Parsing bbcode outside of vbb

[ScienceofSpock]

Greetings, y'all.
I'm in the process of rewriting my website, and I'm switching from phpbb to vbb. In the process, I set up a news forum in vbb, and a query on the front of the site to pull news from that forum and display it. This all works fine, but if the news post has bb code in it, the code shows. how would I go about parsing the bb code? Bear in mind that I have no direct hooks into vbb, I'm only grabbing the posts directly from the database.
Is there an easy way to parse bbcode the way I'm doing it or is there a way to hook into vbb from the front page of my site that will parse the bbcode?
For reference, I'm an experienced php programmer, I just haven't learned my way aroung vb yet

Thanks.
SoS