I Won’t Be Home For Christmas

By Frank Absher

It’s really the best way I can think of to fight a war.

I served two tours in Southeast Asia – a total of 15 months – as a “grunt” with Armed Forces Radio & Television.

So I don’t pretend to be anything special as a veteran, but I want you to know about AFRTS, or afarts as we called it.

The idea behind the system was a simple one: If US troops were assigned to overseas outposts, the government wanted to provide them with good old American media.

By the time I got involved, most of the “grunts,” who were non-officer types, had been drafted. You see, if you wanted to be “talent” instead of a pencil pusher, you had to be an enlisted person. This meant that many of us with college degrees decided to forego an officer’s commission so we could be on the air. It was stupid, really, because we were paid crap and had to live in substandard barracks. Officers actually had air conditioning, as well as their own dining facility. Ah, the stupidity of youth!

But it really was fun!

We on-air folks had a bond. We were there against our wills while our contemporaries back in the states were working their way into major market gigs. The military lifers had one goal: to make our lives miserable. In those days, a career military person in AFRTS usually wasn’t good enough to make it as a civilian in the business. They were, however, smart enough to know this, so they stayed in the military.

So it was us against them. That made for powerful bonds. The friction, and the rebelliousness it produced, made for good programming too. And the gig was much better than most of our enlisted counterparts had. One of my buddies, who had a master’s degree in microbiology and worked in the MASH unit, had to answer to a “superior” with a high school education. As I said, we lacked some common sense.

For three years and nine months, I was a military broadcaster/journalist. Tom Petty said it best when he wrote of “the stories we could tell.” But this reminiscence isn’t about that. It’s about a facet of broadcasting.

The goal of AFRTS was to educate, inform and entertain. The “inform” part was stretched a bit because of the censorship that was imposed on us, but most of it made sense.

We didn’t have satellites back then. Almost everything we did in our section of Southeast Asia was locally originated. Our little station was block programmed with just about every music format represented. AFRTS also sent out programs on disc featuring US talent, mostly from the area around Los Angeles, where the AFRTS production facility was. These were used to fill time at stations that didn’t have enough people to serve as disc jockeys.

The AFRTS system also sent out all our music discs. This meant our playlists were at the mercy of what the network’s programmers wanted us to have. We couldn’t play the Filipino bootlegs that were available on the streets.

I later spent 14 months in Alaska at the network’s Anchorage headquarters. My morning show was heard from the tip of Shemya in the Aleutian Islands across the entire interior, northern Canada and all of Greenland thanks to the huge microwave towers all over those regions. (The Defense Department decided it was okay to pipe the signal into civilian communities that were completely isolated from broadcast signals, which meant I had to occasionally broadcast school closings if the wind chill hit 70 below.)

It was pretty heady to broadcast to those areas five days a week. I still have several fan letters which I will cherish until I die.

When I look back now I can understand the big picture, but there was a small thing I never understood. During all the time I worked as an AFRTS DJ, I got requests around Christmas for the saddest seasonal songs.

Our job was to keep the morale up, but invariably, the guys wanted to hear the sad stuff, like “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” We knew when we played that song that we were putting out a real downer, but they really wanted to hear it.

It taught me that the radio was something very special for them, and our listeners had an emotional attachment to the radio and the announcers.

Radio was very special, and I was honored to be a part of it.

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