(November 7, 1946 – October 22, 1965)

In action on this day near Phu Cuong, about 35 miles northwest
of Saigon, PFC Milton Lee Olive III of Company B, 2nd Battalion,
503rd Infantry, threw himself on an enemy grenade and saved
four soldiers, including his platoon leader, 1st Lt. James Sanford.

For his actions on that day, he was posthumously awarded the
Medal of Honor.

At a ceremony on the steps of the White House, on
April 21, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson (center)
presented Olive’s Medal of Honor to his father and
stepmother (left).

CIA reference photograph of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile in Red Square, Moscow.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union, when American
deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were
matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

The crisis lasted from October 16 to October 28, 1962. The
confrontation is widely considered the closest the
the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear
war.

Cuban Missile Crisis, map of immediate-threat areas.

The United States Naval Academy opened in Annapolis,
Maryland, with 50 midshipmen students and seven
professors. Known as the Naval School until 1850,
the curriculum included mathematics and navigation,
gunnery and steam, chemistry, English, natural
philosophy, and French.

The Naval School officially became the U.S. Naval Academy
in 1850, and a new curriculum went into effect, requiring
midshipmen to study at the academy for four years and to
train aboard ships each summer—the basic format that
remains at the academy to this day.

The American Forces Network can trace its origins to 26 May 1942,
when the War Department established the Armed Forces Radio
Service (AFRS). A television service was first introduced in 1954
with a pilot station at Limestone Air Force Base, Maine. In 1954,
the television mission of AFRS was officially recognized and
AFRS (Armed Forces Radio Service) became AFRTS (Armed
Forces Radio and Television Service).        

AFN-Japan’s radio services today consist of AM and FM stereo operations at Yokota Air Base (810 AM & cable FM), MCAS
Iwakuni (1575 AM), FLTACTS Sasebo (1575 AM), Okinawa
(648 AM & 89.1 FM) and Misawa Air Base (1575 AM).      

AFN-Okinawa ceased over-the-air analog TV operations along
with all other Japanese TV stations on July 24, 2011.      

All music was recorded on LP discs.

1960

AFRTS Okinawa Record library (1950s)

AFRTS Okinawa TV Master Control booth in 1964.

Pat Sajak, the host of TVs Wheel of Fortune
served in the U.S. Army as a disc jockey
during the Vietnam War for American
Forces Vietnam Network. He hosted the
same Dawn Buster radio show that Adrian
Cronauer had, and for 14 months, followed
Cronauer’s tradition of signing on with
"Good Morning Vietnam!"

Gene Autry, perhaps the greatest singing cowboy of all time, 
was born on September 29, 1907, in Tioga, Texas.

While still a boy, Autry moved with his family to a ranch in
Oklahoma where he learned to play the guitar and sing.

The young Autry was quickly attracted to a new style of music
that was becoming popular at the time, which combined the
traditional cowboy music popular in Texas and Oklahoma and
the folk songs, ballads, and hymns of southern-style country
music. Known as country-western.