The man immortalized in the Robin Williams movie "Good Morning Vietnam," Adrian Cronauer, visited the KRMG Morning News studios this morning to discuss an important mission to Tulsa.

Cronauer is a special assistant to the director of the Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.

In his own words:

For almost seven years I have been a special assistant to the director of the Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office at the Department of Defense. One of the more important and certainly rewarding things we do here is what we call "Family Updates."  

 

Almost every month, we pick a major metropolitan area and rent a hotel ballroom on a Saturday. We invite anyone within a 350 mile radius of that city who happens to be a relative of a missing American from any of our conflicts--ranging all the way back to World War II--to join us for a day-long briefing from representatives of our various units around the world. We present these relatives with a power-point briefing about who we are, what we do, and where & how we do it. At the end of the day, we give them a print-out of whatever we might know about their particular missing loved one and give them a chance to talk with one of our area experts; if, for example, their missing relative was lost in Vietnam, we invite them to talk to a Southeast Asia expert.

 

For some of these people, it is the first time in years they've heard anything about their loved one--maybe even decades. Even if we are able to give them only a tiny bit of new information, if it helps them move a bit toward closure it means so much to them and they are so grateful.

We, of course, return from these monthly briefings reinvigorated and rededicated from seeing, first hand, how much it means to them.

 

Learn more about his Tulsa visit here.