You gotta laugh ... or cry

The 36th Tactical Hospital at Bitburg AB in the spring of 1968. (Don Dale photo)

I have to tell one quick story about watching AFTV-22 while I was still a medic but was working part-time at the station.

Not everybody who got through the DINFOS school at Fort Benjamin Harrison was fit to be on the air. (DINFOS was then the Defense Information School, where most military broadcasters were trained, at a large Army post on the outskirts of Indianapolis.)

A case in point was Airman ... well ... let's just call him Airman Doofus. He was assigned to AFTV-22, but nobody quite knew what to do with him. For the most part the station manager kept him behind the scenes, since he was awful on camera. He'd write and voice PSAs for various entities like the base theater or the PX or the recreation club and make sure the filler films about "stopping the gold flow" (spending too much money on the German economy instead of on base) were on the log. Finding things for Airman Doofus to do -- and keeping him out of trouble -- was almost a full-time job for the station manager.

I was sitting in the hospital barracks dayroom one evening watching TV. "Star Trek" was about to come on, so the room was crowded. And up pops Airman Doofus's voice on a PSA promoting a "fun, two-week railway getaway from Spangdahlem to Australia." Hmmm ... that would be impossible unless somebody had laid train tracks across the Pacific Ocean. Airman Doofus had confused the nearby country of Austria with the faraway continent of Australia. When "Star Trek" ended, the PSA ran once more. The dayroom crowd again roared in laughter.

On a more serious note, Airman Doofus was a disaster on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in early April of 1968. Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis at about 6 p.m., but it was after midnight in Germany when the bulletin came through. Most of us learned about it when we woke up. AFTV-22 didn't sign on until 11 a.m. And Airman Doofus was the only broadcaster available to do the first news headlines.

He couldn't quite get his tongue around the slain Civil Rights leader's full name. Every time, it came out sounding like "Martha Luther King Jr."

Seriously.

Every time.

I think that might have been the last time Airman Doofus ever got any airtime on AFTV-22.