Military Personnel Around the Globe Listen to Disc Jockey Joe Reiling, Programming From a Cubicle in Sun Valley

Thanks to the high lottery number that kept him out of the draft in 1970 when he graduated from the University of Dayton in Ohio, Joe Reiling missed the war in Vietnam entirely.

In fact, he has never held--much less fired--a rifle, saluted a 22-year-old second lieutenant or picked up a cigarette butt in the service of his country.

Nevertheless, when Reiling went to see the film “Good Morning, Vietnam” in 1987, he had a sense of empathy with Airman Adrian Cronauer, played by Robin Williams, who transformed the Armed Forces Radio Network from a purveyor of Muzak and spots on the Uniform Code of Military Justice to something on the cutting edge of both radio broadcasting and music.

Cramped Sun Valley Studio

Sitting in a cramped little studio in the bowels of a nearly windowless blockhouse-like building plopped in the middle of a nondescript industrial zone in Sun Valley, disc jockey Reiling, now 42, straight-faced contends that, if he had to pick something on local civilian radio with which to compare at least his part of the Armed Forces Radio Network, it would be KEDG. The station is an avant-garde progressive outlet that just changed its call letters from KMPC-FM in an attempt to emphasize its self-image--of being at the cutting “edge.”

The cramped studio belongs to the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, which originates the programming for a worldwide audience of 1.2-million service personnel and an unknown--but clearly many times larger--audience of foreign nationals who tune in to the Department of Defense programming.

To be sure, Reiling is no Cronauer. He programs a mix of banter interspersed with selected album cuts so contemporary that they could be heard on any progressive, adult-oriented Southern California rock music station. But in its unique way, it sort of bridges the two conflicting images of Armed Forces radio--the one Cronauer destroyed and the one he created. Carrying on a little-known Southern California tradition that dates to World War II--the network was established in 1942--the Sun Valley building--butted up on one side to a tall stand of satellite dishes--is the point of origin for every song, sitcom, football game, news report and soap opera on armed forces stations in 21 countries.

Few Americans Hear It

Yet it is a network Americans hardly ever hear any more. Until Oct. 1, 1988, some of the radio programming was fed to the military network’s affiliates by short wave, and the Armed Forces Radio Network had a large and loyal following in the continental United States. But on that date, the short-wave operation was shut down in favor of a satellite feed system that offers significantly better sound quality.

With that, the ability of U.S. citizens to hear programming provided by the Sun Valley network nerve center, with 140 employees and a $25-million annual budget, ended forever.

One day recently, Reiling was playing a track called “Nothing’s Shocking” by the psychedelic rock band Jane’s Addiction, whose album cover stirred a stateside furor because it depicts a sculpture of a profoundly buxom woman.

Developing the image, Reiling first suggested there was an anatomical similarity to two other prominent Los Angeles-based disc jockeys who have shows on the Armed Forces Radio Network, Mary Turner and Laurie Allen. Then deciding that the image didn’t go far enough, he proposed that the similarity was closer to First Lady Barbara Bush and former First Lady Nancy Reagan. Reiling now questions the taste of this remark, but the crack has been distributed worldwide.

In an involuntary fit of paranoia, Reiling says, he realized what he had said and fantasized momentarily about an apoplectic reaction farther up the chain of command. Instead, there was silence. “Nothing happened. I (guess I) didn’t expect that it would,” recalled Reiling, himself a veteran of Los Angeles radio with stints at KMET, KNX-FM, KLOS and KLSX.

Most of the time, Reiling’s audience hears him reading from scripts prepared by the American Forces Information Service. “You know,” Reiling intoned in another recent broadcast, “so many opportunities await you when you serve your country overseas.” And just after playing a song called “Dirty Boulevard” by Lou Reed, who since the ‘60s has perhaps been rock’s leading chronicler of the underside of urban American life, Reiling observed:

“Many of us don’t know what it means to be an American. It’s not just who’s leading the league or who has the latest hit record.”

What Reiling is doing--addressing the complex and sometimes contradictory priorities and interests of his armed-service audience--is being echoed in a way by Navy Chief Ralph Zabriskie, who runs the broadcast and cable television channel and one AM and two FM radio stations that keep up a drumbeat of home for the 7,000 inhabitants of the huge Guantanamo Bay U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

On the one hand, Zabriskie said in a telephone interview from Guantanamo, his audience demands television and radio programming--sports, public affairs and entertainment--virtually identical to what everyone sees back home. On the other hand, the Navy chief said, the apparent juxtaposition of reminders about loyalty, military justice, water conservation, sunscreen use, drunk-driving prevention and the dangers of drugs meets the sometimes conflicting needs of his listeners and viewers.

“I think there is a listenership for the messages about re-enlistment, strict adherence to the military Code of Conduct and precautions about preventing terrorist attacks, for instance,” Zabriskie said. “We have gone through a phase of time where people have kind of rediscovered some of their basic values.

“Something like the Code of Conduct, which 10 years ago would have been laughed at, people listen to now.”

World’s Largest Network

What Zabriskie is describing is, quite simply, the largest radio and television network in the world. Its satellite dishes in the San Fernando Valley pull in network shows, including all three nightly newscasts, fastidiously strip every commercial out of them and then send them back up a satellite to reach troops overseas.

Simultaneously, a separate division of the operation does the same thing with network radio feeds, sending the troops everything from Paul Harvey’s version of the news to the Public Broadcasting Service’s “All Things Considered.” And at the same time, in-house production facilities and programming contractors produce prerecorded materials--both radio and television--that are circulated around the world in a constant swirl of 325,000 video cassettes (each one of them a unique dark blue that prevents it from being confused with any other network’s programming) and 175,000 LP records.

No song may be played that is not provided, in neatly packaged weekly shipments of custom-made LPs, by the Sun Valley network nerve center. Sun Valley, in turn, contracts with a local popular music programmer, Don Ovens, to listen carefully to the lyrics of every song he is considering for the troops.

As a result of Vietnam era disclosures of rampant censorship of its programming and a subsequent 1967 order by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that such practices must end, the network censors nothing it disseminates.

Guard Against Obscenity

But, Ovens said, there is a constant battle against obscene words. Lately, Ovens said, rap music has been giving him fits. “We’ve gone a long way with sex in our culture, but I don’t think we can use all of those words,” Ovens said. “I don’t think any FM station in the U.S. can play those words.”

Because the military network uses open-air broadcast frequencies in what the service calls “host countries,” network programmers are careful to remind stations in the field that some subjects may be too sensitive for use in specific places. The warnings permit local disc jockeys--most of whom are service personnel--to make individual decisions about programming suitability. “Funk” gets through, but with an asterisk.

Songs such as Lou Reed’s “Dirty Boulevard,” which, Reiling noted, contains a veiled sexual reference, are included without hesitation in prepackaged programming that originates in California. But the program LPs contain the same warning of potential for offensiveness to host country governments.

“A lot of dope stuff might get by on a German radio station,” Ovens said, “but not on a station in Spain.” References to abortion are equally sensitive. Reiling said he has been discreetly reminded that the topics of nuclear war and atomic bomb explosions may be particularly offensive in Japan, where the audience is so large that a rating service estimated 22 million Japanese civilians listen--some of them using radios sold by Sony that can pick up only the Armed Forces Radio Network.

Drug References Screened

Disc jockey Mary Turner said she shies away from selecting music that has strong references to drugs for her five one-hour weekly Armed Forces Radio Network shows not because anyone ever told her to but because she concluded the practice was appropriate to the audience. “It’s a sort of a flash to know that you are on all over the world,” she said, but the realization necessitates careful sensitivity to music content.

Like Reiling and disc jockey Charlie Tuna, Turner said she programs a blend of new and established music that would be characteristic of any progressive radio outlet in the United States. “I would have to say I guess it’s album-oriented rock,” she said. “I don’t know what you call it.”

In some television news programming, network officials said, U.S. embassies may be asked for advice on the suitability of subject matter for local broadcast air. While individual stories are not censored, said Jerry Fry, the network’s director of programming, entire stories are sometimes deleted. The practice has occasionally embroiled the network in controversy, despite the strict anti-censorship policy.

The network pays for what it plays and shows, but at bargain rates. Music publishing companies and entertainment unions waive most of their fees for material the network picks up. The network pays a set fee for television shows: $670 to $860 per half hour, depending on whether the network receives the show by satellite signal or is furnished a tape copy. Disc jockeys such as Reiling, Turner and Tuna receive $84 per one-hour show.

Supplemental Programming To Navy Capt. Jack Martin, the Sun Valley facility commander, all of this is the fastidiously planned result of the continuum of programming that begins with Reiling sitting at the microphone and ends at Guantanamo and in such disparate places as Antarctica and Alaska, Tokyo and Okinawa, Seoul and Pusan and Berlin and Bremerhaven. The network includes a total of 408 outlets, including about 45 major overseas studios--virtually all of which originate some of their own programming to supplement what they receive by satellite and cassette from Los Angeles.

A total of 150 Navy ships large enough to have their own closed-circuit stations are involved. Each boat in the Navy’s fleet of Trident missile submarines routinely submerges at the beginning of a mission playing the adult rock offerings of Reiling, Tuna and Turner and surfaces months later at mission’s end with the tapes still rolling.

Martin and Air Force Lt. Col Larry Pollack, deputy commander of the Sun Valley installation, describe the programming as a knowing, carefully crafted part of the Department of Defense’s total system of what is called “command information.”

In other words, the enormous expense of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service is undertaken to convey what amounts to a commercial message to service personnel. Instead of selling Reeboks, however, the network is selling re-enlistment. It doesn’t carry ads for the services of drunk-driving attorneys, but it does extol the purported virtues of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Commercials Cut

During January’s Super Bowl football game, for instance, the military network stripped out product announcements but inserted its own deluge of 90 military announcements--many of them produced by contractors employed by the Sun Valley facility. The spots focused on everything from income tax information and stress avoidance to smoking cessation and military customs and traditions.

“The networks are there to sell products,” Pollack said. “You’re not going to sell products unless you get people to watch entertainment programs. We can say the same thing here.

“The way we get them to watch or listen is to wrap (the messages commanders want the troops to hear) into entertainment programs. These things vary from ‘Be a good guest in the host country’ to ‘Don’t drink and drive.’ ”

Because recruiting rates have been in decline recently and reenlistment is an ongoing problem for field commanders, Pollack said, the network has a heavy focus on re-enlistment for troops already in the service. So, he said, the frequent comparison of public service announcements on the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service to commercials is especially apropos.

Occasionally, the network’s inherent uniformity in its message leads to humorous results. Dan Simon, a Navy petty officer who runs the network outlet in Antarctica, for instance, said drunk driving messages seem particularly irrelevant at his duty station since there are no private vehicles and very little driving, of any kind. Martin conceded that announcements urging the fastidious use of sunscreens may seem irrelevant in Alaska winter. At Guantanamo, Zabriskie said, there is little use in exhorting the troops to avoid damage to truck motors by checking levels of antifreeze.

Humorous Diversions

Such things are only humorous diversions to Martin. Asked, for instance, if he had reflected on the role of the network in shaping the cultural lives of service personnel, he simply shook his head.

“That is not the driving force behind what we are,” he said. “Nor are the DJs we have here. It’s nice to have that voice talking to you between songs, but the basic, underlying reason we’re here today is command information. Getting that message out, and we have a worldwide message.

“Some of the message is pretty basic. We’re trying to reach a relatively low common denominator. We’re focusing, for instance, on financial responsibility. (The person hearing that message) may be a 19-year-old wife with a baby who has never had a checkbook before. So some of it seems a little sophomoric. But it’s real important.”

Pollack said the entertainment value of the combined radio and television programming package is especially important in places such as Japan, where the exchange rate value of the dollar puts low-paid enlisted personnel in a difficult position in terms of being able to afford local entertainment. Even a hamburger from a chain such as McDonald’s, Pollack said, can cost as much as $6.

In this context, when Martin himself took his wife to see “Good Morning, Vietnam” in a local movie theater, he didn’t quite know what to expect. “I thought it was very entertaining,” he said. “I was over there during that period.”

Later, Martin said, he got to talking with the commander of the armed forces station in Frankfurt, and the two men agreed that they had observed a clear generation gap in audiences for the film. Young people watching it, Martin said, didn’t seem to know what to make of the tribulations of Adrian Cronauer.

“But the fathers,” he said, “were laughing their butts off.”

TOP 10 ALBUMS Military vs. Civilian

Military Civilian 1 “Don’t Be Cruel,” 2 by Bobby Brown 2 “Electric Youth,” 1 by Debbie Gibson 3 “Appetite for 3 Destruction,” by Guns N’ Roses 4 “Traveling Wilburys, 4 by the Traveling Wilburys 5 “Shooting Rubber- 7 bands at the Stars,” by Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians 6 “Forever Your Girl,” 5 by Paula Abdul 7 “Guns N’ Roses Lies,” 8 by Guns N’ Roses 8 Mystery Girl,” 6 by Roy Orbison 9 “Hysteri,” 10 by Def Leppard 10 “Giving You the Best 11 That I Got,” by Anita Baker

Number nine on the civilian chart is “Loc-ed After Dark,” by Tone Loc. It is not among the military Top 10.

Source: Army and Air Force Exchange Service (Military) and Billboard Magazine (Civilian).