Donut Dolly: An American Red Cross Girl's War in Vietnam

Chapter 5 Poison Booth at the Carnival

117 ✚ Chapter 5 ✚ Poison Booth at the Carnival Saturday, August 6, 1966, Dong Ba Thin, South Vietnam Some secrets are meant to be shared, some to be hidden. Dong Ba Thin was a self-contained civilization, a small unit with Susie, Gini, and me. My new home was a green Quonset hut. It sat in the middle of an open area away from other buildings. There was a perfect palm tree in the front yard. No guards, no barbed wire, and no bunker. Inside, the hut had the same configuration as our tent at An Khe: a sitting room in the front and small bedrooms partitioned off in the back. You could hear everything in the house. A small patio with a privacy fence on two sides adjoined the house. We could lie outside and sunbathe. Every morning my clock radio woke me up to Adrian Cronauer’s morning show. He was on Armed Forces Radio in Cam Ranh Bay. Robin Williams made Cronauer famous in 1987 in the movie, Good Morning, Vietnam.1 I hadn’t heard him at An Khe. He was as good as any radio personality in the States, and he had a unique signature program opening. He greeted every new day with a hearty and elongated “GooOD MORning, Vietnam!” It was impossible to sleep through his signature line. He reminded everyone where they were. We all groaned 118 Donut Dolly at the sound of his wake-up call. He repeated his loud greeting throughout his show. Every evening Captain Windsor called me. Maybe he did love me. Wednesday, August 10, Tuy Hoa On this day, four days after I arrived at Dong Ba Thin, I had been in Vietnam for three months. Susie and I went to Tuy Hoa (pronounced “Too ee Wah”), a forward base camp. Susie was short with a round face and quick smile. All this, and she was easy going. She tied her long, brown hair in a twist. Until Tuy Hoa, the worst place I had ever been was the foxholes at Buon Blech in the Cambodian border hills. It was cold, rainy, and gloomy. Ground fire and snipers threatened every mile and every mud-slogging step. Tuy Hoa defined the opposite. It sat about 120 miles north of Dong Ba Thin on the coast of the South China Sea. From our helicopter it Dong Ba Thin girls in the recreation center. Left to right: Susie, Joann, and Gini. Poison Booth at the Carnival 119 looked like any other forward camp: row after row of tents. Tuy Hoa stretched like a beach without water, nothing in sight but sand in every direction. When we landed we jumped out and waved our “Thanks for the ride,” to the pilots. They waved back, waited for us to get clear of the rotors, and then took off. The blast from the helicopter created a sandstorm . The tents strained against their stakes, their flaps snapped in the wind. We headed for shelter. The gale drove sand into my eyes. I put on sunglasses, but sand still blew into my eyes. Nonetheless we stumbled into an office. Susie, who knew the clerk, introduced us. We checked the schedule with him and verified our plans. I was able to get the grains of sand out of my eyes, but they burned for the rest of the day because the sand was salty. When I could see again, we left the office. It was understandable why a now-anonymous commander had chosen this place. The Viet Cong wouldn’t want to be there any more then we did. The sun blinded us, and its oven-like heat pounded us. The wind whipped through the camp the entire day. Helicopters came and went on one business or another . I learned that this wasn’t just an isolated, bad day. It was the same for the two months I stayed at Dong Ba Thin. Sand blew into everything , our hair, our clothes, our food. My discomfort was short-term. Some of these men lived with this every day for months. It was so hard to see that I never figured out where I was. All I saw were glimpses a few yards ahead, blasts of sand to the eyes, and then the inside of a tent. With each step, our shoes sank deep into the sand. It was perfect for a beach, but almost impossible to walk...