Good morning, Baghdad!
Dave Rabbit was a renegade pirate DJ in Vietnam who railed against LBJ to the sound of Jimi Hendrix. Now the garrulous Texan granddad is packing up his old persona, minus the psychedelics, and heading to Iraq.
By Christian Parenti
Sept. 23, 2006 | It was another quiet evening in the suburban Sunbelt -- Dallas to be exact, February 2006 -- and a short, puckish, middle-aged and middle-class father of four named Dave Rabbit was helping his youngest son, a senior in high school, do homework on the Vietnam War. Although Dave had spent most of his adult life managing a family-owned business that designed and manufactured custom T-shirts and caps, he knew about Vietnam, having served three tours there with the Air Force from 1968 to 1971. But that was 35 years ago and now almost a universe away. The decades since the war had been consumed by the simple pleasures and routine trials of being married, raising children, maintaining a summer house on the Gulf Coast and now watching two grandkids grow up.
His son's homework assignment involved the subject of music and the war, so Dave started Googling "rock 'n' roll" and "radio" and "Vietnam War." Then a very strange thing happened. The all-American dad ran into his former incarnation as wild young renegade. Dave Rabbit, the 57-year-old regular guy, stumbled upon Dave Rabbit the drug-addled, smack-talking, 22-year-old Air Force sergeant who was responsible for one of the strangest stunts in broadcast history. It all went down in 1971, when Dave manned a pirate radio show from the back room of a brothel. He blasted Jimi Hendrix and Steppenwolf, portrayed LBJ as a pervert, talked constantly about smoking pot and having sex with Vietnamese hookers.
Then another strange thing happened. After coming across the old recording of his Vietnam radio show on the Internet, Dave discovered that it had been copied and passed around for decades, first as an 8-track, then a cassette, then as an MP3. Dave Rabbit was a underground cult hero.
The discovery was a revelation for the loquacious Texan granddad, and in a fit of inspiration and perhaps crazy bravado, Dave has decided to resurrect his renegade persona, create a new radio show, and broadcast from a stealth location in Iraq. On Tuesday the reborn pirate DJ flies to the Middle East.
"The show is for the front-line troops searching those houses, putting their lives on the line," Dave says. "We're going to slam the terrorists and those knuckleheads, the idiots with bombs strapped to them. But most of all we want the show to be tremendously funny." Worried about security, Dave prefers not to publicize his real name. He asks to be known only as "Dave Rabbit," the moniker he adopted in Vietnam in homage to the legendary L.A. rock DJ Jimmy Rabbit.
The context of Dave's Vietnam radio show speaks volumes about it. In 1965, Armed Forces Radio, known as American Forces Vietnam Network, experienced a brief shot of iconoclasm in the DJ voice of Adrian Cronauer, later the subject of the Robin Williams movie, "Good Morning, Vietnam." But by 1970, when Dave was on his third tour, Cronauer was long gone. As the lights went down over Vietnam each night, and Charlie crept closer to the wire, the official armed forces radio network was back to playing Dionne Warwick, Glen Campbell and the lobotomized optimism of the official news.
At the time, the U.S. military effort in Vietnam was lost but not yet over. The young American draftees and enlistees were still slogging through menacing jungles, burning down suspected Viet Cong villages, killing or being killed, and coming home horribly maimed. At congressional hearings in Washington, a grim-faced former swift boat lieutenant named John Kerry summed up the mood in one rhetorical question: "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a lie?"
Out in the field, some U.S. military units suffered a total collapse of discipline; drug abuse, sabotage, "combat refusals" and "fragging," the murder of officers by their own men, were rampant. The Green Machine -- the mighty U.S. military -- was stalled out in the paddy mud, with no clear way out of Vietnam other than ragged-ass retreat. It was amid this squalid meltdown, and because of it, that Dave launched his show, the sound of psychedelic chaos and youthful fury.
The first show aired at 8 o'clock on New Year's Eve, 1971. Called Radio First Termer, the show was broadcast from a homemade studio that Dave and his friends had constructed in a Saigon whorehouse. They bribed the madam with goods from Air Force supply, like silverware and radios, to keep the room a secret. Dave's friends included "Pete," the engineer, and a female news personality, "Nugyen," who was actually a highly placed administrator in the American Forces Vietnam Network -- the U.S. military's official English-language television and radio network. "She helped, you know, 'monitor' when the heat was getting to be too much," says Dave.
The nightly three-hour show is haunting, heady stuff. One show starts with the languid, dreamy notes of a sitar, over which the sultry voice of Nugyen announces, "The following program is in living color and has been rated X by the Vietnam academy of maggots. The purpose of this program is to bring vital news, information and hard acid rock to the first termers and non-re-enlistees in the Republic of Vietnam. Radio First Termer operates under no Air Force regulations or manuals. In the event of a vice squad raid this program will automatically self-destruct."
Radio First Termer is a mix of skits, jokes, news updates about possible vice raids, and a lot of rock 'n' roll. It has a play list full of now forgotten psychedelic bands like Blood Rock, Cactus and Sugarloaf, along with those we remember, like Hendrix, the Who and Led Zeppelin. Much of show's humor is right out of the locker room. Early on, Dave intones, "Here's the Rabbit philosophy: Pussy is the breakfast of champions." That's one of the more classy asides.
But the show can also be subversive, as when Dave reads "another quickie from the latrine walls around the Republic of Vietnam" over the eerie intro to the mournful Vanilla Fudge cover of "You Keep Me Hanging On." "This joker writes, 'Eighteen days until I can go home to picket and protest this fucking waste of human lives that lifers and the government call a war.'" In another passage, after playing a recording of a sputtering, furious officer, allegedly describing his hatred of Radio First Termer, Dave responds, "Fuck you, sir." He continues: "Tsk, tsk, tsk. Can you believe that's what the base commander thinks of me and my nasty ways. You notice how I emphasized the word 'sir'? The guy's got an inferiority complex."
To stay on the air, which meant overriding the military's own programming, Dave depended on the aid of about a dozen sympathetic technicians at key relay stations of the American Forces Vietnam Network, as well as like-minded friends in the military police. "What are they gonna do," asks Nugyen in one skit, "Send you to Vietnam?" Dave, defiant and mocking, his voice distorted into a crazed frogfish rasp, responds: "Ha ha! Fooled ya, sister -- they already did!"
Radio First Termer lasted 21 days and 63 broadcast hours. "We were at the top of shit list of the Air Force base commander in Saigon, who was dying to shut us down," Dave says. Nevertheless, he planned to continue broadcasting until he learned that his friends in the military police and radio network were also in danger of being disciplined or court-martialed. To protect his buddies, Dave called it quits. He and the crew were so scared of jail that they destroyed all their archives.
Next page: Over the years, weird rumors circulated about who Dave Rabbit really was