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Available as a limited series teleplay or a radio drama script.
In the mid-1960s, a college radio station is looking for a way to boost listenership from an audience which pretty much feels the station is a joke. They play current music, cover sports events, and have campus-based news and talk shows, but programming is pretty much one big yawn.
Then, while playing around creating sound effects for a show, the station's program director comes up with what everyone there thinks is the most brilliant idea ever.
So, tired of simply reading the news and in order to put the station on the map, they decide to send a student to Vietnam to become a reporter embedded in a search-and-destroy U.S. Army company.
It's important to understand two things. First, this is all taking place during the height of the Vietnam "conflict." News via UPI and AP is pouring in every minute over the teletype machines. Second, the technology available to do this is pretty much “Stone Age” electronics.
Of course no one is actually sent. But each night, portable tape recordings from their "embedded correspondent" are heard from deep within some of the most fierce battles of that era. The sound of bullets whizzing past, enemy warriors everywhere, and the fear and panic of both the student journalist and the young soldiers around him pours from radio speakers wherever their meager radio signal can be heard.
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What the young college radio station team does not realize is that their tiny transmitted signal travels down the coast, all the way to New York City, where listeners become so incensed that they lambaste the college's president with, "How can you conscience sending a young student into the middle of a war just to increase ratings?" They threaten to take what they've been hearing to the national news.
Thus begins a massive attempt to create a cover-up which might just prevent the expulsion of a dozen talented students and prevent a 30,000-student university from being forever tainted.
The students who run the station strike a bargain with the president of the university: They will figure out how to "bring their correspondent home" in good health and with minimal fuss and the college will "overlook" this transgression – essentially bury it.
Deep.
As an aside, no one still living will ever admit to being part of this.