Soldiers in Vietnam Mailed Their Voices Home on Tape. Here's How an Audio Drama Makes One Sound Real.
Michael Crouch, an AudioFile Golden Voice, plays Ronnie Crowley, the soldier whose tape TJ hears in the school library.
In March 1969, Army Private First Class Frank Kowalczyk sat down at Long Binh Post in Vietnam and talked into a tape recorder for his mother back in Illinois. Partway through, he stops to tell her a helicopter is flying over. That tape now lives at the National Postal Museum, part of the Smithsonian, and Smithsonian Magazine’s November issue tells the story.
I wrote a tape like that into my novel, The Real Education of TJ Crowley, and it came to life in the full-cast audio drama under the direction of May Wuthrich, my co-author on the adaptation. Dani Martineck voices TJ, and Michael Crouch plays his brother Ronnie, who sends TJ a tape from Vietnam. TJ plays it in his school library. Pool balls clack and men laugh behind Ronnie’s voice, recorded at the PX, so TJ knows right where his brother is.
A letter you can hear
Lynn Heidelbaugh, the curator who acquired the tape for the museum in 2011, put it this way: “That’s a moment that you can’t get in a written letter.” Kowalczyk had bought a reel-to-reel recorder from another soldier, and he hated writing. On tape he could tell his mother about the cockroaches and ask after the neighbors.
I have a package story of my own. When I was about ten, a package came to me from Vietnam from my older sister’s boyfriend, wrapped much the way I later wrote it. Inside were a First Cavalry patch and a recording tape. I put that package into The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline.
The cover of the full-cast audio drama. Ronnie’s tape from Vietnam is Scene 31.
The tape in the library
In the audio drama, a seventh-grader named TJ Crowley takes his brother Ronnie’s package and runs from Ray Hatcher, a bad man from his mother’s past who has made himself at home. He locks himself in Ronnie’s car and cuts the box open with a pocket knife from the glove box. In the dim light he finds a First Cavalry patch and a thin box marked “For TJ Only!” holding brown tape on a clear spool.
At school, the librarian threads the reel onto a machine and hands him headphones. He hears the hiss a tape makes before someone speaks. Then Ronnie: “Hey, TJ, it’s me!” Behind the voice, pool balls clack and people laugh. Ronnie is recording at the PX on his base.
Why it rings true
AudioFile Magazine gave the drama an Earphones Award. Its reviewer noted “remarkable verisimilitude,” from the play-by-play of a basketball game to the whirring of a helicopter in Vietnam, and called the production a “slice of our history.” In plain English, it sounds like the real thing.
The sound has real Wichita behind it. The ARISE Ensemble, founded by civil rights leader Josephine Pace Brown, sings the spirituals, and her daughter, Sheila Brown Kinnard, plays a role inspired by her mother. Longtime Wichita broadcaster John Wright voices a 1968 announcer. I built the story from conversations with Wichita residents who lived on both sides of the redline, and the Vietnam tape comes from the package I got when I was about ten.
TJ and the Crowley and Washington families are storybook people. The redline and the Fair Housing law are history, and so is the summer of 1968. Ronnie is a storybook brother, and Frank Kowalczyk was a real soldier who recorded a real letter to his mother.
Hear it
Here’s the scene, with Michael Crouch as Ronnie: Scene 31, Ronnie sends a tape from Vietnam. The Redline Scenes page has sevenfree scene cuttings from the scriptbook, free to perform and cleared for competition and classroom use.
The complete script is in the scriptbook edition, by Grant Overstake and May Wuthrich. You can find the audio drama on Amazon, and there are more posts about it on the TJ Crowley blog.
About the drama. The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline is a full-cast audio drama set in Wichita, Kansas, in 1968, adapted from Overstake’s novel by co-authors Grant Overstake and May Wuthrich. A seventh-grade boy’s life is upended when a Black family moves in next door in a neighborhood divided by the redline. Fifteen actors perform it, with spirituals by the ARISE Ensemble. It won the 2025 Audie Award in the Young Adult category, an AudioFile Earphones Award, and an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for Outstanding Books of the Year. Blackstone Publishing distributes the audio. Learn more on the TJ Crowley page.
About the authors. Grant Overstake, a former Miami Herald journalist, is the author of the novel and was executive producer of the audio drama. With over 400 audiobooks to her credit, May Wuthrich produced and directed the audio drama and co-wrote the adaptation.