--- title: "Shock as Chicago GI’s 43-minute tape home from Vietnam catches a HELICOPTER roaring mid-letter!" url: https://badiyaa.com/vietnam-audio-letter-frank-kowalczyk-43-minute-tape/ published: 2026-10-27T18:13:00+00:00 modified: 2026-10-27T18:13:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Shock as Chicago GI’s 43-minute tape home from Vietnam catches a HELICOPTER roaring mid-letter! Private Frank Kowalczyk hated writing, so in March 1969 he talked 8,600 words onto a reel for his mother. The Smithsonian's postal museum now holds it. A helicopter thunders across the tape. For a few seconds in March 1969, a 21-year-old Army private on the far side of the world stops talking about cockroaches and family gossip, and the war itself barges into a letter meant for his mother in Illinois. The private was Frank A. Kowalczyk, a South Side Chicago kid serving at Long Binh Post near Saigon. He hated writing letters, so he bought a reel-to-reel recorder from another soldier and talked instead. The result runs 43 minutes and holds roughly 8,600 words. It now sits in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, and this week his voice is reaching a far bigger audience than one kitchen in Calumet City. ## “You know how much I hate writing” Kowalczyk explained his shortcut right at the start. “I figured I’d just sit down and instead of writing you a letter just make use of tape—it would be a hell of a lot easier,” he said into the microphone, about halfway through a deployment that lasted 11 months and 20 days. Then the punchline: “You know how much I hate writing.” The tape was a two-way street. He recorded one side; his mother recorded her reply on the other and mailed the reel back to Vietnam. What fills those 43 minutes is gloriously ordinary. He wonders whether his father is back on 12-hour shifts. He asks about his income tax paperwork. He ribs his brothers (“Billy still the big Casanova, or has Paulie taken over his place now?”) and hopes a neighbor named Carol did not marry a man named George. He also warns his mother about the local wildlife: “I guess you’re wondering how big these cockroaches get over here.” ## The war breaks in The jokes do not hold all the way through. Kowalczyk tells his family about a soldier from his company who bled to death in a bunker because nobody came to get him. He grumbles about life on the huge base, where officers kept enlisted men busy with chores and, as he put it, kept “asking you silly questions.” He wanted out of there and back into the field. “I’m going to keep asking to go back out there,” he says. “There’s no harassment out there. … They treat you like a man out there, not like they do over here.” Then comes the helicopter. “That’s a moment that you can’t get in a written letter,” said Lynn Heidelbaugh, the museum curator who acquired the reel from the family in 2011 while researching the exhibition that became “Mail Call.” His daughter heard the same thing: “These helicopters are not in Chicago. This is happening in Vietnam.” ## The base behind the noise Long Binh was no small outpost. It sat about 20 km northeast of Saigon, held the headquarters of [United States Army Vietnam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Binh_Post), and was the largest US Army base in the country, peaking at 60,000 personnel in 1969, the very year Kowalczyk pressed record. The base had also been hit in the Tet attacks of early 1969, weeks before his tape. It came with swimming pools, a bowling alley and nightclubs, which helps explain a young infantryman’s itch to escape the spit-and-polish routine. Mail was the lifeline for bases like it. In 1968 the Cu Chi post office alone, which served the 25th Infantry Division, said it moved between 7,000 and 12,000 pounds of mail a day. ## Do the math on that “letter” Here is why the tape felt easier to a reluctant writer. Kowalczyk’s 8,600 words divided by 43 minutes works out to 200 words a minute, just by talking. Writing the same message by hand would have filled page after page, and none of those pages could have carried a Chicago accent or a passing rotor blade. He was not the only GI to try it. The University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library holds the [Robert J. Shepard collection](https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/07e8dc24-8ac0-4494-87d8-c134486e972a) of recorded letters a soldier sent home from Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, including a reel labeled for Christmas Day 1968. Spoken letters were a habit of that war; the World War II version had been a booth that cut a short 78-rpm record a soldier could mail in an envelope. ## From a basement to the Smithsonian For decades the reel sat in a basement. Like many veterans, Kowalczyk rarely talked about the war, and his daughter, Manda Kowalczyk, does not remember hearing the tape until it joined the museum’s collection. She now works there herself, as an accessions officer. Her father, who died in 2024, found the whole thing a bit funny. “He did remark that it’s funny that somebody would want this—that it’s just him talking about the weather and bugs,” she said. For her, the tape is something else: “It was a version of him that I never would have known.” The [National Postal Museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Postal_Museum) stands opposite Washington’s Union Station in the city’s old main post office, and admission is free. “Mail Call,” the permanent exhibition that brought the reel out of that basement, is where the museum tells the story of letters between the front and home. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Long Binh Post](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Binh_Post) - [Wikipedia: National Postal Museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Postal_Museum) - [University of Michigan: Robert J. Shepard recorded letter, December 25, 1968](https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/07e8dc24-8ac0-4494-87d8-c134486e972a) *Image: PFC Thomas L. Larsen, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*