As it ought to be screamingly obvious, the various radio and television outlets run by the US military overseas for the diversion and amusement of the troops and their dependent families, operated with the permission of and at the pleasure of the host nations involved, some of which (Looking at you specifically, Greece under the PASOK administration of Andreas Papandreau) were very much touchier than others. Years from now, when I am in that final coma and circling the drain of this plane of existence, likely I will be galvanized into consciousness again by someone leaning down and whispering “Greece-Turkey-Cypress-NATO-European Economic Community!” into my ear.

Yes, any mention at all of any of those words in any element of broadcast media when I was stationed at Hellenikon, Greece in the mid-1980s meant flagging that reference and consulting with an immediate supervisor – or higher, all the way up to some operative at the US Embassy responsible for vetting references which might result in hurt feelings. Most usually it meant dropping whatever program contained such mention as being more trouble than it would be worth, especially at two in the morning. Nothing went on the air which hadn’t been vetted thoroughly, not even silly pop-culture celebrity interviews which had nothing to do with Greece. We all lived with the nightmare of someone in a show like that suddenly saying, “Oh, by the way, did you know that the Greek prime minister routinely commits sexual indecencies with barnyard animals?”

“Why that’s outright censorship!” observed the caller with an English accent one evening, asking why a popular extended-news program had been bagged for about the second time in a fortnight. (We had considerable of a shadow audience among the English-speaking population in the greater Athens area, a publicly available phone number – and heck, the night shifts were as boring as heck. I didn’t mind long talks in the wee hours with random callers, unless it was either of our two local nutcase regulars.)

“We prefer to consider it a tender concern for the fragile sensitivities of the citizens of our host nation,” I replied to the English caller.

Some local Greek nationals had very fragile sensitivities, indeed. One of our staffers had to have a produced radio spot pulled from rotation because it contained a passing mention of a cheap diner described as a ‘greasy spoon.’ Supposedly a member of the Greek Parliament got his shorts in a twist over it; apparently his grasp of American slang being less than minimal.

Mercifully, the local nationals in other places where I was stationed as an AFRTS staffer were not nearly so touchy. Indeed, Denmark – which essentially Greenland was a part of – had no host nation sensitivities at all, which was quite incredibly civilized of them. Japan was only sensitive about mention – or broadcast footage of the WWII atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Spain retained some heartburn about being beaten like a drum in the Spanish American War of 1898 – which topic appeared practically never in American radio and TV programs almost a hundred years later.

There was one regular radio program in our broadcast package which always mildly surprised us by never raising heartburn in various host nations over the years. That was Wolfman Jack, whose humorous bits sometimes trod heavily over the boundary of humor and well into raunch territory. I remember one such skit – with sound effects – called Beat the Press. (What you would think, with one correspondent confessing that he liked being beaten “on his tushie”, with whip-swishing sounds and yelps of pain.)

A station manager in my early days who had served in Thailand in the late 1960s told us of another Wolfman Jack moment heard when the show aired late at night – a joke which was so raw that he was astounded at not being ordered to pack up the entire broadcast station and leave the country within 24 hours. (The Thais were deeply embarrassed about being viewed as a kind of sexual Disneyland by American servicemen, back then.) The Wolfman rumbled in that deep growly voice that was his trademark: “What’s brown and lays in the forest? Smokey the Hooker!”  But the next morning – not a peep out of anyone, and we never heard any objection to the Beat the Press skit, or any others that were just as questionable. Our own explanation for this was that perhaps Wolfman Jack’s patter was so slangy, colloquial and idiomatically American that most of it went straight over the heads of most English-speaking foreigners. For which we were very grateful, in the long run.