast on 69 Megahertz in FM and 690 kilohertz in AM from Radio First Termer's illicit station in the back of a Saigon brothel. It was radio relayed on different frequencies to the entire country from listeners in the signal corps.

Unfortunately, it was not to last. Dave Rabbit feared imprisonment from his base commander, who knew of the show. But for 20 glorious days, people who just wanted to go home could listen to sounds of it, and be reminded that there was a reason to keep fighting.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Damn. I am tired and now you have me off to do some research.

Joe C said...

The scar on your Ohio reader's back must be new, if it's Stepho. Otherwise, it's on her front... And I have pictures. ;-)

and pirate radio rules. Errorfm.com is pretty sweet. I guess it isn't hard to get a show, and I have friends who broadcast there on Fridays 8p-10p. Awesome show.

Stepho said...

The scar is on my belly. It's my one weakness!

(My TATTOO is on my backside.)