Chapter 27

The four of us fresh-caught donut dollies were met at the terminal by a small Vietnamese man carrying a sign with our names on it. He spoke fairly good English, helped us collect our luggage, and then loaded us into a large but old American car for the trip to the Red Cross’s headquarters in-country.

I had seen it all before, but it had been a long time ago, so it seemed almost like a first impression all over again. Blaring rock music assaulted pedestrians from bars. Old women squatted on the sidewalk over steaming and sometimes very smelly pots. Teenage prostitutes strutted their stuff in tiny miniskirts. Teenage boys rode double on Honda motorcycles, while miniature blue and yellow cabs barely missed the scooters. Signs advertised dressmakers, massages, and quick marriages; many of the signs were in English, and many of the rest were in French, which I could read, and Vietnamese, which I could not. American soldiers towered over elderly Vietnamese women, who wore conical hats and carried parasols, and were often dressed in ao-dais, the Vietnamese woman’s common formal dress. Black market stalls lined the sidewalks with the wildest assortment of things for sale. Everything seemed cluttered, cramped, smelly, tawdry, and ramshackle, and it seemed as if I had forgotten the confusion of it all. Even having been there all that time before in my own personal timeline it still seemed strange and exotic, something I would never be able to totally comprehend.

An older American woman, who turned out to be another long-time Red Cross worker, met us at the headquarters. She said her name was Adeline. “I know you’ve had a long trip, you’re tired and you’re jet-lagged,” she told us. “So I’m just going to have Mr. Hoan here take you to an apartment we maintain for people visiting here, so you can get some sleep and pull yourselves together. Come on over here in the morning, and we’ll start to get you processed in and see what we’re going to do about your assignments.”

Despite the excitement of déjà vu all over again, it did not take me long to fall asleep once we got to the apartment.

The in-processing the next day actually lasted a couple of days; we were given another orientation like we’d had in Washington, and not surprisingly there were several things we were told that didn’t match up. Finally we were given our assignments. One of the girls who had come with us was going to be sent to the Red Cross canteen in An Khe and the other to the one in Lai Khe. Both Cat and I had hoped to be assigned together and we were, to the one in Phan Loc. “We wouldn’t normally do something like that,” Adeline said, “but we are really hurting for people up there right now. It’s the smallest of our centers, and sometimes it tends to get forgotten about. I’ll have to see about getting you on a plane up there tomorrow.”

I don’t want to say I was dismayed to hear the news. As Joe, I had spent my time in the Saigon/Tan Son Nhut/Long Binh/Bien Hoa area. I had known it pretty well, although my memories of it were now very stale. Going out in the boonies to a place like Phan Loc would be a completely different situation from what I had experienced back then, and things were bound to be a little more primitive. I couldn’t even remember hearing much of anything about Phan Loc, other than it was upcountry a ways and I had never had to drive a truck there. I was pretty sure this wasn’t a discontinuity, just something different.

There were a few other things we needed to get done before leaving. One of the things was to get name tags. “Just to help people get familiar with you, and a little to protect your identity in case someone gets possessive, it helps to use something of a nickname on your tags,” Adeline suggested.

“My name is Catherine, but everybody calls me Cat,” Cat replied. “Will that do?”

“Sure, that sounds fine to me. How about you, Joan?”

“I answer to Jo about as well as anything else,” I told her.

“All right, I’ll send Hoan out to get the tags made,” she replied. “He has them done someplace, I don’t know where but they’re pretty fast for Vietnamese.”

I still don’t know what happened, but Adeline’s pen must have given her trouble or the person making the name tags must have misread her note or something, but when I got the black tag with the white lettering back the next day it read “JoJo.”

“Hey, this isn’t right,” I told Adeline the instant I saw it.

“Oh, well,” she sighed. “In a way you’re lucky they got it that close to right, but there’s no time to have it changed now. You’ll be back here sooner or later, maybe you can have it redone then.”

That was how I became “JoJo the Donut Dolly,” and it was a name that was to stick with me the rest of the time I was in-country and even afterwards with some people. After a while I even came to like it. Cat soon usually called me that, and I found myself signing family letters with the full nickname, and initialing notes and such “JJDD.” I fought back, at least in front of the troops, by calling my friend “Kittycat,” and after a while that stuck a little bit, too.

Once that got sorted out – or not sorted out, to be more correct – Adeline told us that she’d send us to the airport to grab a flight to Phan Loc shortly. “I’m going to try to call Sharon, the director up there to let her know you’re coming, but whether I can actually manage to do it is another story. You would not believe how hard it is to get a phone call as far as even Long Binh, and the odds of being able to get through to Phan Loc are really bad,” Adeline explained. “If you get there and no one meets you, you should be able to get a ride to the center pretty easily. Just ask around, and I’m sure someone will be happy to take you.”

Sometime in the next couple of hours we were back at the airport, getting onto a plane – not a sleek jetliner, but a big propeller-driven C-130, painted olive drab and with a tail that stuck high in the air. There was a ramp that lowered from the back of the plane, and we walked aboard to find that there were no neat airline seats, just fold-down webbing seats along each side of the plane. There was not a lot of room to sit on them since most of the floor space in the plane was taken up with an immense pile of boxes, bags, crates, skids, and God knows what. We added our luggage to the pile; it consisted of a dark green Army duffel bag each, and a small hand-carried duffel bag called an “AWOL” bag.

“You know,” I said to Cat as we settled into our seats – there were no seat belts, either – “I almost wish we’d brought our rucksacks. They might’ve proved to be handy.”

“Now is a heck of a time to figure that out,” she shook her head. “Do you realize that it was just a year ago that we were carrying them up Mount Glover in the Wind Rivers?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Boy, that seems long ago and far away, doesn’t it?”

After a while they started the engines on the C-130. They were noisy, since there wasn’t a hint of any insulation in the plane. We taxied out to a runway and took off. There wasn’t much to see since there were no windows, and it was much too noisy to talk, but after a while we heard the engine noise die down, and we were descending. Eventually we felt the plane touch down, and then we felt ourselves pushed forward as the pilots reversed the pitch of the props and brought us to a very quick stop. I still have no idea of why all that stuff and the people in the plane didn’t wind up in the cockpit with them.

Our first sight of Phan Loc as we walked down the ramp at the back of the plane was not encouraging. There was some green off in the distance, but the predominant color was brown; just about everything had been bulldozed flat to build the base, which was made up of buildings that were mostly unpainted. It was very dusty, and although it couldn’t have been more than a few years old, everything seemed worn and dilapidated.

Although we had noticed the heat earlier, it was incredibly hot and dusty, and our blue seersucker dresses were feeling sweaty very quickly. I took some solace in Joe’s memories of his first days in-country when it had seemed stifling, even at night, but I had acclimatized myself to the heat quickly. In a month, I told myself, this would seem normal.

We weren’t very close to where we were told the terminal was, such as it was, so we slung our heavy duffel bags over our shoulders and started walking toward it. Not surprisingly, we were soon asked by a couple of guys if we would like their help, and of course we took them up on it. We knew right from the beginning that we had to be at least overtly friendly to just about everyone, so we asked them their names, where they were from, and how many days they had left. The last, we had been told and Joe knew from experience, was very important to virtually everyone, and anyone you asked could tell you to the day. We told the guys where we were from, and got them to talk about their homes just a little bit. They seemed pleased to actually be talking to a couple of American girls around their own ages, and there was no doubt in my mind that it was the highlight of their day, and perhaps their month.

Sure enough, there was no one waiting for us at the terminal, not that we had expected there to be, but it was only the work of a minute to walk outside and find three guys loading onto a three-quarter-ton truck. “Hey,” I said to the driver. “What’s the chances of getting a ride to the Red Cross canteen?”

The driver’s jaw all but dropped to the ground; it was clear that an American girl hadn’t spoken to him in a long time either. “S-s-s-sure,” he managed. “I don’t think these guys will mind if we go out of our way. T-t-there’s not going to be room for both of you up front, though.”

“No big deal, I can ride in back,” I offered. “I want to look around, anyway.” That brought a big smile to the three guys who were going to be riding in back.

Cat and I threw our bags into the back of the truck, and while she climbed in front with the driver I clambered up into the back and sat down on the wooden fold-down seat along the side. “Hi, guys,” I said to the three soldiers, who looked as if a dream had just been beamed down to them. “I’m JoJo. I’m glad you could take us with you, and I hope we won’t take too much of your time.”

“Take all the time you like,” one of them said. “I don’t think any of us are going to mind a bit.”

It wasn’t a long ride to the Red Cross center – only a couple of miles – but I went through the “where are you from” and “how long do you have left” routine again. I know it was superficial, but even though it was, the guys all appreciated having some attention from me. It seemed that a friendly American girl was a pretty rare thing to see out in the distant boonies where they were normally stationed.

The truck soon pulled to a stop in front of a low wooden building with a corrugated metal roof, with sandbags stacked all around. There was a sign in front of the building that said “Phan Loc Red Cross Canteen” so I guessed this was to be our new home. “Thanks for the lift, guys,” I said as I got up. “I’ll be seeing you around.”

Cat and I didn’t even have to carry our bags into the building; we had several volunteers to help out, all of whom were thanked with handshakes and warm greetings. As they filed out, a dark-haired heavy-set woman in her thirties said, “Hi, welcome to Phan Loc. Have you been assigned here by any chance, or are you just visiting?”

“Adeline said we were supposed to be assigned here,” I told the woman.

“Wow, will wonders never cease? We’ve been promised some help for a couple of months, but nothing ever seems to happen. It’s been down to three of us for a while, and we’re supposed to have seven. Two at once? It’s a miracle, I tell you, a miracle. Hi, I’m Sharon, I’m the director.”

We introduced ourselves and told her that Adeline had been going to try to call and tell her we were on our way. “She sent some paperwork for you with us,” I told her. “I’d be willing to bet that at least some of it is notification that we’re on our way.”

“It always seems to work that way,” she shrugged. “Let’s get you settled into the hooch, and then I can tell you about how things work around here.”

The “hooch” – the small barracks-like building where we would be living – was conveniently next door to the canteen. It was nothing much, just another one of those sandbagged, tin-roofed, and bare-wood things that were to be seen all over the country. There were six bunk beds there, plus a single bed in one end of the building; it was Sharon’s by right of seniority. Two of the lower bunks were taken, with blankets and sheets on them; the other four bunks just had mattresses folded up on them. “The crapper is out back,” Sharon told us. “It stinks, but it’s the only designated woman’s john in Phan Loc except for the one at the field hospital so you’ll get used to it. Same thing for the shower back in the end of the building. It’s cold, but you get used to it too.”

“Are you telling us that we’re the only women here?” Cat asked.

“Except for some nurses, the only American women, as far as I know,” Sharon told her. “Oh, we have Vietnamese women running around, mama-sans mostly who take care of the hooches and do odds and ends of chores. Chu Lin, who does it for us, is pretty good. She keeps the hooch clean, does the laundry, and does the same thing for the center. She doesn’t have much English, but I guess speaks French pretty well.”

“We both speak French pretty well,” I smiled. “That’s what we were majoring in.” I went on to explain briefly that we were planning on going to Switzerland to study it more when we were done here.

“Well, that’s good to know. Sometimes it’s a little hard to get through to her, but I don’t have any French at all. I take care of paying her, but I’ll ask you to kick in five bucks a month to cover her wages.”

“Five bucks a month among how many of us?” Cat asked. “Is that all?”

“It’s pretty good money here,” Sharon shrugged. “You hear stories of real cat fights among the Vietnamese who want to get those jobs.”

Cat and I took an upper and a lower, dumped our gear on the beds, and followed Sharon back over to the center.

Over the next little while Sharon told us about what we would be doing. A large part of it would be the “clubmobiles” we had heard about in Washington, although we rarely used the term. Usually one of us and sometimes two of us would be staying at the center in Phan Loc to deal with people who wandered in during the day, usually not all that many. Normally, two of us SRAOs would go on the clubmobile trips – it made for better shows and allowed us to talk to more guys much like I had done with the guys coming from the airport. Because they had been so short-handed, they had been going out by themselves, but at least we would have someone to show us the ropes.

I was to learn that we took our services out to the troops in the field much more than the USO did. The USO workers mostly stayed around the canteens and rarely went to small units stuck out in the boondocks. We donut dollies went just about anywhere there was a more or less permanent encampment if there wasn’t an active battle going on nearby. It may have not been the services that could be provided in a larger camp, but it was something when the guys out in the field usually had nothing. Sometimes we would hit several such camps in a day, mostly hitching rides in helicopters, usually Hueys. We were located very close to a helicopter pad, and over time we got to know most of the helicopter crews pretty well.

When we got back in the evening we would all pitch in at the canteen, where there were guys who showed up after working hours. Again, it was nothing as elaborate as the larger USO canteens but we tried to provide some recreation. There was nothing alcoholic, and nothing tawdry. We’d serve coffee and cookies and Kool-Aid, sometimes play games with the guys who showed up. Sometimes we’d give little programs, just light entertainment things, but the heart of the matter was to be there, be seen, and talk with guys who needed someone female to talk to, and honestly, sometimes have a feminine shoulder to cry on – someone who wasn’t necessarily in their unit. Sometimes when you have troubles it’s easier to talk to a relative stranger rather than someone you know and work with every day. Sometimes we could provide advice, but we soon learned that when a man had some troubles he usually knew the answer to them, but had to admit it to himself.

A little to my surprise, there were more men there who were functionally illiterate than I would have thought, so sometimes we’d help someone write a letter home, or read one from home to them. There were lots of little things like that – just providing a tiny little taste of home.

The canteen was frequently busy in the evenings. There were some units that had their own enlisted men’s clubs, which is to say bars, and there was a lot of drinking going on. But sometimes drinking doesn’t help solve a problem, and sometimes guys were not inclined to drink away their loneliness.

Cat and I were hardly older than the soldiers we served. We had both been twenty-one for only a couple of months, but the average age of the men we were talking to was only nineteen. I found out that was intentional. The maximum age the Red Cross would hire girls to be recreational aides was twenty-four, while that was the minimum age for the USO girls. I guess it was because it was felt that we younger women would relate better to the younger soldiers. When you stop to think about it, it was a hell of a thing to dump on the average girl just out of college – or not even that, in Cat’s and my cases. I like to think that we were more mature than the average SRAO, mostly because of our travel and climbing (and Joe’s input, of course) but there were times that it still was pretty emotional and stressful.

That evening we met the other two SRAO girls at Phan Loc. One of them, Mary, was very severely dressed, and had the look about her that she had never smiled in her life; we were to discover that she was a Mormon and pretty serious about it. The other one, Brenda, immediately put me in mind of Deanna back at Venable College – an empty-headed blonde cheerleader type with a big chest and a nice smile. Neither of them seemed to me to be the kind of girls who ought to be Red Cross SRAOs, so I thought that Mrs. Oldfield must have been pretty desperate for help. I soon found out that I was wrong on that; both of them were very good at what they did, although they went about it differently.

Mary was just as straight as she looked. Except for her, all of us wore our dresses as short as we were supposed to get away with and sometimes shorter; it was a touch cooler in the hot weather and besides, the guys liked the short skirts, even if they were Red Cross uniforms. However, Mary’s blue seersucker dresses were halfway down her shins. But she had a wicked sense of humor – never dirty or even slightly off-color – but she could stand up in front of a group of guys and have them in stitches in minutes with her droll, almost flat presentation of jokes about everything under the sun. I learned a great deal from her about handling crowds and keeping their interest.

Needless to say, if a man was having a religious crisis of one sort or another, sometimes he could accept advice better from a friendly girl than he could from any chaplain – if for no more reason than she was a girl, and not in the Army. Knowing how the Mormons like to preach, I was surprised that she wasn’t working for a mission of theirs. She said it was something she had considered, but had decided she wanted to be able to be a little more flexible. It seemed that Mormon missionaries were a little too serious for her.

Brenda was actually almost as straight as Mary, but she sure didn’t look like it. She had sex appeal and knew it, but she used it wisely. A lot of her jokes were about how she’d brushed off this guy or that back in the States. It sounded to me like she’d heard every possible pick-up line and come-on known to men and had an answer for all of them. She had plenty of innocent, clean, but sexy jokes and stories, all of them told in a breathy voice that would captivate a bunch of guys even if she were reading Little Red Riding Hood to them. I am not kidding; I saw her do just that several times, not deviating from the story – well, not much – but in a sexy voice and manner that made it seemed as she were reading the most erotic story ever. I tried to pull it off a couple of times and never even got close.

Brenda told a story – and I heard it any number of times – about her brother, who was a draft dodger and proud of it. She got tired of hearing about it, and one time when she’d heard enough she joined up with the Red Cross. When her brother asked her why she’d done it, she said, “Somebody in this family has to have some guts and serve their country, and if you don’t have them I’ll just have to prove that your sister is the one with the balls in the family.” I have little reason to doubt that every word of it was true.

They were pretty special young women, and it wasn’t long before Cat and I were proud to know them and work with them. Both of them were glad to see us; while our being there wouldn’t do much to lighten the work load, it would at least spread it around a little further, and allow us to do more of what we needed to do. There was plenty of that for all of us.