FROM AFVN TO WLWT

Bill Brown’s Vietnam War Tour of Duty as an AFVN Journalist Led to Remarkable Career as Sports Broadcaster

BY Marc Yablonka

Bill Brown, the longtime Cincinnati Reds and Houston Astros radio and TV play-by-play announcer, says that his experiences as an American Forces Vietnam Army journalist in the Vietnam War paved the way for his long, successful career at the height of his profession.

“For a draftee who hated the Vietnam War, I loved the Army,” Brown remarked, after coming home from the war and immediately getting his first big job with WLWT-TV in Cincinnati. “Without AFVN, WLWT would not have happened. Getting a chance to do the Cincinnati Reds TV network games would not have happened. The Houston Astros TV job would not have happened.” Serving in the Army in Vietnam, he said, “gave me my first big career break.”

Growing up as a big baseball fan in Sedalia, Missouri, Brown fell in love with sports broadcasting after being inspired by two legendary Major League announcers, Jack Buck and Harry Caray. “When I was fourteen, I listened to the St. Louis Cardinals network on a transistor radio on summer nights,” he said. “It was magical. They painted the picture for me better than Van Gogh could have done. I wanted to be them.”

Photo courtesy Bill Brown

Luckily for the teenaged Brown, Smith-Cotton High in Sedalia had a journalism class. “Through that,” he said, “I was able to write stories in the Sedalia Democrat about our high school’s basketball games and learn from the professionals at that newspaper. In those days, we jotted down our game stories from Rolla, Jefferson City, and other road venues and dictated them over a pay phone to the editor.”

After graduating from high school in 1965, Brown enrolled at the University of Missouri in Columbia where he studied at the university’s renowned Missouri School of Journalism. Not long after graduating from Mizzou in 1969, Uncle Sam came calling.

Bill Brown was drafted into the Army, and in 1971 he found himself in South Vietnam plying his broadcast journalism trade with the Army’s Hometown News Service based on Long Binh Post. “We had a great office at Long Binh,” Brown said. “We had several writers but only one broadcaster. I had a recording studio with nice speakers.”

He also traveled throughout the war zone.

“We had blanket travel orders to go wherever we wanted,” Brown said. “I went to Qui Nhon for a week, Ðà Nang, Sông Bé, and other places. We taped interviews with troops and sent the interviews to their hometown radio stations so their friends and families at home could hear their voices and get an update on what they were doing.

“When I got back to the studio, I wrote a script from notes about them, recorded a voiceover description of their unit’s work, and packaged it into a three-and-a-half-minute piece ready for broadcast.” Brown’s interviews covered whatever GIs had shared with him before the tape rolled.

Photo courtesy Bill Brown

“It could be edited, so sometimes I went off the grid. We were all pretty buttoned up while on tape,” Brown said. “The mood was usually chatty. There were good vibes. I was asking the basic questions about what their jobs were and what they had a chance to do in their spare time.”

Five months after arriving in-country—largely because he had done radio voice-over reports at Ft. Sill prior to going to Vietnam, Brown was transferred to the Saigon studios of the American Forces Vietnam Network.

“They found me acceptable for on-camera sportscasts, and it was a big part of the job,” said Brown. “Narrating highlights of college and NFL football games and the like. It was all I ever wanted to do.”

Working at AFVN became more than a full-time job. “We worked 12-hour shifts six days a week,” Brown said. “Let’s face it, everybody wanted our jobs. We were constantly writing TV and radio sportscasts, and taping games for the troops. I was really grateful to be able to do what I always wanted to do – broadcast sports.”

It had also helped that, right after college, and before going into the Army, Brown had worked at WOAI-TV in San Antonio.

“The news director felt I looked too young to go on camera for a sportscast and be credible,” Brown said. “I told him I thought we were trying to attract a younger audience for TV ratings. He asked if I could grow a mustache. I said no.

“My wife and I found a fake mustache and tried to trim it to fit. That didn’t work. Therefore, on weekends I wrote and prepared the sportscasts but the news anchor read them on camera while I pouted.”

After he came home from Vietnam in November 1971, Bill Brown found that his work experience in-country, primarily an audition reel he put together, got him a job as an announcer and weekend sports anchor at WLW Radio and its sister station WLWT-TV, Channel 5, in Cincinnati.

From Cincinnati, it was on to Houston in 1987, where he broadcast Astros games for Home Sports Entertainment and Channel 20 on TV. He also did the games simultaneously for KTRH Radio.

“At that time, and for a few years, I was doing six innings on TV and three innings on radio,” Brown said.

He retired from sportscasting in 2016, but still carries great memories from his work with the Reds and the Astros. “My favorite year with the Reds was 1976 because they won the World Series. The Reds were the legendary team of the ‘70s, and it was a career thrill to be a part of it.”

“I retired before the Astros won their first World Series in 2017, so [the highlights] probably were 1999 and 2001, when they clinched the division titles on the final day of the regular season.

In his retirement, Bill Brown has written four baseball books, including: My Baseball Journey: A Sportscaster’s Story, and Houston’s Team: Houston’s Title, about the Astros victory in the 2017 World Series.

He is at work today on a book about professional athletes who served in the military.

The journalist and author Marc Yablonka’s books include Hot Mics and TV Lights: The American Forces Vietnam Network, which he co-wrote with former AFVN broadcast journalist Rick Fredericksen.

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