Barbara “Bobbie the Weathergirl” Keith - Vietnam War

From 1967 to 1969, Barbara “Bobbie” Keith lifted spirits of homesick American troops in Vietnam during her nightly TV weather shows as “Bobbie the Weathergirl.” Servicemen would send Keith sacks of mail, asking her for photographs, weather reports from their hometowns, or visits to their bases.

A globe-trotting daughter of two World War II veterans, Keith was 19 when she took a clerical job with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in South Vietnam. An officer scouting for a volunteer weathergirl for Armed Forces Vietnam Network’s (AFVN) Saigon-based evening news broadcast told the blonde-haired Keith she looked the part, so Keith auditioned and won the role.

For the next few years, Keith shared weather reports across Vietnam and Asia and in the troops’ hometowns and favorite R&R spots. She mixed in humor, dancing and music on her shows, providing American military personnel with a welcome respite from combat and becoming one of the war’s biggest TV celebrities. Each broadcast would end with Keith wishing her audience “a pleasant evening weather-wise and you know, of course, otherwise.”

“We never had cue cards,” said Keith, who on occasion donned a bikini during her shows. “You read the ticker tapes. You went into a room, and you pulled the ticker tapes off the machine, and it would tell you the weather. We didn’t really start with the hometown news until the men started writing in and say, ‘We’d like to know what’s going on in our home.’ And that was very important for the guys to know that you recognize their home.”

Keith honored many of those requests to visit U.S. troops in the field, making hundreds of trips throughout the war-torn country and sometimes bringing the troops mail from home. She caught a few USO shows starring Bob Hope. She even dodged gunfire and rocket attacks from North Vietnamese forces, surviving the Tet Offensive, a series of attacks launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against South Vietnam in January 1968, and the May Offensive a few months later.

During her time in Vietnam, Keith never had problems with the troops. “Even in the middle of a war, they are still gentlemen,” she said. “I could be out with hundreds of them by myself and nothing would happen. I think they saw me as the girl they left behind.”

By 1969, Keith had grown tired of the war and left Vietnam, taking a “sanity sabbatical” to decompress from what she had experienced. “I don’t know if anyone ever recovers from that,” Keith said. “There’s so much jammed into a tour of duty. I don’t know how to describe it. For example, I still get goosebumps anytime I hear the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the blades of a helicopter. That never goes away from you, which is really weird. And then sometimes if you hear a loud bang that is unusual, that can startle you and bring back memories.”