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By Root 913 0

he’d be of some use as a goodwill ambassador to the local community. But Carlin did his best to undermine the assignment. As a DJ he enjoyed some of the perquisites of the job, accepting pizzas and boxes of donuts from distributors trying to get their records played. On the air one weekend he began drinking a fifth of liquor he’d just received as a gift. According to Stan Lewis, who was listening at the time, the drunker Carlin got, the more he joked about life at Barksdale. Some minutes later the last record ended, and the needle stayed in the groove, leaving dead air. Lewis called the studio—no answer. “I thought he’d gone to the bathroom,” he says. He called Joe Monroe, who hustled down to the station, where he learned that Barksdale MPs had hauled Carlin out of the studio and down to the guardhouse.

By Carlin’s own count, he was court-martialed three times and slapped with “numerous” Article 15s for minor offenses. On the night the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees to win the World Series in 1955, Carlin was with his Strategic Air Command unit on a training mission in England. He’d been a Dodgers fan from childhood. Though both the Yankees and the New York Giants played in the Bronx, Carlin instinctively rooted for the unlikely team way over in Brooklyn. The perennially successful Yankees were a “boring, arrogant” team whose fans were “dull-spirited, overbearing twits,” as he once wrote in a New York Times article about his love of baseball. The Dodgers, by contrast, were a motley crew affectionately known as “Dem Bums,” a team that had integrated baseball by adding Jackie Robinson to its roster in 1947. To Carlin, the Dodgers were “colorful, reachable, human . . . and definite underdogs.”

On the night the team clinched the Series victory, Carlin celebrated by getting drunk on cooking wine in a small town near the barracks. “When my tech sergeant expressed his displeasure with my actions—not to mention my noise level—I replied in a manner that he didn’t consider in strict accordance with military protocol,” Carlin recalled. “I told him to go fuck himself. To be honest, I don’t think my salute was up to standards, either.”

There were plenty of other opportunities for him to express his displeasure with military service. During a simulated combat drill at Barksdale that December, Carlin, cold and tired, slipped away from his guard duty post. “I left my gun on the ground and went up into the crawlway of a B-47, smoked a joint, and went to sleep,” he said. The judge told him he’d been inclined to lock him up, but because it was Christmastime, he let him off.

The offenses continued to pile up. In July 1957 Carlin was given a general discharge under honorable conditions—not a dishonorable or bad-conduct discharge, but one that nevertheless implied considerable behavioral issues. In a letter to “Airman Third Class George D. Carlin,” his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Edward E. Matthews, described his decision “to have you eliminated from the Air Force as unproductive.” The officer cited several incidents: his failure to report for guard duty, a driving-while-intoxicated charge in February, a reckless driving episode the previous November, and “Disrespect to Air Policeman, Failure to obey a lawful order by an Air Policeman and Disobeying a direct order from an Officer” on June 24, 1955. Carlin was also reminded of the numerous times he’d been chastised about his personal appearance, the condition of his room, and “drinking alcoholic beverages to such an extent that you could not control your actions.”

While he was busy misbehaving his way out of the Air Force, Carlin was also expanding his role at KJOE, where he took over the afternoon drive-time shift. As a modest nine-station market, Shreveport radio was deeply competitive. When Carlin arrived, KJOE had a commanding fifty-two share, meaning the station could claim more than half of all listeners in the area. But KEEL, another AM Top 40 station, was in hot pursuit, with incoming owner Gordon McLendon vying for the loyalty of the city’s young rock ’n’ roll fans.