Memorial Day in Dearborn Will be a 'Good Morning' Thanks to Special Guest

Dearborn's on Monday, May 30, will honor Dearborn’s Vietnam veterans, including 69 servicemen who lost their lives during the Vietnam War. Overseeing the parade as grand marshal will be Virginia resident Adrian Cronauer, an Air Force sergeant who was immortalized in the Robin Williams movie Good Morning, Vietnam.

"If I had done half the stuff that he did in that movie, I'd still be in Leavenworth today instead of Virginia," he said. "There's a lot of Hollywood exaggeration and outright imagination in there."

He served in Vietnam for a one-year tour of duty in 1964. An Air Force sergeant, he worked as a radio and television production specialist and gained a significant degree of notoriety while hosting the morning "Dawn Buster" program with his sign-on slogan, "Good morning, Vietnam!"

In planning the parade, Dearborn Allied War Veterans Council Commander Craig Tillman was searching for a grand marshal that had ties to Vietnam, and was delighted to have a figure as iconic as Cronauer accept the duties.

"He totally changed the sound of music in Vietnam," Tillman said. "He started playing more rock 'n roll and Motown sounds that kinda helped the troops get their minds off what was going on in Vietnam and start thinking about home a little bit more."

"When he said he was going to accept this, everyone on the parade committee was just ecstatic. Some of the guys started whooping and hollering 'Good morning, Vietnam,' like Robin Williams portrayed in the movie."

Cronauer started the campus radio for the University of Pittsburgh, where he majored in broadcasting. After finishing his tour in the Air Force, he pitched a sitcom based on his experiences as a DJ for Armed Forces Radio that attempted to meld two popular TV series of the time, MASH and WKRP in Cincinnati. 

Networks turned down his story, but it eventually caught the attention of Hollywood. Very little of his original script treatment was left intact after studio rewrites, but he was pleased with the final result, saying, "It was intended to be a piece of entertainment, and it certainly was that."

"(Williams) wasn't playing me, he was playing a character named Adrian Cronauer who shared a lot of my experiences," Cronauer said. "But what he was really doing was playing Robin Williams. That's what he does, and he did it beautifully, so I was fine with that." 

With only a year left on his enlistment, Cronauer decided to volunteer for Vietnam.  Options for one-year tours were limited, and already having served on bases in Texas and Crete, he thought Vietnam would be an interesting place to work.

On June 25, 1965, he narrowly–and luckily–escaped the Viet Cong's bombing of the My Canh restaurant, having left about 15 minutes prior to the dual detonations of a claymore bomb planted along the riverbank and an explosive mounted to a bicycle.  Forty-eight people were killed on the floating restaurant, a boat moored in the Saigon River with tables and chairs set up on the deck, with 100 others injured.

He survived the bombing of the hotel at which he and fellow servicemen were staying, and the radio station where he worked was routinely attacked and destroyed.

"It was a very state of the art station because every few years they'd blow it up and we'd have to bring in all new equipment," he said. 

"It was kind of bizarre, kind of surreal in a way, because it's a standard radio station, but next to turntable one there's a leather holster hanging there with a loaded automatic in it, and there's another one over in the newsroom hanging beside the teletypes, and our instructions were that we'd use it if necessary."

Faced with the horrors of war, and perhaps a sense of betrayal from the politicians and their fellow citizens, many Vietnam veterans are hesitant to speak of their experiences. Cronauer, however, feels an obligation to share his story in an effort to set the record straight on the legacy of Vietnam and the soldiers that fought there.

"I never met people who fit the mythical media image of murders and rapists and baby killers and dope addicts and psychotics,” he said. "What I found were a lot of honorable men and women who may not have been too delighted with where they found themselves but were determined to do their duty as well and as professionally as they could."

"We have an obligation to talk to the next generation, to tell them who we were, where we were, what we were doing there, what was so important we felt it was worth fighting for and risking our lives for," he added. "If all they have is the false images of the media of Americans in Vietnam and Vietnam veterans in this country, it's going to be a totally wrong idea."

For Cronauer, a member of the American Legion and the Vietnam Veterans of America, among other organizations, Memorial Day means more than just having an extra day off work. His work as grand marshal is a way to help give back to his fellow veterans. 

"It's a day in which we remember those who scarified, and for some gave the ultimate sacrifice, in order to protect our way of life and the freedoms and liberties that we have, and also to remember that each and every one of us has an obligation to defend our country and to be good citizens and do what needs to be done."