GOOD MORNING VIETNAM

So far 2020 has been anything but normal. Basically, the entire economy has been shut down for months and I have been unable to travel. With everything shut down I have had to find something to do while social distancing and trust me that hasn't been easy.

One thing that I have done is expanded my walking, around the neighborhood and a couple of local trails, and have been averaging between 5 and 6 miles a day. I have also got into trail hiking which is a little more challenging. I have hiked a few short out and back sections of the Appalachian Trail and a few other local tails that I have found on the All Trails App. 

But a man can only walk so far, so one of the other things that I have found to occupy my time is to fulfill photo requests on the Find-A-Grave  Website. People, mostly relatives who are doing ancestry research post request for grave photo and a volunteer in the area where the cemetery is located goes to the cemetery and attempts to locate and photograph the gravestone. 

A lot of the requests are in small rural family cemeteries that are located on private property. It is sometimes extremely hard to contact the property owner to obtain permission to access the cemetery. Other requests are in large church cemeteries who have extremely poor records of grave locations. They may have a list of people buried in their cemetery, but actual location is either very vague or not recorded at all. In that case you end up walking the cemetery hoping to get lucky. 

Then there are cemeteries that have either only line grave locators or a kiosk on site.  That was the case recently when I got a couple of requests for people buried in the Southwest Virginia Veterans Cemetery. Arriving at the cemetery I stopped at the kiosk and quickly secured the plot location for each person.  The Southwest Virginia Veterans Cemetery is a relatively new cemetery, opening in 2013 so there are only a couple of sections currently in use. 

On this day both requests were in Section 8. I was able to quickly locate both request and snap and upload the required photos.  As I was walking around the section looking at the name on each stone, I happened upon the grave of Adrian J. Cronauer. For some reason, the name rang a bell but for the life of me I could not figure out why. So, I left the cemetery and went about my business. Then an hour or so later, like a bolt out of the blue, it came to me...."GOOD MORNING VIETNAM." Could it be?

So I look it up and sure enough this was the same Adrian Cronauer who co-authored the original story for the movie, "Good Morning, Vietnam" In that film, Cronauer was por­trayed by Robin Williams whose performance was nominated for an Academy Award. But what I didn't know was the Mr. Cronauer live in Troutville, Virginia and served on the Board of Directors of the National D-Day Memorial and two terms as a trustee of the Virginia War Memorial. He died on July 18, 2018.