Starting Friday, March 3rd, we’ll be spotlighting one Red Cross Donut Dollie each week featuring vintage photos from their time in Vietnam or Korea and answers to the 10-questions listed below. We ask that you check here each Friday to learn more about the Donut Dollies in their own words. Please help spread the story of the Donut Dollies by sharing these posts, especially with any veterans you may know.
Here are the questions the Donut Dollies will answer:
What prompted you to join the SRAO (Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas) and want to go to Vietnam?
When and where were you stationed in Vietnam? Did you go by a nickname?
What was a routine day like in Vietnam?
Did you ever have any “close calls” either on base or in any vehicles?
Were you ever injured while in Vietnam?
What was it like to visit the soldiers in the hospitals?
How was the transition returning home to the United States?
What would you like people to remember and understand most about the women who served?
How do you feel Veterans think of your time having served with them? Have any Veterans expressed their feelings to you directly?
What were your fondest or most interesting memories of your time serving in Vietnam?
Please check back each week to learn a new story directly from a Donut Dollie!
Thanks for sharing with everyone the super ladies who did so much who so few have heard of your love. I await your posts.
When they were up to the kennels at CRAB. It was a special feeling of warmth that I got from them. We had a beer party on the beach one morning. I think 4 of them showed up. Drank and ate with us. They even wore two piece swimsuits. That really made us feel good. Thank you to all of you for being there for us with your smiles, kind words, laughter. Thank you for being round eyes that didn’t look down on us.
823rd Red Horse, Air Force engineers, heavy construction…..Binh Thuy 1970…..The word in the chow line, Donut Dollies are on base, there’s going to be a show…..There’s singing and joke telling and one of the raised her skirt a LITTLE and gave a leg shot. Boy are we having a good time…..At one point all the girls run out among the troops and one of them grabs MY arm and pulls me to the make shift stage. They start doing a version of the duck song/dance and all the guys are struggling to keep up and are looking foolish. My Red Horse friends are screaming at me and are enjoying my performance way to much. At the end my girl pulls me back where she got me and planted a big one on my cheek…..I was some kind of home sick that night.
For as much as they appreciated us, we were crazy about them. They really needed to have fun and went along with our silly little games with enthusiasm and good humor. We collected as many gimmes as we could like socks, combs, candy, calendars, pens and paper. I even took toilet paper once! And I bought a little Kodak camera for a guy bc they had no regular access to the PX. I went back to base at the end of every day just hoping they’d all be there the next time I came.
“Doc” Thompson here. 377th USAF Disp, They were and still are wonderful women