Lance Corporal Michael A. Baronowski

In 1966, a young Marine took a reel-to-reel tape recorder with him into the Vietnam War. For two months, Michael A. Baronowski made tapes of his friends, of life in foxholes, of combat. And he sent those audio letters home to his family in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Then he was killed in action.

Michael’s tapes survived and were used to produce this story as part of the public radio series “Lost and Found Sound,” created by the Kitchen Sisters and Jay Allison. You can find more “Lost and Found Sound” stories on the podcast Kitchen Sisters Present from Radiotopia. The Vietnam Tapes of Michael A. Baronowski was produced by Christina Egloff and Jay Allison.

The Radio Diaries Podcast is produced by Joe Richman, Nellie Gilles, and Sarah Kate Kramer. Our editors are Deborah George and Ben Shapiro. We have support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowments for the Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and many others. We are a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of sixteen outstanding podcasts.