Paul Betit likes to tell stories.

“I really do. And being a sportswriter or newspaper reporter was the only way you could tell a story and guarantee you’d get paid for it,” the 67-year-old Vietnam War veteran said.

Raised in Augusta, Betit served in the Army as an intelligence analyst, earning commendation letters during tours in South Vietnam and Ethiopia; after the service, he drove for his family’s trucking business and worked as an account executive in radio. Writing the commercials was the best part, he said.

Betit got a journalism degree from the University of Maine at Orono and went on to write news and sports stories for newspapers for nearly 40 years. Even in retirement, the Brunswick resident still covers games for his longtime employer, the Portland Press Herald.

At Wiscasset Public Library on Wednesday, Oct. 1, Betit will share some of his latest work in another aspect of his writing life, being an author. The talk starts at 7 p.m.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the writing I did as a newspaper man, but I had an inkling that I wanted to write fiction,” he said.

For years, there wasn’t the time for it, between work and coaching the many sports teams that his and wife Debbie Betit’s two sons played on.

He came up with a scenario for a story about a psychiatric patient who takes the place of his lookalike, the U.S. president, after the president has a medical emergency and dies. But the scenario was as far as he got with it.

Years later, when the movie “Dave,” written by Gary Ross, came out in 1993 with a similar premise, Betit said he wasn’t sorry that he hadn’t taken his idea further.

“I thought it was good, that I had come up with something like that, too. It was encouraging.”

In the late 1990s, he drew on his wartime experiences for his first book, “Phu Bai,” a mystery set in Vietnam. Two more would follow with the same fictitious Army investigator, John Murphy. The second, “Kagnew Station,” is set in 1968 East Africa; the third, “The Man in the Canal,” set in Sweden in 1971, was just released in February.

Now Betit is writing his next book, a set of short fiction stories, each told by a different character, from a 10-year-old boy to a  teenager getting ready to go into the service.

“It’s about different ironic things that can happen in a person’s life,” Betit said. Parts are autobiographical.

The stories have provided a change from the work he did mapping the plots of the books in the John Murphy series.

“I don’t necessarily know where it’s going before I get there,” he said.

For more on Betit and his books, visit www.paulbetit.com.