July 20, 2005

Emily was a Donut Dolly with the Red Cross in Vietnam. A Donut Dollies' job was to organize and provide recreation for the soldiers. They played games, sang songs, and sat and talked to the soldiers. Emily shares some of her pictures and writings about her experience there: The time the VC landed a direct hit on the Dong Tam ammo dump, a fatigued soldier, flying around by helicopter, the architecture, and kids.

She uses some Vietnam era slang, so if you need help, try here.

posted by un- 18 years ago
  • Nice post, un. I didn't know much about the Donut Dollies. Thanks.
  • "Emily was a Donut Dolly with the Red Cross in Vietnam". That's a wonderfully lyrical sentance.
  • un-, you're on fire this week!
  • Yeah - is this turning into a posting marathon attempt? Bananas to you.
  • Yeah - is this turning into a posting marathon attempt? Bananas to you. Well, I've just sorta saved up these links over the years as I never really had/took the opportunity to share them. I actually came across the donut dolly site a few years ago when I was searching around for personal accounts of the Vietnam war. I found hundreds. Lots of them aren't very good, but many of them seem to serve as an emotional release for the writer, and they also seemed to help vets reconnect with people they knew during a particularly violent and crazy time of their lives. Anyway, out of all those sites, I remembered Emily's because it saw the war from a slightly different perspective. And I'd never heard of Donut Dollies before, so I found it interesting.
  • I clicked all around those links and didn't see one damn donut. I'm so hungry!
  • a particularly violent and crazy time of their lives I just finished Dave Grossman's On Killing, which discussed the child soldiers' Vietnam experience at some length. This post complemented it well. Thanks, un- (which is not to say, un-thanks).