A Soldier in Vietnam Recorded His Letter Home Because He Thought It Was Easier Than Writing. It’s a 43-Minute Splice of History

There’s more to Private First Class Frank A. Kowalczyk’s 1969 message than routine updates on his deployment. He poignantly preserved not just his feelings and personality, but a palpable soundtrack of war

Jim Beaugez

Photograph by Cade Martin

November 2026

During World War II, American soldiers stationed abroad could step into a portable isolation booth and record a brief message to a loved one. Once the machine had created a 78-rpm record, the soldier could slip it into an envelope for the folks back home. By the Vietnam era, some soldiers were using higher-fidelity reel-to-reel tape recorders to create audio letters—poignant, often funny, sometimes remarkably intimate.

Private First Class Frank A. Kowalczyk, a 21-year-old United States Army soldier from the South Side of Chicago serving at Long Binh Post near Saigon, was eager to give it a try. After purchasing a recording machine from another soldier, he recorded a tape to send to his mother back home.

“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 in March 1969, at the midpoint of his nearly 12-month deployment, speaking into a microphone attached to a reel-to-reel tape recorder. “You know how much I hate writing.”

If the recording were a letter, it would’ve taken Kowalczyk quite a while to write all 8,600-odd words to his mother. During the 43-minute runtime of the tape (his mother would record her own message on the other side and mail it back to him), Kowalczyk relays the realities—and, in many cases, banalities—of war while making touching inquiries about friends and family back in Calumet City, Illinois. 

The format also encouraged a different kind of communication from letters: In an almost stream-of-consciousness monologue, Kowalczyk wonders if his father is back to working 12-hour shifts and how his siblings are doing in school and elsewhere (“Billy still the big Casanova, or has Paulie taken over his place now?”). He asks about his income tax statements and engages in neighborhood gossip, saying he hopes Carol down the block didn’t marry George.

Manda Kowalczyk, Frank’s daughter and an accessions officer at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., says that her father “was the oldest in the family and was always kind of the keeper of his siblings.” She recalls: “Hearing my dad asking about my aunts and uncles ... seemed very much like my dad.” 

At times, the grave circumstances of the war interrupted Kowalczyk’s thoughts. He mentions a soldier from his company who bled out in a bunker because nobody came to rescue him. The tape also indicates that he chafed when working in the sprawling Long Binh Post facility, the command and logistics hub where superior officers kept enlisted men busy tending to their work and living spaces and “asking you silly questions.” “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.”

Did you know? How many letters went back and forth during the Vietnam War?

• In 1968, the postal operation at Cu Chi, servicing the 25th Infantry Division, reported handling 7,000 to 12,000 pounds of mail each day. 

• Cu Chi was also sending out around 1,000 pounds of mail daily to the Air Mail Terminal at Tan Son Nhut for shipment home. 

At one point, the buzz and wash of a passing helicopter interjects. “You’re at war and it’s scary, and it’s very real,” Manda says of the moment captured on her father’s recording. “These helicopters are not in Chicago. This is happening in Vietnam.”

“That’s a moment that you can’t get in a written letter,” says Lynn Heidelbaugh, a curator at the National Postal Museum who acquired the tape from the family in 2011 while researching “Mail Call,” now a permanent exhibition. “That sound, to me, just brought it home.”

Manda knew about the tape her father recorded but doesn’t recall hearing it until it became part of the Smithsonian collection. Like many soldiers of the era, her father didn’t talk much about his experiences in the war, and the audio recording he made half a world away remained stashed in a basement until she mentioned the exhibition. But the elder Kowalczyk, who died in 2024, was game to donate the recording, if not a little bemused.

“I think it was just funny to him,” she says. “He did remark that it’s funny that somebody would want this—that it’s just him talking about the weather and bugs.”

Wartime correspondence is often as much a comfort for G.I.s in the field as it is for those back home. But for Manda, hearing the recording her father made as a young man learning how to navigate life as a soldier abroad gave her a glimpse into the person he’d been before he even deployed. 

“It was a version of him that I never would have known,” she says. “To be able to hear his voice—there’s a Chicago accent ... and hearing it, it just sounds like home.” 

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• National Postal Museum
• Smithsonian Institution
• Sound Recordings
• Vietnam War
• Warfare