“I know you’re on vacation but you promised me a tour of RTL,” I said to pester Benny Brown. Actually I knew he was looking for any excuse to stop in at the Radio/Television Luxembourg studios because his mandatory two month vacation was driving him…and Marlies…nuts. “That’s the way they do things here,” he said. “They just shut everything down in the summer because the whole continent is on vacation anyway,” he groused.
Benny was an oddity when at AFN and nothing much has changed. A military brat, (Father was a Lt. Colonel in JAG) he enlisted in the Army at age 17, trained in armored cavalry and was sent to Vietnam to do war in a tank. His next assignment took him to Europe and he talked his way into AFN Network headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. The oddity part is, in my day not that many on-air talent had seen combat. Sure, in basic training we were taught how to kill a man with a bullet or a bayonet but the closest most of us had gotten to actual combat was defending the music we picked to play on the air. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over.
