Sound Bites

This page has some sound bites of tape recordings that my dad sent home to my mom. In addition to their daily letters that they wrote back and forth, they would also make audio tapes for each other. Now of course these weren't cassettes, they were the old reel-to-reel tapes. My challenge if I wanted to ever hear these was to try to get my hands on a machine that could play these tapes in 1999. After several calls around the city of Columbus, I found an AV company that said they could rent me a player for $25/day. I laughed when I heard my mom say in one of the tapes that she was borrowing the tape recorder she was using because she had priced one and it cost $17!

This was really special for me to discover these recordings. I knew I had some tapes, but I thought they were all of my mom. As I went through them though, I found two tapes that had my dad's voice on them, which I never recall hearing before.

Most of the tapes contain personal informaion, but at times my dad would just be describing what was going on around him in the hootch. The following bites I believe are from Chu Lai in December of 1966. I thought that maybe some of the guys mentioned would get a kick out of hearing what my dad had to say.

Hair cuts and taking fire from the Village   (Real Audio 374K)

About Jack "VanZ"   (Real Audio 80K)

Doug Darran makin' cocoa   (Real Audio 33K)

Gettin' ready to party   (Real Audio 90K)