The "Five O'Clock Follies" was the name given the daily press briefing in Saigon during The Vietnam War. Now an Alabama couple have launched a website to commemorate the men and women who worked in the information side of the U.S. war effort. From engineers who kept the military Radio and TV stations operating, to the officers who conducted the actual briefings, there were many thousands of people involved in getting the military message out. Today we'd called it "spin". You may know I have a dog in this fight, having served with Detachment 5 of AFVN in Quang Tri in 1970-71.
Mrs. Chu Green of Mobile typed the press releases handed out during those briefings. She and her husband Joe launched MACV (The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Office of Information) on Saturday. The site includes the names of personnel who served in MACV, their biographies and "war stories"...but it is very much a work in progress. If you know anyone who served in the information part of the military during the war, send them a link to the site so more names and bios can be added. 
The photo at left shows AFVN Detachment 5 in Quang Tri. The "guts" of the entire TV station were in that white tractor-trailer. The flat-roofed green building to the left was the "studio"...one of the few air conditioned places within many miles. The objects on the corrugated roofs? Sandbags to keep them from blowing off during storms.
[NOTE: Only twice in my career have I been ordered not to air a story. The first time was on AFVN. The second was on APT. Details another time, but it is interesting that both occured in government-operated media environments.]
I wonder if Birmingham Police Chief A. C. Roper, formally a spokesperson for the U. S. Army in Afghanistan, would be interested in that site.
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