Ancient Web: AFVN Kept Voices from Vietnam-Era Radio on the Air

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

An old radio broadcast can tell you more about daily life than a stack of photographs. You hear the announcer's timing, the music, the jokes, and the sense that everybody on the other end of the signal is somewhere far from home.

Visit the American Forces Vietnam Network archive.

The AFVN veterans' website asks former personnel and collectors to send in anything they can contribute: photographs, letters, recordings, and memories. Its homepage is a modest doorway into photo albums, scanned documents, and an audio archive.

The recordings have unusually useful descriptions. 'Town and Country' is listed as a 31-minute country-and-western program from Saigon. 'Dawn Buster' preserves a morning show associated in popular memory with Good Morning, Vietnam, though this archived example is credited to host John Allgood. Another entry, 'End of An Era,' summarizes the network's locations and detachments, including the loss of personnel at Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

The page credits contributors such as Don Cotterell, Lou Waters, and John Hounslow for supplying material. Those names reveal that this is a shared preservation effort, not an official streaming catalog.

When television needed airplanes

Follow the Project Jenny section and the archive opens an even stranger technological chapter. It describes U.S. Navy NC-121J aircraft called 'Blue Eagles' that transmitted television over South Vietnam. According to the project's history, an airborne radio relay carried the 1965 World Series, while airborne television began in 1966. The aircraft supported AFVN's Channel 11 and South Vietnamese television on Channel 9.

The section offers pages for crews, aircraft, patches, photographs, and historical articles. Its creator, Steve Robbins, invites corrections and contributions from veterans and families. A video link still specifies RealPlayer, another reminder of the era when this digital collection was assembled.

Descriptions and contributor memories should not be treated as independently verified transcripts of every recording. The significant fact is that material once transmitted into the air is now gathered around individual recordings, names, and recollections.

Browse the AFVN audio holdings and the Blue Eagle history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.