Oral History interview with Mary "Larry" Young Hines, 2015

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Mary Laraine "Larry" Young Hines
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: August 3, 2015
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is August 3, 2015. My name is Therese Strohmer. I'm at the home of Larry Hines in Raleigh, North Carolina, to conduct an oral history interview for Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina of Greensboro. Larry, could you state your name the way that you'd like it to read on your collection?
LH: Mary "Larry"—L-A-R-R-Y—[Laraine] Young Hines—H-I-N-E-S.
TS: Okay. Well, Larry, why don't you stay out by telling me a little bit about where you're from, when you born?
LH: I was born on Easter morning, April 21, 1946, in Lexington, North Carolina, where both my parents were also born and raised.
TS: They were both from there?
LH: Yes.
TS: Do you have any brothers and sisters?
LH: I have one older brother.
TS: One older brother?
LH: His name is Baxter Craven Young.
TS: Baxter? Now, for your folks, did they both work outside the home?
LH: My father started and created two companies, the Buck Young Oil Company, which was a fuel oil and home heating distributorship, and then he also founded Maybelle Transport Company, which is a trucking company in Lexington. My mother ran the oil company during World War II when my father was away, and then after my father's death in 1960 2
my mother became the president of both the companies and ran them for many, many years.
TS: Oh, is that right?
LH: Yes.
TS: She definitely was working—
LH: Oh, yes.
TS: —outside the home.
LH: Oh, yes.
TS: Now, in Lexington, North Carolina, at that time, what kind of environment was it? Was it close to the city or out in rural country? Where were you at?
LH: I lived about two blocks off Main Street. I grew up at 200 West Second Avenue.
TS: [chuckles]
LH: Like my parents, I graduated from the Lexington City Schools, and Lexington Senior High School [LH corrected later] in 1964. At that point [racial] segregation was in full force. I was the last class to graduate from Lexington High School that was all white; they began integration the following year.
TS: The following year?
LH: Yes.
TS: Well, what was it like to grow up at that time? You're growing up in the fifties and sixties, you're post-war, and—
LH: Pre-TV.
TS: Pre-TV. [chuckles]
LH: Grew up initially with no television. I think we did have one of the first ones when I was about six or seven years old. But it was an idyllic childhood. I had both sets of my grandparents there, I had cousins everywhere, but I was, I guess were my closest friends, and still are. I had a horse, which was a great thing, because back then women didn't really have sports or many outlets, so I was—I mean, I thought I had the perfect childhood. We walked to church; the First Methodist Church in Lexington. Life was good.
TS: Yeah. You had a horse? What'd you do with your horse? 3
LH: Well, I started riding when I was five years old.
TS: Okay.
LH: And my dream was to have a horse, and when I was eleven, that was my Christmas present; I got my first horse. Which I kept that horse, and then I got a different one, and ended up teaching horseback riding when I was a college student, summers. And of course, when I went to college we sold the horse. But I mean—
TS: Yeah, did you—
LH: —we had all—we always had cats, dogs, gerbil, hamsters, birds, bunny rabbits, chickens; we had all kinds of wildlife in and out of our house.
TS: Any cats as sweet as this one over here?
LH: A lot of cats, a lot of kittens, a lot of dogs. [chuckles]
TS: There you go. Well, did you walk to school?
LH: I did, I walked to school. I went to Robbins Elementary School, it was built in 1870—it was named for a Confederate captain, Captain Robbins—and it's the same elementary school that my mother walked to, and my grandmother; we all went to Robbins School.
TS: Now, did you appreciate that kind of heritage as a young girl or were you just going to school?
LH: I assumed everybody had that, but my way of getting to school was walking, roller-skating, riding my bike.
TS: Oh, you roller-skated?
LH: Oh, yes, with the kind that you had to tighten up with a key.
TS: Oh, is that right? [chuckles]
LH: I even had—my mother made sure that my music lessons weren't neglected, so I used to go take piano lessons at seven o'clock in the morning, close to the school, and I'd walk one day a week from her—from my piano teacher's house.
TS: Well, what kind of things were you doing for fun around then?
LH: Oh, one thing about school that's interesting too. My mother and I had the same sixth grade teacher, in the same class.
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[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: You're kidding? Really?
LH: Miss Hattie Lee Burgess.
TS: She's a little older when she got to you, I imagine.
LH: Well, she was a great teacher. Things we did for fun: I read, hung out with my friends. I don't know. We stayed at each other's houses all the time. We'd have slumber parties, and just the things that girls did.
TS: What did you like to read? What kind of books did you like to read?
LH: When I was going to elementary school we weren't allowed to use the library until fourth grade because it was upstairs. The first three grades were downstairs and the fourth, fifth, and sixth were upstairs. But because I was such a voracious reader, and I guess I was a little beyond my time, my second grade teacher got special permission for me to go upstairs and use the library even as a second grader, and I think I probably read every biography there was. I've always been drawn towards non-fiction, and of course I read Nancy Drews [Nancy Drew Mystery Stories], and The Happy Hollisters [series]; all—I mean, I just read constantly. But I think the book that probably had as big an impact on me as any was reading Gone with the Wind.
TS: Oh, really? Why? Why would you say that?
LH: Well, having Southern heritage I was even more curious about the Deep South, and I knew my mother and father had both enjoyed that book, and I made a point of reading it cover to cover, and the Bible, the same year; I read them both cover to cover.
TS: Gone With the Wind and the Bible.
LH: That's right.
TS: What did you bring from that? When you read it, what did you think about it?
LH: Well, I had a real curiosity about the whole Southern heritage. My—I didn't know it at the time, but I've—as I've gotten older I gotten more interested in family lineage, and my family ancestors came to North Carolina in 1732 with Valentine Leonard, who came from Katzenbach, Germany. And then my other patriot relative that I've traced back is Peter Craven, who came to North Carolina from England by way of Pennsylvania, and he was the—one of the first people who introduced the art of pottery making. Of course, back then it was for utilitarian use, it wasn't for decorative use, it was because they used the pottery for—to eat on.
[A patriot is defined by the organization The Daughters of the American Revolution as 5
someone who aided in achieving United States independence. Being a descendent of a "patriot" is a Daughters of the American Revolution membership eligibility requirement.]
Civil rights were bubbling around a lot when I was in junior high school; the sixties. I hit junior high school about 1958, so from there until I finished high school the civil rights movement was very much something that I was aware of.
TS: What'd you think about it?
LH: Well, my parents had always been very open-minded, very progressive, and very courageous, and I really feel like that since both my parents attended Duke University in the thirties—now my father only went for two years because there was no money, but my mother's a graduate of Duke—my family ties to Duke actually go back to 1841, because my great-great grandfather, Braxton Craven, was the founder and the first president of Trinity College, which became Duke after it moved to Durham in 1892 and was—because of a gift [in 1924—LH added later], was named for the Duke family, but it was originally Trinity College, which is still the undergraduate college at Duke; is named Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.
I think because my parents had had this global exposure to people of other faiths and other backgrounds and other races, they always felt that the south and our community should be more open. So my parents were very progressive. We had an integrated company, and our Christmas party at the country club which was actually a municipal club in Lexington, was always integrated. I don't think anybody else dared to do that other than my parents. And then our summer picnic for our companies was at Tanglewood, which at that—Tanglewood Park out in Clemmons, North Carolina—which was a "Whites Only" park, but when my dad rented it for our company party everybody went. He didn't ask whether it was alright to bring our black employees or not, he just did it.
My father grew up very, very poor in Lexington, and he never ever wanted me to forget the fact that there were people in this world who had a lot less than we did. He would—At Christmas, the Kiwanis Club always sponsored a party for the children at the Junior Order Home orphanage [United Americans Mechanics North Carolina State Council, now American Children's Home], and he always took my brother and me there to show us what other kids got for Christmas, which was usually maybe a pair of gloves and box of checkers and a box of candy, and he said, "I want you to remember next Christmas—next week when you're opening all your presents, this is what a lot of other kids are getting, which is next to nothing."
TS: Yeah. Did it make an impression on you?
LH: Oh, yes, it did.
TS: Did it?
LH: Of course it did. I mean, my parents have always instilled in me that we need to—to those to whom much is given, much is expected, and that we need to—all of us need to 6
take care of the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely, so I've tried to devote my life to trying to make them proud and to follow their examples.
TS: We talked a little bit about the Civil Rights movement. Do you remember much about the Cold War, with the "duck and cover" [safety drill]; did you have anything like that going on?
["Duck and cover" is a method of personal protection against the effects of a nuclear explosion]
LH: Oh, we had that, yeah. Those were our—That impressed me a lot more than a fire drill.
TS: Did it? [chuckles]
LH: Yes, it did, and of course, the whole space thing, we were—
TS: Oh, the space race?
LH: Yeah. And of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis, that's when I was in high school. So it always—somewhere in my mind, but the international things did not make the impression on me that the local issues did. In fact, I won a short story contest, I think in the eighth grade—and I went back and read it one time—and maybe it was the ninth grade—anyway, it was somewhere along that area when I was sixteen, sixteen, fourteen, fifteen—and my topic was—I wrote the short story through the eyes of a little African American girl riding on a bus on the first day of her integrated experience into a
school—into an elementary school.
I have no idea how I have the audacity to think that I could put my thoughts into that person, but I knew that it was happening. Not so much in Lexington. It was coming to Lexington, but I had watched it on TV, and I knew that it was something that was right, and my parents had pushed hard, my mother particularly, for integrating the schools, the municipal pools, and this was not exactly well received by a lot of her friends.
TS: No?
LH: They thought it was a frightening thing that a woman of her social stature and education would be a leader in this movement, but she was, and we had a lot of the leaders in Lexington—the leaders of these black organizations—that were pushing, [along] with my mother, to get integration going in Lexington.
TS: Now, what year did your father die?
LH: My father died in 1960.
TS: Nineteen sixty. And so, then your mom was pushing for these things as a single— 7
LH: Right.
TS: —widow—
LH: Right. Right.
TS: —at that time. So that must have been really tough for her to go it alone, I would think.
LH: Well, we treated our employees as well as we could, and I'm bothered that people paint all of the south with the same brush, because I know how my family felt about integration and about all equal rights for all people. I do remember very well though—I do remember growing up as a child, in Woolworth's, the "Black Only," "White Only" [water] fountain, and they were side by side and they were right next to the fish tank. And I remember leaning over and getting that cold water on the right hand side fountain and just wondering, was there really a difference from the left.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Right.
LH: And I also remember as a child, my babysitters were almost always black, young women who were usually the children of our employees, and when we went to the movies—the Carolina Theater in Lexington—we sat upstairs, and I thought it was kind of fun. I mean, that was just—I just went upstairs because Zula had to go upstairs, and so Zula and I together went upstairs.
TS: Oh, because you went to the movies with her?
LH: To the movies, yeah, sure. She couldn't sit downstairs with the white people but I could sit upstairs with the black people. And there also were—All the barbecue restaurants in Lexington had back entrances that said "Black Only—Colored Only." I mean, I remember that. I mean, "separate but equal" was not good enough for my parents and they—they weren't afraid to push that.
[Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law according to which racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1868, which guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all citizens, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal.]
TS: Well, when you were a young girl, and you're growing up, and you're saying you had this pretty great life going, did you have a sense of what opportunities you had in front of you; for choices you could make for your life? At that time. 8
LH: At that time. Well, my parents, again, made sure that I knew that there was a bigger world out there, besides the close up one. My father always had business meetings with the Sinclair Oil Company [sic Corporation], in either Atlanta or Washington [D.C.] or New York, and my parents would incorporate and pull my brother and me along on these trips. So we would ride the train or we flew, and so I knew that there was a New York City and Washington and Atlanta, and I was curious about all those things, and my parents wanted me to understand that the things that didn't exist in Lexington; such as elevators, buses, bell boys, room service, tipping; things that were not—
TS: Do you want to shut that blind?
LH: That's okay. Things that were not commonplace in Lexington, and I appreciated that. They took me to Broadway [theater] when I was eleven years old to see Judy Garland [American singer, actress, and vaudevillian], and see My Fair Lady. I mean, they really wanted me to thirst beyond the close-up things in Lexington, and my parents always said to me—my dad in particular used to say, "Honey, if you don't make your life interesting, it won't be. Don't look in the mirror when you're fifty years old and say, 'What happened?' and have there be a resounding silence. You make sure that you make things happen in your life."
TS: You want me to pause for a second?
LH: Yeah.
TS: Alright.
[Recording Paused]
TS: We took a tiny little pause there. So did you take your dad's advice?
LH: Right. They were always saying, "Get out of your comfort zone. Try things that are hard. Don't be satisfied with what's easy in life. Look around and see how you can help." I've sort of used that as my mantra.
TS: Have you?
LH: Yeah.
TS: Well, was there a particular, like, type of career that you thought would be interesting?
LH: Well, my mother had—after she finished Duke she taught English at Lexington High School, and of course, I had been programmed my entire life that I could go to any college as long as it was Duke, and since my father died the summer of the eighth grade it was kind of my mother and me living together. My brother was so much—six years older 9
so he was already out and about.
TS: Out of the house.
LH: Excuse me?
TS: He was out of the house?
LH: Yeah, he was out of the house. In fact, he had served in the army and was living in California. I mean, I had the strong, strong family authoritative [chuckles] notice that I was going to Duke, because that was the only place that was acceptable. And I visited Duke and I love Duke University. I think it is a wonderful place, and I have a master's from there, but when I was eighteen years old I was looking for something really different and I did want to get out of North Carolina. I wanted to travel and land on my own two feet somewhere that nobody knew me, and just to—
So I started visiting colleges, really, on my own, and I had a friend that I had gone to summer camp with from Tampa, Florida, who was at the University of Georgia and when I went to visit her it was just the perfect match. So much to my guidance counselor, my mother, and my grandmother's horror I decided—even though I got into Duke, I decided that the University of Georgia was a better fit for me at eighteen, so.
TS: I bet [chuckles] you had some good conversations about that, then, huh?
LH: Well, there weren't—for a while there wasn't any conversations because my mother wasn't speaking to me about it. She's called it my "teenage rebellion," and maybe it was, but I had been programmed to be strong and think for myself so that's what I decided to do.
TS: Right.
LH: And I would repeat that, because I learned so much more about myself and life—
TS: You're far away from home.
LH: I did, yeah, and I had a Jewish roommate. All the things that I didn't anticipate, but I got thrown—I mean, we think in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, we really think we're in the south, and we are, but there is a different south that exists in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, especially in the 1960s.
TS: How was it different?
LH: Oh, very, very racially—separatists. A lot of very—People were very angry about the Civil Rights Movement, and I learned that—I learned what my own feelings were, and my own convictions were. I realized I couldn't change that culture, but I also reexamined my own feelings about race and social class and that kind of thing, because I was bumped up against some attitudes I'd never really heard expressed before.
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TS: What years were you at University of Georgia?
LH: I went there in September 1964, which was also the same time that Lewis Grizzard [author and humorist] arrived, and also Vince [Vincent Joseph] Dooley, our football coach. We all got there September 1964, and I graduated June the eighth, 1968.
TS: In 1968. So a whole lot happened in those four years, just—
LH: Oh, wow.
TS: —nationally, as well, as, I'm sure locally, there. What do you mostly remember about your time?
LH: Well, Georgia had integrated slightly with [Alberta] Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes [The first two African-Americans admitted to the University of Georgia], and very few students—no athletes or anything like that, there were probably less—I don't know the numbers, but there were very few African-American students. I don't ever remember seeing one; I don't remember having a class with one.
TS: No?
LH: No, I do not. But I was there—My senior year was when [Dr.] Martin Luther King [Jr.] was assassinated, and I woke up and was just horrified to hear this news. But there were people, I mean, cheering it, because they thought—I think—getting rid of Martin Luther King meant getting rid of the problem, which was integration for them.
TS: There were people cheering it?
LH: Oh, yes, honking horns and going up and down Sorority and Fraternity Row [Lumpkin Avenue.
TS: Really?
LH: Oh, yes, we're talking about Georgia.
TS: Okay. Well, I haven't heard that from anyone before—
LH: Georgia.
TS: —so I—
LH: Oh, yes. I mean, it was, "If we could just get rid of that guy then we can all go back to the plantation" mentality. That was how simple it seemed to them.
TS: That he was the problem?
LH: Right. Right. 11
TS: Well, and you also had Robert F. [Francis "Bobby"] Kennedy.
LH: Robert F. Kennedy. Interestingly, the night before my last exam, which was Shakespeare—one of my favorites—I majored in English to please my mother and myself—and I had set the alarm clock—the clock radio—for four o'clock, because my plan was to wake up at four o'clock in the morning and study four straight hours and go take my exam at 8:00 [a.m.], and when the—when the radio kicked on as the alarm it was one o'clock in the morning in California and the reporter was screaming about this assassination of Robert Kennedy, which was absolutely horrifying. And then I woke up and went up and down the halls of my sorority house telling everybody, "Wake up! Wake up!" and we went down—because there was only one TV—down in our communal TV room, and we watched that on TV, which was surreal.
Because my senior year in high school was when [President] John F. [Fitzgerald] Kennedy was assassinated. I remember hearing that news when I was sitting in my high school sociology class.
TS: What'd you think about that at the time?
LH: Oh, it was just unreal. I mean, I couldn't imagine. And then to have—in the span of four and a half years, to have John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy—I mean, and here I was already knowing when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated I was headed to Vietnam. It just seemed like violence was on—it was everywhere. It was in Vietnam, it was at home, it was just not safe. I mean, it was a very interesting time to be alive, honestly.
TS: Well, you did have a lot going on there. You were talking earlier, before we turned the tape on, about how you had, maybe, mixed feelings, would be a good way to put it, about the war itself at that time.
LH: I noticed in high school—my senior year in 1963, '64—that people were being drafted against their will to go into this war, which, of course, escalated so much by the sixty—'65, that people who didn't want to serve in the military were being told they had to, and they also had to go halfway around the world to a country, to a war situation, that nobody really understood.
Then when I got to college is was even more intense, and I was around a lot of men because I was the Sigma Nu [fraternity] sweetheart at the University of Georgia, so I was around lots of men, and all the ones I knew, not just Sigma Nus, but KAs [Kappa Alphas], Phi Delts [Phi Delta Thetas], everyone I knew were all trying to figure out how to get out of this thing called "the draft." They were trying to get medical excuses, or they were going to graduate school, or they were getting married, they were having children; whatever the exemption was, people were willing to do it. And then it was getting tighter and tighter and tighter, so there were less and less exemptions.
[A fraternity sweetheart is a female who is elected by the members of a fraternity for her dedication and contributions to the success of the chapter over the previous year.] 12
And I just didn't understand it. I mean, what—I've always been a news-aholic and I've always read every newspaper and watched news on TV, but I could not put my arms around why this thing in Vietnam was a good thing. But I really thought if I could ever get over there I would understand this, and I would support this wholeheartedly, because I had so been influenced by President Kennedy's mantra that we "ask not what our country can do for us, ask what we can do for our country."
I thought about the Peace Corps, but the Peace Corps was a two year commitment and you didn't really—as I understood it from my preliminary investigations—you didn't have much say about where you went, and I was very interested in getting as close as I could to the Southeast Asia situation. Didn't know how to do it with an English major.
TS: Didn't, but you were thinking about it?
LH: I was thinking about it. I could not go into the military because my eyesight back then was very, very poor and I knew I couldn't pass a physical, even if I did—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Would you have wanted—
LH: —even if I did I didn't have a nursing degree or anything that would have enabled me to get actually closer to Vietnam.
TS: To Vietnam. What about the counter-culture, was going on at that time too? Was that happening at the University of Georgia?
LH: The University of Georgia was very insulated. I mean, back then we still didn't have—the women didn't have the right to live in apartments, we were all under lock and key in either a dormitory or a sorority house. Women did not have the right to wear pants or shorts, we had to wear dresses. We were—It was probably one of the last strongholds of keeping womanhood pure, and I don't remember ever hearing anything about drugs, marijuana, or any other things. I mean, people thought it was really a wild weekend if you—if some guys would get some grain alcohol. [both chuckle] It was—It was still very much a buttoned-down collar, dresses, and proper manners college. At least the sor—my world was that way.
TS: Yeah?
LH: It was very insulated in—with white people that—we were all on the same sort of page.
TS: Right. What kind of things did you do for fun?
LH: Well, being a fraternity sweetheart I had to be the hostess at all the parties. We never—13
almost never left campus. Athens was a very—People stayed on—People stayed in Athens because it's a great town; it still is. We went to rivers and swimming, and we went to parties, and we—occasionally we'd go into Atlanta, but basically we loved our campus so much. It's very "Rah-Rah", and it still is. The people that go there really love that school, and they're really proud to be there.
In the summers I went to summer school [in Athens]; two or three summers. I just wanted to be there longer and more. And my other summers I worked in Wisconsin; I was a horseback riding teacher up at Camp Nagawicka and Camp St. Johns, right outside of Milwaukee [in Delafield]. And that, again, was an opportunity for me to go into a different culture. I loved it up there. It was really, really fun. But it was always good to get back to Athens.
TS: How was the culture different?
LH: Well, everybody made fun of the way I talked, for one thing. And the stable master that I worked for refused to let me say, "Yes, sir," and "Yes—No, sir."
He said, "I'm not your daddy." Oh, no, he said, "I'm not your father." He wouldn't say "daddy."
And he used to, for fun, send me in to town, and I didn't know he was making fun of me. But he would send me into the hardware store—he told me later he would call ahead and say that I was on my way—and he would give me a list of things that he wanted me to buy, and one of them was spelled O-I-L.
TS: Oil.
LH: And I would go into the hardware store and ask for oil and they thought that was hilarious. And the other thing on the list was W-I-R-E, which I would ask for wire. [chuckles] And they thought that was hilarious. And some of the counselors out at this camp who were from the Midwest, would ask me things about integration.
TS: Would they?
LH: Yeah, they were curious about it. Because they'd see George Wallace on the schoolhouse door, they'd see the water hoses and the German Shepherds, and I'm like, "I don't know anything about that. That was not going on in my world."
They would say things like, "Well, I hear black people—colored people can't go out at night." That wasn't the way it was in Lexington, not at all.
So the percep—I realized the perception of the south was based on the worst possible views of it—
[George Wallace was a governor of Alabama who was famous for his strong pro-segregation stance in the 1960s.]
TS: The sensationalization and the media—
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LH: Yes. Yeah, the sense—
TS: —and the—like you say—the worst.
LH: Right. But I've always been curious. When my mother was widowed she decided when the—the year I was fifteen, so that was—what?—1961—she and I went to—she took me to France, England, and Spain for three weeks, and it was so fun to me because I had taken high school Spanish for a year and a half and just—It just was magical to me to just be in a different culture like that.
So when I graduated from high school—it's interesting—we all had quotations put under our names that the faculty or the yearbook staff, or somebody, had decided were appropriate, and for women, almost all the quotations had something to do with physical attributes, like "She walks in beauty like the night," or "Golden curls."
TS: Sure.
LH: Or "Known by all." Mine, I couldn't wait to see what they said for me. Mine said, "Mary Laraine Young: I am a citizen of the world." So I think it was already apparent to people that I was bound for bigger and better things.
TS: Yeah. So you weren't sure what you were going to do with your English degree at that time?
LH: Women really weren't encouraged to do different things. Women were encouraged to be teachers, nurses, work in banks, airline stewardesses; that kind of thing. I did not get a teaching degree, interestingly, because I didn't want to take education courses, I'd rather take other ones, and I didn't want to leave Athens, Georgia to do practice teaching for six weeks anywhere else.
So I knew I was graduating with just a straight English Literature degree; didn't know—have the slightest idea what I was going to do with it.
TS: No?
LH: But I figured that my people skills would take me somewhere and that I would find a job. I just knew I would.
TS: What happened on that day that you were telling me about, when you were walking—there's a group of businesses coming in and trying to solicit [unclear]?
LH: In that day, before the internet, companies would come on college campuses and do interviews—job interviews—and they would post the names of the companies and what kind of majors they were looking for. Most of the companies who came were looking for business majors, chemistry majors, accounting majors; I was none of the above.
TS: [chuckles]
LH: Not many people were interested in Liberal Arts majors, but I did notice that the 15
Wachovia Bank was coming, and I thought, "Well, that will—" they were talking to English majors and I thought, "Well, I can do that," so I signed up for that interview. And at that point banks were restricted to certain states and by—if I had been hired by Wachovia I knew that that would mean I was going to be returning to North Carolina, which was fine with me; I was ready to come back home.
And while I was sitting in the placement office with, maybe, twenty or thirty other people waiting for various interviews—I was between classes and I had about a twenty minute lull before my Wachovia interview—and a Red Cross recruiter—a woman named Hazel Breeland—walked through in her Red Cross uniform, and she glanced around the room and walked straight over to my chair and said, "Are you talking to anybody right now?"
And I was so shocked. I said, "No, ma'am. I have about fifteen minutes."
She said, "Well, come on back and talk to me."
TS: You were the only one in the room or were there others?
LH: Oh, there were several people in the room, women and men, and she came straight to me. And I didn't know why, but I felt like I had been picked to go talk to her, so. When I got back in her office she has a trifold with a lot of pictures and brochures, and that was my first introduction to the Red Cross program called Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas—SRAO—which the Red Cross had been operating in Korea for quite a while, and they had opened the program up in Vietnam [in 1965]. They had just started recruiting Liberal Arts majors for that job, and when she told me about it I was just so focused on that, I couldn't think about Wachovia anymore, but I was thrilled that I might have an option to actually go to Vietnam and see for myself what this war was about. She did, however, tell me not to get my hopes up, which was kind of an ironic thing since all the men I knew were trying to do everything they could not to get to Vietnam and she was telling me that it would be hard for me to be selected for Vietnam. This is because the Red Cross recruited regionally, and the Southeast had a lot more applications than any other region.
TS: So more competition to go?
LH: Yes, and the requirements were—on paper you had to be between twenty-two and twenty-seven, you had to have a college degree in hand, and they did background checks; I had my fingerprints run through the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]; went down to the police department in Athens and ran my fingers across the inkpad and had those checked out. They went back and looked at my second grade teacher, knocked on her door and asked her what kind of an eight year old I had been.
TS: [chuckles]
LH: Because they were looking for not only wholesome, well-rounded, truthful young women, but they were also looking for an odd combination, which was you had to be feminine and personable and approachable, but you also had—you had to be tough as nails. But you had to be able to understand that you were underneath the rules and regulations of the Red Cross too. Just because you were in a war zone did not mean you got to do what you 16
wanted to do, or go wherever you wanted to. You had to be willing to accept their rules, which was curfews, no birth control pills—which were brand new anyway and I wasn't taking them—but no frosted hair. I mean, that was considered to be kind of racy, to have frosted hair. The skirt length was very controlled. Everything we did. I mean, no—if you were accepted you had to understand that if you had on that Red Cross uniform you could not drink a beer, you couldn't make comments to the press, you couldn't tell a dirty joke. You had to really be a pristine representative of womanhood, and good values, and patriotism.
And so, we were not really on our own, and that was a good thing, because curfews needed to be in place. We didn't need to be running around bases all night, we had to go to work early in the morning and we needed to put forth the proper image, and I was willing to do that.
But once she told me about that job, I mean, I was just on fire; that that's really what I wanted to do.
TS: That's what you wanted to do.
LH: That's the only thing I wanted to do. I didn't tell my mother, I didn't tell many of my friends, I just, sort of, quietly went around, interviewed with her, and then I got invited to Atlanta for another round of interviews. That was in probably early March of 1968, and I got my acceptance letter about three weeks later. So—And actually, the night that I got my first shots I was lucky because Athens has a—at that point was the home of the naval—U.S. Navy Supply School, so they had shots available out there, like, for yellow fever and typhoid, and all these shots that I had to start getting. And the night that I got my first set of shots was the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated.
[On 4 April 1968, American clergyman and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray, a fugitive from Missouri State Penitentiary.]
TS: Oh, is that right?
LH: So I was running a fever and feeling sort of dopey anyway from these shots that I had had that day, and then when I woke up and heard what had happened I was just horrified.
TS: Yeah.
LH: Really horrified.
TS: When did you finally tell your mom?
LH: Well, my mother was coming through Athens on her way to Florida, and so she said, "I'm—Let's have dinner together." So we went out and she said, "I've got something to tell you."
And I said, "Well, I've got something to tell you too." [chuckles]
And she said, Well, you go first." 17
And I said—So I told her about this Vietnam opportunity, and I don't really know what her true response was. She didn't act horrified and she didn't act excited either, she just, sort of, took it all in, and—because I said to her, "They say I'm going to be safe but nobody—" because they warned us. They said they had not had anyone get killed up to till point. They did later; they had three girls who were killed doing this job.
But my mother had finally told me what she had to tell me, which was that they had discovered she had a tumor on her parotid gland and she needed to have surgery, and that they didn't—she didn't know what the outcome of that was going to be, so it was sort of sobering to hear that. But as it turned out her surgery went fine, no complications, and my trip to Vietnam, also turned out fine.
TS: Was it March that you actually found out that you were going to Vietnam, or were you just—
LH: It was late March.
TS: Late March, okay.
LH: Yes.
TS: And the only other option you really had was to go to Korea, at that time?
LH: They—When the Red Cross interviewed you they decided from your personality and your interview process if you were more suitable for the program in Vietnam or for Korea, and they also asked you which one you would like to have. I was offered both countries, but I was not interested in Korea. I mean, I wanted to go participate in history and be part of the Vietnam experience, so I chose—selected Vietnam. And the girls who—The Red Cross at that point sent over seven classes a year, of approximately twenty girls, so each time—to Vietnam—so each time twenty girls went in-country new, there were twenty girls rotating out, so they constantly kept, approximately, a hundred girls in Vietnam in the SRAO program.
TS: And so, you got a year contract?
LH: A year contract, and it ran a little longer than that, because while I was in-country I took two R&Rs [rest & recuperation], and I delayed en route on the way home in Japan, so it stretched it out another month.
TS: Okay. Now, what about your friends? What did they think about your decision?
LH: Oh, wow. Well, I had three roommates in my senior year, and all of them were either engaged to be married or in serious relationships, and they did not have the slightest idea what in the world I was thinking of. I mean, they were worried about china patterns and bridesmaids' dresses and wedding invitations, and I was worried about getting combat ready to go into the war zone. So my girlfriends and my sorority sisters all were supportive, but mystified about why I would want to do such a thing. My male friends were doubly mystified because, as I said, they were trying everything they could not to 18
go. And I noticed it was a lot of these same young men who had been very close friends of mine started really kind of avoiding me and never wanting to talk about this decision. I found out twenty years later from one of my old beaus, he said he was absolutely ashamed of himself. Now, he was a true 4-F [unfit for military service]. I mean, only one kidney and ["two burst eardrums—LH clarified later], but he was a true 4-F. But he said he felt like he was a coward compared to me. That was an interesting conversation to have in 1988, not 1968.
TS: Do you think that's how some of the other men felt at that time?
[Speaking Simultaneously]
LH: Oh, I think a lot of them did. It made them very uneasy.
TS: That's why they, kind of, distanced themselves from you?
LH: Yeah, I think they were very embarrassed about my—
TS: That's okay.
LH: Of course, I was not going to be carrying a rifle when I was—didn't know where I was going to be, but I didn't fear for my life, but at twenty-two, who does?
TS: True.
LH: At twenty-two you never think you're going to get killed or grow old or any of these things that actually do happen to you, but—
TS: In your mind, did you think about what that experience was going to be like before you got there, before you got to your training? I mean, the way that it was described to you.
LH: I thought it was going to be an eye opener for me. That I would get over there and understand the war and get way—really behind it, because I thought there's got to be a justification for all these deaths. This was the time when the troop buildup was approaching the highest and so were the deaths.
TS: Tet [Offensive] had already happened?
[The Tet Offensive was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, launched on 30 January 1968, by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the United States Armed Forces, and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam.] 19
LH: The Tet had happened in February when I was—started my interview process, actually, which really even spurred me on more to want to go. It made me more curious than ever about why we were there investing these lives and money. I saw it as a huge adventure. Although I had been to Europe and Mexico and Canada, I saw it as an opportunity to see a different hemisphere, and really to help people, and to help myself understand it. I wasn't afraid.
The last place I went before I started my training in Washington was, I went up to my old camp in Wisconsin, and it has a militaristic flavor to it, but the camps [were] sponsored by St. John's Military Academy, and I think that maybe had some impact on me in the summers, watching these little kids do parades on Sunday afternoons, and a lot of the administrators there were retired military. But as I was leaving these little kids who had been my riding students were sobbing and crying and saying, "You're going to die. We're never going to see you again. Don't die. Don't die." That was kind of the first time it hit me that people were anticipating I wasn't coming back. It was sobering, honestly.
TS: Because they'd heard about death from Vietnam, in the news, right?
LH: And almost everybody knew somebody who had been killed or maimed or didn't come back at all, yeah.
TS: Well, what was your training like? You went to Washington, D.C.?
LH: I went to Washington, D.C. Now, I found out recently—I didn't know this—but the class before us was not allowed to train in Washington. That was the go-to place for training, because we did it at the Red Cross National Headquarters. But that was also the summer of so much unrest when the cities were all on fire and they had Freedom City, and all this out on the [National] Mall, and there were curfews, and so the class before us actually trained in—I think it was Charlottesville, Virginia, but by the time I started—which was July the eighth, one month exactly since I graduated—I graduated on the day they buried Robert Kennedy; June the eighth, 1968.
So July the eighth we arrived and we were put up in a hotel, and as it turned out, my roommate was Korea bound. So we had about twenty girls—twenty-two maybe—going to Vietnam, and maybe fourteen or so going to Korea, and we trained together the first week. Of course, that was about learning the history of the Red Cross, the importance of the Red Cross worldwide and in America. It was general programs all about the blood programs, the water safety cards, and all that. The second week we divided up and we got specific training for Korea versus Vietnam. We got our uniforms. The Korea girls got heavy wool sweaters and heavy coats and they were learning all about how to deal with snow, and of course, we didn't need any of that. We were getting more—and they had girls come back and talk to us who had recently returned.
TS: I was wondering about that; that some had been to Vietnam that you got to talk to?
LH: Yes.
20
TS: Do you remember anything that they were telling you?
LH: Well, always, when I reflect on it, I always say it's sort of like childbirth. Other people can tell you all about it, but your experience is going to be your own. There's no way to know until you actually go through it. And nobody mentioned ever being afraid. I mean, they told us about the two different—Our two different missions in Vietnam in this program which, of course, was—we were forbidden to ever refer to ourselves as "Donut Dollies". They thought that was demeaning, it was beneath us, it was silly, and we always were supposed to refer to ourselves as the SRAO girls, which does not exactly roll off the tongue.
TS: [chuckles] Right.
LH: Of course, once you get there we were always called the Donut Dollies by the military.
We had two main functions. One was to run—to staff recreation centers in safer zones, like Da Nang, Cam Ranh [Bay], but what—most of our work was spent flying in helicopters out to the field. So we taught—learned about what you would call "Forward Runs" or "Clubmobile" where we took out puzzles and games, and we made them up ourselves with acetate and it was just homemade fun. Usually it was just modeled on—the games were modeled on a TV show like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune, that kind of thing. Or we'd take out paper airplane directions and we'd have paper airplane contests. Or we'd—The games always had a theme that somebody knew something about, like state capitals or football or music or just something that—American history.
And it wasn't about the games. It was about just getting the soldiers minds off the war, and getting them to talk to each other and come together. And we were also told—and this turned out to be good advice—that there—you're going to get basically two reactions from the people you serve in Vietnam. You're going to have—and the ratio of men to women was about ten thousand to one, so you're going to get noticed a lot; wherever you are, whatever you're doing, people are going to see you. I always say we're the only women who had legs, because the other women in Vietnam, few as they were, were wearing fatigues; the nurses, the clerical personnel, they all wore army [or air force—LH clarified later] fatigues. We had blue dresses with our legs and arms showing.
But the—We had to make these games up, which caused the units to talk to each other. We always went out in pairs in the helicopters. We didn't go in the trucks [or jeeps—LH added later] very much because it wasn't safe. We—My first unit I was in had both forward runs and a rec[reation] center in Dong Ba Thin. It had forward runs and a recreation center. The second unit I was in, Cam Ranh Bay, we had two big recreation centers, and we didn't do many forward runs. The air force kept us mostly on the bases. And then the third unit I was in, the Americal division [the United States Army's 23rd Infantry Division] were all forward runs, because it wasn't safe there to have a recreation center.
So the games we would make up, and use in all the different units we went to, and then we'd pass them off—we were passing games around between our different—
TS: Oh, you shared the games?
LH: We'd share the games. So when we—everybody in our area had pretty much seen my 21
games—they was on the sixties music—then that would sent down to Cu Chi, and then we'd get them all around from there. But our typical day—
TS: Well, before you get there, why don't you talk about getting there; getting to Vietnam. How was that trip?
LH: Well, I had a really unusual trip. We left on July 22. We flew from Andrews Air Force Base [Maryland] to Travis [Air Force Base, California], and there we boarded an orange Braniff [International] plane, with all the wild, crazy, psychedelic stewardess' outfits, and they were only stewardesses back then. We were excited. There were about twenty-two of us headed for Vietnam.
TS: So you all went together?
LH: Yeah, we all went together on the overseas part, and maybe two hundred GIs. That's when I started realizing how much attention we really were going to gather, because it was ten to one ratio, and it was going to be ten thousand to one. But all the men—Oh, I didn't finish what I was saying about how the people [unclear] will put you on a pedestal; they think you're the most wonderful thing ever when you arrive in Vietnam, or you may get the cold shoulder, because some people, no matter what, think women have no business in a war zone anywhere, especially flying out [in the field—LH clarified later]. Other women, other men are really haunted by the sight of a woman. They think you're distracted from the war, but it's also distracting them from the war, and it reminds them so much—usually the married men, who really, really, really missed their wives, or girlfriends, mothers, sisters. We're that reminder that your loved one is half a world away, and some men never could reconcile that.
TS: So maybe a little resentment?
LH: Right. I mean, they just—it was painful—resentment and/or painful to see us there, and it's funny to break through to those men now, and they apologize and say, "I didn't understand why you were there," or "I didn't want you there," or "It [LH corrected later] made me sad to see you," but that percentage was really small.
TS: Was it?
LH: Really small.
TS: It was more the—
LH: Most of them were like, "Will you just sign my uniform with a magic marker? Will you just let me take a picture with you? Can you just—Can you just talk to me for just a minute?" They were just so thrilled, and some of them were so shy, because the average age over there was nineteen. We were all college graduates. We were more like big sisters I think, than girlfriends.
TS: Did you have some of them ask if they could smell you? 22
LH: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
TS: I think I've heard that a few times.
LH: Yes. In fact, one of the most touching things that ever happened to me, I think, was at a reunion. I was in Houston [Texas]. I think it was 1986. And reunions were just getting started then. So we were invited to go to a welcome home parade and welcome home events in Houston, and I had been in a parade and was walking across a field and this—I saw someone coming towards me. And a lot of these men just wear ragtag uniforms—just ponytails and tattoos and the whole thing—but this guy was very nicely dressed in khaki pants, and weejuns [shoes]. He had on a red golf shirt and he had on mirrored sunglasses, and he came right up to me, and I had on a t-shirt that said "American Red Cross Donut Dolly, Vietnam. 1968/69." And he said, "Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am." He stopped me and he said, "Ma'am, were you ever in Chu Ci?"
And I went, "No, I didn't go down south. I—"
And he said, "Were you there in 1970 and '71?"
I said, "No, I was there in 1968 and '69."
He looked at me and said, "Well, when you came out to see us—" [chuckles].
TS: It didn't matter to him.
LH: It didn't matter that it wasn't really me.
TS: You represented the—
LH: It was the collective me. "Well, when you came out to see us, ma'am, let me just tell you what it was like." And he started crying, just sobbing, just tears flowing down his face and all over his shirt. He said, "I'm so sorry ma'am, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
And I said, "What?"
He said, "I never thanked you for coming. I never thanked you for coming."
And I held him. I mean, I put my hands around him and I said—my arms around him and I said, "It's okay. You're telling me now, and I'm glad. You waited eighteen years to tell me and I'm glad to hear it."
He said, "Ma'am, just let me tell you what it was like." He said, "When you girls came out to the field to see us," he said, "we didn't ever know when you were coming." And he said, "Those helicopters would land," he said, "you'd jump out of those helicopters wearing those baby blue dresses." And he said, "Ma'am, every man in my company just stood there. We just couldn't believe it. You were like angels coming out of—flying—dropping out of the sky." And he said, "Ma'am, we'd been out there for weeks. We were dirty, and we stunk, and we had a lot of our best people killed, and we were just like animals out there, ma'am. We were just killing so we wouldn't be killed." He said, "It was terrible. And then you landed," and he said, "We've got to put on shirts and tucked them in, and we had to watch out language, and we sort of got as close to you as we could." He said, "You just smelled so good." And he said, "And you were laughing." And he said, "You just made us—you just gave us hope, ma'am."
And then I started crying, and I said, "You know what? That's what we were 23
trying to do, and I appreciate so much you're telling me this."
And he said, "You stayed for about thirty or forty-five minutes," and he said, "it was just great. And we didn't know if we'd ever see you again but," he said, "when that helicopter flew away and you were waving good-bye," he said, "every man in my company looked up there and pointed and said, 'That's what I'm going home to." And he said, "Ma'am, a lot of those men didn't make it, but you made them think they were going to make it, and you made them think that they mattered."
I mean, that's the kind of impact—
TS: Yes.
LH: There's no other job in the world I'm ever going to get that kind of satisfaction from. I do think—and I'm glad I did—I do think I recognized the significance of it, at the time. The only regret I have about any of it is I didn't keep a journal. I wrote home in letters what I thought my mother could handle, and she saved them all and I have all my letters. But they don't really tell what was going on.
TS: But maybe that would have been too hard to—
LH: I wish I had it now.
TS: Yeah.
LH: I really wish I had it now, because there were things that happened that are seared in my memory forever. There are names and places that I've forgotten that I wish I could remember.
TS: Well, what'd you think about when you first got there, when you landed? Do have any visceral memory about—
LH: Oh, I didn't tell you about how crazy it was when we took off.
TS: Oh.
LH: We took off at night from Travis Air Force Base.
TS: Okay.
LH: Okay. So we're sitting there, and I'm sitting with another girl, who I actually ended up being stationed with.
TS: Oh, yeah?
LH: We took off, and we'd been in the air, I guess, about forty-five minutes, and I'd flown a lot, and I'd flown internationally before, but the plane was shaking like crazy, and they were trying to do beverage service and it was—they couldn't even pour the Cokes [Coca-Cola soft drink] it was so shaky and turbulent. So they stopped the drink service, and the 24
first time we hear anything from the captain is about an hour into the flight, and we hear this Texas drawl over the PA [public announcement system] say, "Folks, this is the Captain speaking. We're going to dump all our fuel and head back to the mainland." [chuckles] Which, we were like, "What?!" So they did, they dumped all the fuel, and we did a 180°—Is that right?
TS: Yes.
LH: Yeah, 180°; went back to the California, landed. Of course, the guys were all cheering.
TS: [chuckles]
LH: Because their time started the minute they left Travis. Our time, as Red Cross, didn't start at least until we signed into a book [in Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon—LH added later]. So they went back to Travis, we landed. There was a big hole in the wing where the cowling had not been secured, and so the whole time we were flying this piece was ripping the wing.
So we didn't get our luggage. They put us all on buses, took us to Sacramento, and then took the manifest, which was, I guess, alphabetical order, and took one, two, three, four, and gave us a hotel key. And so, they had men and women all mixed up together.
TS: Right.
LH: [chuckles] We didn't have any clothes—no night clothes. But we straightened out the gender thing, so the women all ended up [together—LH added later] in our own hotel rooms. We stayed there for twenty-four hours. I didn't even tell my mother, because I thought, "This is just too crazy. She's not really all behind my going over there anyway." So we stayed in Sacramento for an extra day and then we took off again.
We—I guess back then planes didn't have enough fuel to make it the whole way, because we went from Travis Air Force Base to Hawaii. And I'll never forget, the guys came back from the layover in Hawaii and gave us leis [a garland or wreath], so we were wearing leis the whole way. I have a picture somewhere of me wearing my lei. And then we went—Let's see—Travis to Hawaii, Hawaii, I think, to Wake Island—I think—then to Guam and then the Philippines. So we made about four or five stops across the Pacific [Ocean] and refueled every time. And then when we got to the Philippines it was about an hour, hour and a half, out, and they told us that when we got to Tan Son Nhut to land that we were going to go immediately into the terminal. Do not stop, do not take pictures, do not dilly-dally, just go. And this was in the day—they didn't have these covered jetways to get into the airport; you had to go downstairs [down a stairway—LH added later] and walk.
Well, before that though, as we got close to Tan Son Nhut we were really high in the air. And then they did almost a straight down descent and we landed. It was really dramatic. I've never had a landing like that. And the captain said, "Pick up your belongings, get off the plane, go straight into the—" he told us. And at the bottom of the stairwell there were armed, with M-16s, soldiers waiting for us. I will never forget—I've read the before—I will never forget when I walked out that door, the heat and the smell. Many people reflect on that. I don't know what it is, but— 25
TS: They sure do.
LH: —as we were taxiing over to the airport I remember seeing these blown up remnants of [Lockheed] C-130s [airplanes], and runways that had been bombed and mortared and rocketed, and I thought, "Wow, this isn't a movie. This is the real thing." And of course, they got us right into Tan Son Nhut. The civilians of us—the Red Cross—went straight to a book we had to sign, which I had never used military time. They had taught us all this in training, about ranks and military time and—so I put—I remember picking up the pen and putting 0600 [6:00 a.m.] 24 July 1968, and signing my name and putting American Red Cross. Which the reason I remembered it so well is, when my son—our son was born exactly six years later, I remember I'm calling it out in the delivery room, "0600, 24 July!"
TS: [chuckles]
LH: Thomas Blair Hines, Jr. arrived in the world. So it's just funny how that happened.
But we went straight from there. They rounded us all up, took us to the Red Cross headquarters, where we had a little orientation, then took us to what they call the Massachusetts BOQ [bachelor officer quarters], which is where the officers processed in and out of Saigon. It was my first experience with unisex bathrooms.
TS: Okay.
LH: And showers.
TS: How was that?
LH: Interesting. [chuckles]
TS: Yeah?
LH: The—Our windows—It was an old concrete—I don't know where these buildings had come from. The French, I guess. But the windows all were taped up with duct tape, so if the window shattered the glass wouldn't fall on us. The shower consisted of a handheld shower—you just shut the door and the whole bathroom was the shower. I got—They—We had orientation classes for a couple days, and then at night we would go out to eat, always in military facilities, or the Rex Hotel [Saigon] or the Caravelle [Hotel] or something like that. We were warned not to drink ice or water. I remember the last night we were in town we went to this place to eat, and then they said, "Come on upstairs. There's a party upstairs on the rooftop." So we—the girls all went up there, and again, we got a lot of notice. Interestingly, we were sitting there, I ordered a drink, and I thought, 'What is the drink of the tropics? Aha! Gin and tonic." Because the quinine will protect me from malaria. So I ordered a gin and tonic; never had one. I didn't particularly like it, and I held it long—the whole night; I had this whole drink—the same drink the whole night. And the first thing I remember happening when we got up there was a very attractive, tall, handsome, in uniform African-American lieutenant came up and asked me 26
to dance, and I was out on that dance floor in a flash. I had never danced with a black person before but there I was, I was doing my thing and it was great.
Well, we got back to the BOQ, and about two o'clock in the morning I got hit with the worst gastrointestinal explosion on both ends than I've ever had in my life. Oh, it was so terrible. And we were supposed to leave early the next morning for our units—our units out in the field in Vietnam—and I couldn't get off the bed, I was so sick. And I'll never forget this roommate of mine who was another Red Cross girl, she said, "What's the matter? Can't you hold your liquor?"
Well, the problem was I had held the same drink all night long and the ice had melted into the drink, so I was so sick, so I did not get to leave with my unit. Everybody else left and I was stuck behind at this BOQ for two or three—I ended up in the third field hospital, getting treated, and so I got a late arrival at my unit.
TS: How long did that take you to recover from?
LH: Oh, man. It was terrible. I was so dehydrated and I couldn't drink the water.
TS: Right.
LH: The Red Cross was sending ginger ale and things to me, but it just took two days to get over, it really did. And some IVs [intravenous therapy].
TS: And some IVs?
[Intravenous therapy (IV) is the infusion of liquid substances directly into a vein.]
[Speaking Simultaneously]
LH: That was my introduction to Vietnam. Having—
TS: Did you ever have a gin and tonic again?
LH: That's still my drink.
TS: Oh, is it? [both chuckling] I would think that it would set you back.
LH: I just drink them faster. Don't let the ice melt.
TS: That's the key, okay.
LH: Especially if you're in the tropics.
TS: That's the lesson learned, alright. That's interesting. Where were you sent to then for your first— 27
[Speaking Simultaneously]
LH: I went to Don Ba Thin, which was the headquarters for the 18th Engineering Brigade, and that was a six person unit, and we had two trailers—three in each—and that's where I learned the ropes. I mean, that's where I—we didn't do—we went to Ban Me Thuot and a couple other places, but basically what we did there was run the center, and we also did a lot of work—we'd take cookies and games and puzzles and stuff out to the flight lines, the offices. They had a little—little hospital there. We'd do a little bit of hospital visitation.
One of the things I remember doing, because I could play the piano, is they asked us to serve at the memorial services. I think that's when it really got real for me, was going into these little chapels and seeing the boots and the helmets and the
M-16s, representing people. That's the first encounter I had with lives and death. I didn't know who they were, but that was pretty sobering to see. Not just to read about it in the paper back in the States, but to see it right there.
And then we also were close range. We used to go out and visit—there was a Special Forces "B" team and—In fact, the movie The Green Berets came out while I was over there, and over there movie screens consisted of boards painted white. And so, the girls got invited to come over and watch The Green Berets, and of course, it's just such a terrible movie with so many things about it that are wrong, that the Green Berets started filling up beer cans with sand and slamming them into the boards.
TS: Throwing it at the—
LH: And also, I'll never forget, they had—somehow they had come across two orphaned—they said—tiger cubs, and they were probably about twenty or thirty pounds at that point, but they had the run of the camp. And they would jump up on the bar of the Special Forces, and sit in our laps; we could pet these tiger cubs. And I understand—this is true—that they ended up donating one of them to the zoo in Saigon, but the other one, whose name was Clyde, ended up being shipped back and lived out his life at the Atlanta zoo.
TS: Is that right?
LH: They gave it to Atlanta because of Fort Benning being [near there in Georgia—LH clarified later], and so I used to go see that tiger, Clyde, at the zoo in Atlanta.
TS: You knew him when he was just a little cub.
LH: Yeah, I knew him when he was just a baby. But—And they had pet monkeys. I mean, everybody—every unit always had puppies—they'd find puppies out in the field—and cats, and all kinds of weird stuff.
TS: Did they have any of the young Vietnamese orphans? Any of them?
28
LH: There was an orphanage right outside the air base. It was in-between, sort of, Dong Ba Thin and Cam Ranh Bay. There was a orphan—a Catholic orphanage, and we would go out there and take out toothbrushes and—did more of that actually from Cam Ranh because it was a navy-run MEDCAP [medical civil action program], but it was the same orphanage, because we would do Christmas parties for those little kids, and sometimes the mama sans would bring them to work with them. We always had a mama san in every unit who worked for us and cleaned our trailers or Quonset huts, and ironed our clothes—washed and ironed our clothes for us, because that was just the way it was.
TS: Did you just paid them a fee to do that every month?
LH: Yeah, something; probably like five dollars a week or something. And they always said don't overpay, you don't want to upset the economy.
But I tell you what was funny was, we got to know our mama sans pretty well. However, we were warned at all times never to talk about troop movements, or where we were going the next day, or any of that, because you never knew, ever, who was VC [Vietcong] and who wasn't. And so, we couldn't ever put out our schedules, where we were going or anything that we knew. We had to be very careful. When we—We had a secret security clearance, so we were around maps and information like that all the time.
But the Vietnamese, and I [LH corrected later] really did enjoy getting to know these young—some of them were older and some of them were younger women—but they would bring us gifts. Like, they would bring us bags of crabs, which—I mean, live crabs—which I really didn't know what to do with. They would bring us this banana oil that they liked to cook with, and they would like—they liked to cook for us. On the other hand, they loved—and weren't supposed to take them off [base]—but we would get them Ritz crackers. I don't know why they loved Ritz crackers, but we would always get Ritz crackers, and I think they were stuffing them in their clothes and taking them off base.
TS: [chuckles]
LH: And they could not stand cheese; the whole—the whole smell of cheese. We would have—We'd say, "Eat it, mama san, eat some." And they would just scream; they couldn't stand cheese.
TS: They liked the cracker but not the cheese on it.
LH: Not the cheese. And I've read since then that Asian people have some kind of lactose intolerance, so they really—cheese is disturbing to their systems.
TS: [chuckles]
LH: Not only the smell, but just they can't eat cheese. But that—Our contact with the Vietnamese people was so remote. I mean, we just—the people that worked on base, or if we'd go to an orphanage, or that kind of thing, but we never really got to know Vietnamese people.
TS: You weren't integrated in the culture because you were— 29
LH: Never learned the language, I mean, other than—I can say Ba Mui Ba, which is their beer; "33." Which was interesting, too, because they said always drink your Ba Mui Ba in the can, don't put it in a glass, because it has so much formaldehyde in it. And I saw this. When it was in a glass, if a fly or mosquito went over it the formaldehyde was so strong they would just drop dead right there into your glass.
[Note: The theory that Ba Mui Ba beer contained formaldehyde has been disproven.]
TS: [chuckling]
LH: You had a lesser chance of getting one in a can.
TS: A can. That's interesting.
LH: And I drank it. What was I thinking? I don't know. Twenty two [years old].
TS: [chuckles] Well, you had started a while ago to talk about a typical day. Do you want to do that now?
LH: Oh, okay. Alright, a typical day, if you worked in the center, you would go—we were open from 10:00 [a.m.] to 10:00 [p.m.], and we worked, like, five or six hour shifts—six hours shifts—and then it'd be always two; we always had two. Everybody was welcome. I mean, if you were Vietnamese soldiers or Australian soldiers or Brit—anybody who wanted to come in, our—we did not allow weapons in the unit of course, and we did not allow any kind of drugs, or any kind thing that was contraband.
TS: What did it look like? What did the unit like?
LH: It was, of course, no air conditioning, but we had, usually, a converted building, and we would have bookshelves and we'd have stationery, and sometimes we'd have ping pong tables. Cards, always cards. I'd never even heard of Pinochle but everybody always wanted to play Pinochle. I never knew how but I was—
TS: Did you ever play Euchre?
LH: Well, probably, but I never heard of that either.
TS: [chuckles]
LH: Those are not Southern things.
TS: No.
LH: I could play Crazy Eights or Go Fish, but I would sit there—it wasn't about playing cards, 30
it was—
TS: You all aren't stuck inside in the winter time playing cards, that's it.
LH: Well, it was news to me. And I didn't play bridge either, so basically, what the guys wanted to do was just sit there and talk to us.
TS: Right.
LH: Which is what we ended up doing. But we had—Always we had to make big huge vats—which the military supplied—of Kool-Aid and coffee. We always had hot coffee and cold Kool-Aid and cookies. No donuts; beside [despite] the Donut Dolly moniker we never had donuts. But people could write a letter home. We had tape so people could record messages and send home. We had newspapers. They could wear their uniforms, they could wear civilian clothes. It was just a place to socialize and be off time. I'd say 95%, maybe more than that, were enlisted. The officers had officers' clubs to go to; the enlisted gravitated towards us. And we always had a program at night. One of the favorite programs, it would be—maybe we'd do one of our games, or we'd have crossword puzzles contests or, again, paper airplanes. People from the States would send us things that we could be inventive with; crafts or candy, and things like that; we'd always have stuff like that.
Our chap—I'll always be grateful to them—my host chapter in Cam Ranh Air Force Base was Hennepin County [Minnesota]. Wait a minute. Maybe it was—No, I think it was actually Minneapolis. It was Hennepin County, Minnesota, which was St. Paul, Minnesota. And they were so good about sending us things; paperback books, just all—we always had things to choose from to put out for the guys that was new. Keychains. Just any little thing that they could think of to send us.
But one of the favorite programs, it—that the—we had at night in both centers—I had centers at Cam Ranh Bay and Dong Ba Thin—both of them—I still have a picture of it—I have a—on the wall, it says, "What did you do in the war, Mommy?" And they loved it when we put on our civilian clothes.
TS: Yeah?
LH: And we would walk out in regular clothes. They hadn't seen women in anything except fatigues and our blue uniforms, and they just thought it was so great and we wore them.
Now, shopping, that was another thing that was very interesting. Shopping was nonexistent, obviously, for women, so we lived and died by the Sears, [Roebuck and Co.] and [J.C.] Penney's catalogs. We just loved it when we would get a new Penney's catalog and we could order our clothes. And of course, when we left we left everything behind. Didn't want to see those clothes again to begin with, and the people coming in could wear them, and then I guess they gave them to the Vietnamese when they were through with them.
But that was a typical day in a center. And then while two people were working, six—like, there were six at Dong Ba Thin. So two would be in the center, two would be out doing runs to the security police or the dog handlers or the radio research or the flight lines, and then the other two people would either be having a day off or be working on 31
paperwork. Or dealing with issues with Saigon or people moving in and out, that kind of thing.
A forward run. A forward run is different, and the most typical forward run I had, because we put one every day, was in Chu Lai.
TS: Okay. In Chu Lai?
LH: In Chu Lai, because the forward runs we did at Dong Ba Thin or at Cam Ranh were not nearly as frequent, and one of our runs in—when we went off base in Cam Ranh, Tuy Hoa [Air] Base did not have a unit then, so we would go down and spend the night and program down at Tuy Hoa. It was sort of an experiment to see if the Tuy Hoa air force unit wanted to support a Red Cross chapter—I mean, a Red Cross unit there. They did; they finally ended up opening one. But we would go down there and show what it would be like, because the only places we ever went were where the military approved of, and the only places we ever lived was where the military invited us in, because they provided our transportation and our housing.
TS: Okay.
LH: We had to pay for our food, and we had to pay for everything at the PX [post exchange], but they had to be able—and security; they provided our security.
So a typical forward run would be like the ones that I would do in Chu Lai. There were, again, six of us in that unit. Americal division had three separate divisions: the 11th Brigade, the 196th Brigade, and the 198th. So every day two of us would go to one of those brigades. We would go all over that brigade that day, and by this point I had been promoted to program director, so it was my job not only to make sure that two girls got transportation to those units, but also that the programs that they took were fresh and new, had not been seen before; that they were supplied with plenty of stationery and pens and all the stuff that we used to give away; candy and stuff. And that—If we had a new girl, that she was traveling with somebody who was experienced. I mean, the program director had a pretty big job. I would spend the night before lining up these helicopters to pick us up, to take us out, because you couldn't just have people going out without a way back. You had to make sure that the helicopter company remembered that you were out there and you had to come back at night.
So we would get up about 4:30, five o'clock in the morning. See why we needed a curfew?
TS: Yeah.
LH: We'd get up at—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: What was your curfew?
32
LH: Twelve.
TS: Okay.
LH: And if we—if we had trailers, like I did at Dong Ba Thin and Americal, we could have anybody over that we chose. I mean, if you were dating a lieutenant, fine. If you were dating a sergeant, fine. Anybody could come to our trailers. But in Cam Ranh, where we lived in Quonset huts with other officers, there was no way to invite anybody in there. We had to—We really, pretty much, dated officers there because there was nowhere to go if you had a date with an enlisted person.
Back to Chu Lai. We would get up about 4:30 [a.m.] or 5:00 [a.m.], have everything ready by the front door, walk out the front door, walk maybe a half a mile down to catch our helicopters, which all picked us up at the same place. The place that we found the helicopters waiting for us was called Graves Registration. That's because the helicopters that we were riding in had been spending the night before we got on going out all over the AOs—which is the Areas of Operation—they'd been all over the different AOs picking up wounded and dead.
So when we got down to Graves Registration and these helicopters are landing with their last load of body bags, we would stay a respectful distance away while they pulled off the body bags and just stacked them up, and then they would hose out the floors of the helicopters. We didn't ride in seats, we rode on the floors of the helicopters. It's really surreal. It was then and especially is now—watching that, realizing those were people, and we—they were always tagged with a name, which, of course, to protect ourselves and them we never ever got close enough to see the tags. But the personnel would hose out the blood and the mud, and the urine and the feces, and whatever else was in the floors of the helicopters and wipe them down, and then they'd load it up with resupplies. It was usually C-Rations and mail and can—cases of beer and Cokes; that kind of thing. And then we'd either sit on the floor or on the cans of the resupply, and then we'd go on our merry way. And then they would start processing the body bags into the Graves Registration office.
We would land usually on a fire base or a landing zone, somewhere—we would go wherever the troops were and the military thought it was safe enough to go, and we would land about the time that the night patrol was coming in, so we would get the assignment of serving breakfast, and these people had been out all night long and were filthy, dirty, and it—again, we always caused a minor sensation, and we had somewhat of a schedule. Like, we would go to certain places every Tuesday that we could get there, or every Thursday, so they sort of, kind of, knew that we were coming, but if the military said we couldn't come we, of course, didn't.
I remember one time a guy came up to me and was really indignant, he said, "Alright, we didn't have Tuesday last week."
I said, "What do you mean, you didn't have Tuesday?"
He said, "Because you girls didn't come."
And I said, "Look, we would have been here but they wouldn't let us." So we had a fairly predictable schedule, depending on troop movements.
But we would serve meals, usually three meals a day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and the guys would come through and we'd just ladle it out. And then we would do our little program on this hill, and we'd stay on each hill or whoever we were. It could 33
be a bridge; it could be a school; wherever the troops were. And after forty-five minutes to an hour they'd pack us up and then move to the next place. So typically we'd go to five or six different locations in a day, and then about 6:00 [p.m.] or so they'd find a helicopter that could take us back in. So that was the way we spent our days, and they were usually, like, twelve hour days, so from 5:30 in the morning.
TS: Pretty long day. Pretty grueling too.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
LH: Yeah, and sometimes it was later than that. And then we'd all come back to our trailers, and we—sometimes we ate out in the field, sometimes we ate back at the house, but then it was time to start over again. And so, we did that five days a week. Our weekends, in a unit like that, were up to us. Of course, I had paperwork, because I always had to report how many visits we made, how many troops we saw, how many miles we traveled, how many meals we served; I was always doing paperwork and setting up the next week's activities.
And then also, the part of our job that wasn't described to us in Washington, and it was purely optional, was to do hospital visitations. So we did the hospital visitations wherever I was, in every unit I was in. Well, the air force hospital in Cam Ranh [The 12th USAF Hospital at Cam Ranh Bay Air Base] is the largest one in the world [one of the largest—LH corrected later]; it's [it had—LH corrected later] a small clinic of trauma patients; not many beds. But the one in Chu Lai was very large, the 312th Evac, which interestingly was staffed by my hometown; Lexington and Winston-Salem personnel. There only two hospital units that got called up the entire Vietnam War, and the 312th was one of them, and all these people that had told me, "Ha, ha, ha, you're going to Vietnam, we're not," they actually got called up, so I saw some classmates over there.
TS: That must have been interesting.
LH: Very interesting. Three—Oh, I didn't say this earlier about my classmates—Three of my classmates—my male classmates—were killed in Vietnam, which is a pretty big number because I probably only—there were two hundred and twelve in my class, and I would guess, maybe, eighty-five or ninety were male, so to have three killed over there is a pretty high number.
But we would go to the hospitals to see what we could do to help there, and the 312th Evac, the people there, there were basically in two categories; they either had minor wounds, or they had malaria, or something that was going to be easily fixed and they would get sent back to field, and they were pretty—they were guys who did not have a very good outlook, because they didn't want to go back to the field; I didn't blame them. So they were a little bit hard to visit with because they were pretty glum. Then the other contingent of people at 312th Evac were the dying, because they weren't—most of those people were not going to be medevaced [medical evacuation by helicopter]to Japan or back to the States; they were left there to die.
34
TS: Did they know that?
LH: Probably. Some of them were semi-conscious, unconscious. But that was when I really saw the horror of war. I mean, it's not a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not Sylvester Stallone or Clint Eastwood [American "action movie" actors] charging over a hill. It's not that. It's horrible. It's absolutely horrible. And I learned pretty early on, because we'd go over early in the mornings—8:00 or so in morning, stay as long as we could, all day usually—that you don't start off with ward one, two, or three because those are the really, seriously, dying. But we'd go into the wards quietly and ask the nurses, "Where should we go today?"
And they would say, "Make sure you go to Bed Seven, Eight, Fourteen, Sixteen," which the implication was they don't have very long, or they need somebody right now. And we would try to see everybody. Occasionally there'd be somebody going through pinning on Purple Hearts on pillow cases and—but a lot—I just never realized the horrors of amputations and—I mean, I'm an English major, I had never in my life seen people so badly burned and so badly hurt. There are no mirrors in wards like that; ever. The people that had their legs amputated, they would have these things that would come down from the ceiling like peach baskets and just their stumps would be in there and they'd—it was terrible. Or you'd go to a bedside and there'd be a person whose intestines were in a clear bag, sitting right there on top of—I just—I don't know how I did that. I don't know how I did that, except you just do it. There's no training for it, there's no conditioning for it, you just walk up there and you'd say, "Hey, I'm Larry and I'm from North Carolina. How's it going today?" Or, "How are—I'm glad—I'm glad I got a chance to talk to you today."
A lot of them would say things like, "I can't go back like this. My wife doesn't want me. My girlfriend—How do I look?" Because they don't know. They're burned, their ears—I mean, half their face is gone. I mean, I don't know.
TS: What would you say to them?
LH: One thing I know I didn't say, and I'm so glad I didn't say, I didn't say, "Don't worry about it, it's going to be fine." I never minimalized it. I would try to echo back what they were saying. When they would say, "My wife isn't going to want me back like this," I would l say something along the lines of, "You know, It's going to be tough." All the while knowing he wasn't ever going to see his wife again. I was the last person—one of the last people he was ever going to see in his life, ever. Not only the last—It was huge—It was a huge responsibility. The nurses would have done it but they were so busy doing medical procedures, they didn't have time to go have the conversations that we had. Or frequently I'd write letters home they would dictate to me.
TS: Yeah.
LH: Or they would ask me to read letters to them, or they would ask—the Bibles were always ever present—they would ask me to read something from the Psa—from anything, I'd always pick the Psalms or just some—just trying to be a comfort, and knowing this was their last experience with anyone on Earth. It still is hard for me to reflect on, as you can probably tell.
35
TS: Did you have a soldier or seaman or something that you visited that really stood out in any particular way?
LH: You know, honestly, they were all so young. And this is something I've read before, too, and it's so true: you don't learn anybody's names. You make a point—even if you go out on a fire base and you're really close to somebody, all you know him is "Butch" or "Freddie," you don't know his last name. You don't want to know his last name. You know he's "Butch," and you know that he's from Jesup, Georgia, but that's all you know.
TS: I had another Donut Dolly tell me—and I remember for the first time I had heard that—that she only knew the men by their nicknames—"Tex"—or just the way you described, and that when she went to the Vietnam Memorial it was really troubling to her that she didn't know where their names were on the wall, because she didn't really—
LH: That's self-protection.
TS: Yeah.
LH: You can't know, because in the beginning—and see, the Americal division, which I said earlier, they're the ones who had committed the Mӳ Lai Massacre—atrocity—the year before. I made the mistake of going out to—one time and—I might have missed somebody, and I thought, "Where is Tex? I always—He always carried our prop bag for us." Or, "Where is Tex? He always made sure that the—"Going to the bathroom was a real interesting thing on our fire base.
[The Mӳ Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on 16 March 1968. It was committed by U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division (Americal). Victims included men, women, children, and infants]
TS: Why?
LH: I'll get to that in a minute.
TS: Okay.
LH: But anyway, Tex would always be the one that made sure that he met us at the helicopter, and I made the mistake one time—I'm saying, "Where is Tex?" And I found out that Tex had been killed. Now, see, if you don't ask where Tex is, he might be on R&R, he might have gone home—something really good might have happened to Tex—so you just quit asking when somebody's not there.
TS: You just never ask.
LH: You just don't ask.