(helicopter whirring) - I sure wish I was back in the world .

- Please read the question again.

- How many miles has Lincoln said to have walked in order to return one-fourth cents?

- Six miles.

- That's right, it's six miles.

- That far this morning.

(people laughing) - The first time I ever saw Donut Dollies, I came into our troop area and everybody was gone.

I got ahold of my platoon sergeant and I said, "Where is everybody?"

He said, they're in the mess hall.

The Donut Dollies are up there putting on a program.

- I said to myself, "They're American girls.

What are they doing here?"

- People think there were no women in Vietnam and they certainly weren't in combat.

Many people don't know that there were civilian women in the Red Cross.

- We went to combat in a blue dress.

It was quite a year.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (gentle music) - Bona fide agent of the communist party is deployed- Play a major role as artillery and one phase of the communist war to destroy our nation.

(soldier talking indistinctly) (helicopter whirring) (explosion booming) - There was so much going on in the States as far as controversy to the war, and I was really very curious about it.

(lively music) - At that time, our generation really wanted to do something of service.

You know, what could women do to support their country at that point?

The military was not an option.

- When I was a junior in college in 1968, I wrote a letter to the Red Cross and said, what jobs do you have for women?

The only thing I got back was a brochure that said, "For the best year of your life, join SRAO."

- They said it was in Vietnam.

I said, "Geez, isn't there a war going on there?"

- The draft existed.

So we were attending school with guys worried about whether they'd be called up.

- When I learned about the SRAO program, I said, "That's it, that's what I wanna do."

SRAO stands for Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas.

- The program had been in Korea since 1953.

This program was neither for nor against the war.

It was apolitical.

It was just geared toward morale building for the enlisted troops that had to go.

- The nurses took care of the ill, the sick, the injured, and the Donut Dollies took care of the psychological needs of the healthy.

- We were the girl next door, the wife they'd left at home.

Sometimes a mother figure, depending on what they were going through.

- These were individuals that were volunteers.

They had to have a college degree, be between 21 to 24, be single and never been married.

When I got to Vietnam, some of the gals that I met were some of the sharpest volunteers I've ever seen.

- It was a clubmobile program similar to the World War II program when women served donuts and coffee out to the front lines, the men found out about that, I guess somehow.

So our nickname in Vietnam was Donut Dollies.

- You know, we weren't really Donut Dollies there because we didn't have donuts, but we had had donuts in Korea and in World War II.

- I'll never forget one of my runs early on, the mess cook had just finished a batch of donuts.

Now I was so new, I didn't realize at the time those would be the first and only donuts I would actually see in my entire year in Vietnam.

I looked at the field oven and I thought, "Boy, the gas that they use is really strong on the eyes."

And pretty soon everybody started vacating this building.

I said, "Why is everybody leaving?"

And they said, "We've just been CS'd.

It was tear gas.

So nowadays when people ask me, did you serve donuts in Vietnam?

I say, "Yes one time and I was tear gassed doing so."

(laughs) - You know that group of 627 young women that were so naive that volunteered to go to Vietnam, didn't have any idea what they were getting into.

(lively music) - We started with training in Washington for two weeks.

They taught us all kinds of wonderful things, like how to tell different ranks in different branches of service.

- We got a whole ton of shots.

We got fitted for uniforms.

- My trainer, she was so funny, she kept saying, "Da, da, da, da, da, and watch out for those rusty nails."

I don't know if you know, but rusty nails are a drink.

They're a potent drink.

So absolutely the first thing when I got over there and went to the first officer's club was had to have a rusty nail.

It was great.

And I still like rusty nails to this day.

- After two weeks, put our uniforms on to get on the airplane to fly to San Francisco to wait to catch a plate over to Vietnam.

(engine revving) - As we got ready to land in Saigon, I pictured that we were gonna have to run from the plane to a foxhole or a bunker.

That wasn't the case at all.

(gentle music) - As soon as we realize we're about to land, it's absolutely silent, you could drop a pin.

And then you get off and they talk about how the heat hits you.

And boy it does.

We were being billeted in Saigon and it's like, "Oh God, I can't wait to take a shower.

'cause you're sopping wet."

Take the shower, you turn the shower off, you're already sopping wet again.

- I was there a week when our billets were hit.

I ran into my room and got under the cot and the next day the director called and said, "Hi Donna, welcome to Vietnam."

(laughs) (gentle music) - Who killed Jesse James?

- Some type of shoot in the back, like Sheriff.

- Ford.

Is that what you said?

- No victims.

- I was assigned first to Americal Division, which was an infantry division and I spent six months with them.

I really bonded with the guys in the field.

We weren't there to be seductive at all.

We were there just to show what the morale was and it was easy to do that by playing games, getting them involved in something that was apart from their daily activities.

- Our job there, it was called clubmobile.

Every day get to the helicopter at six, you gotta be up earlier than that.

And then we had programs that we'd take out in these huge canvas bags.

There'd be two of us 'cause you always had to travel in twos.

We'd go out there and get in the helicopter and you had no idea where the hell you were going.

And usually we'd be gone six in the morning to six at night, six days a week.

- We had six weeks to get your own program ready to go on the road.

And it meant making your own props.

We had poster board, big base would have a way to print stuff.

- After we had used a program with all the units we would see, we would send it to another Donut Dolly unit.

So the programs were used a lot.

- The first program I ever developed, and I can't even remember the subject, it's that silly.

And in Da Nang there were a lot of frogs.

I would take the frogs to the program.

I walked in with one of the frogs sitting on my shoulder, boy, got some looks, you know, we put the frogs down and say, you know, "Go."

And we had frog races, not leap frog, just frog races.

It was kind of insane.

But that's the first program I ever did.

And I can remember it well because of the frogs.

(frog croaks) - The idea behind programming was that there's no way we could have talked to every one of those guys, but using a program where we engaged them, all of a sudden they were taken back home and all of a sudden they were with their girlfriend back home or their sister or reminded of their mother or best friends and that's what we did.

- In other units, there was a recreation center.

I define it as a primitive USO and had ping pong tables, pool tables, card games.

- The men could come in and read a book, or write a letter home, or just sit and visit with an American girl.

- I remember wonderful experiences at the center.

We played pool with guys, we played cards with guys.

I remember that it was so hot.

The men really couldn't play pool or do anything.

There was no ventilation.

I kept asking for AC, which they said was coming.

It didn't come.

Finally, I called the general directly and cried.

We got an air conditioning the next day.

(laughs) I am always unsure how to explain what we did because it sounds trivial.

If you say, "Oh, we played games."

You know, my friends are going, "What did you do?"

"Oh, we played games."

You had guys who were alone out there, bored to tears, unhappy with where they are.

We would come and change the mood and they would be happy when we left - My very first day on the job, there were 60 guys.

I'm standing up there thinking, "My God, what have I done?

What am I doing here?

I'm a shy person who never gets up in front of class and hearing all these guys are up there staring at us."

I said, "Hi, I'm Eileen.

I'm from Denver.

I've been in country two weeks."

And the guys went nuts.

They absolutely went nuts.

We were smiling, it was happy, it was fun.

I mean it was a blast, but it was a war zone and we saw things that (gunshots cracking) were horrible.

(explosion booming) We kept smiling though.

It was very hard to explain when we got home.

Most of the time our job was to smile.

And we smiled and we smiled.

Sometimes the guys that had a really bad experience out in the field and they weren't into games, they just wanted to talk and we listened.

And those are the times when we didn't smile as much.

- Men that weren't there, they'll ask you about stuff, what they really want to know.

"Well, were you afraid?"

And the answer is, "No.

Afraid is not the right word.

Terrified comes closely to it."

I used to tell myself every morning in Vietnam, I'd say, "Thornal you good looking devil you, don't you ever die."

You just live through one day at a time.

- There was one favorite fire base with the Fourth Division that we generally always liked visiting with them 'cause they were enthusiastic about our games.

One time they said, "You can't go to St.

George today.

They were nearly overrun last night.

If you wanna see the guys, you're gonna have to go to the hospital and play coup and see them."

And we did, and that was hard.

It was really hard.

- One time we were with some guys, we had a wonderful time.

They got in their tanks, waved goodbye, and the next day we found the same guys in the hospital.

(gunshots cracking) Their tanks had hit land mines.

They had gone right from there, waving goodbye to us, they were happy.

And then they were in the hospital the next day.

Some of them I'm sure were gone.

- We were playing bridge one night.

The next night was a rainstorm.

The chopper took off to go pick up the Vietnamese who'd been injured.

And they'd called in and said they needed a medevac.

They took off once and they storm put them back on the ground.

They took off twice, the storm put them back on the ground.

The third time they took off, crashed and burned.

All five were killed.

They were 18, 19 years old.

I kept thinking, "They can't be dead.

We were just playing bridge."

Things like that happened.

(dramatic music) (helicopter whirring) - So we've had an unusual job.

There were times that were horrible.

There were other times that we had a wonderful time.

I loved flying in choppers.

I think most of us did.

(lively music) - I remember the sights were incredible.

We were in helicopters and we could look down all the time.

It's a beautiful country.

- Yeah, and you're flying over the beautiful China Sea.

It's like, doesn't get much better than this at 22.

- I know - There's actually no danger at the beach.

Beautiful white sand beaches.

- Believe it or not, one time I went water skiing in South Vietnam.

♪ And my troubles are further away ♪ ♪ Now I'm gonna walk the line ♪ - We were busy and that was good.

There was an officer club- - Yeah, officers club.

And we'd go there sometimes and talk with guys and dance or something.

Division is 20,000 men.

So there were plenty of guys there.

(lively music) - Dating in Vietnam was different.

- When I got to Eagle, which was a big fire base, I walked into the mess hall.

I think there were four Red Cross girls sitting there having lunch.

I picked the cutest one to sit across the table from, and that was Diane Zettervall.

- After a while, all the other girls left and we were still talking.

- The conversation about deodorant came up.

- And I said, "Yes, I have looked everywhere from Da Nang on for Arrid Extra Dry Deodorant, and they just don't have it."

- So I told this cute little Red Cross girl, I have an extra can of Arrid Extra Dry Deodorant and I'll give it to you.

- Pretty soon he came out and he very flamboyantly raised the can of Arrid Extra Dry up and said, "Diane Zettervall, on behalf of General Zace, myself, and the entire 101st Airborne Division, I would like to present you with this can of Arrid Extra Dry."

And I was just, oh, I was embarrassed, but I was so amused.

And I think that's when I first started to fall in love with him.

One night while we were waiting to go into the movie in the mess hall and we started taking rockets.

(siren blaring) - We ran and we made it to the bunker.

The attack didn't last that long, but it was really devastating.

- As we learned later, 99 men were killed within a hundred yards of us.

So that was a close call.

(lively music) - On May 20th, as Saigon slept, the Vietcong began slamming round after round of rocket and mortar shells into densely populated sections of the city.

The scene was one of total destruction, pain, suffering, and agonizing loss were felt by the people whose lives were touched by these senseless deaths.

- I don't think any of us at that time went around scared that something bad was gonna happen.

- I always say these dresses, it was like a magical suit of armor.

I believe that the bullets said, "Oh, that's a blue dress.

I'm going the other way."

I mean, I'm not that stupid.

But back then, I just, it never crossed my mind.

- We had a very unusual experience, at least it was for us.

We were both assigned to be companions to go and program on Firebase Rendezvous, which was on the eastern wall of the A Shau Valley.

They dropped us off and they started taking fire.

They put us down in the command bunker for the night.

They'd been receiving fire all night and it was just mud and we were covered in mud to get to the helicopter the next morning.

That was probably the most frightening experience.

- It amazed me how far forward they sent them.

That fire base in the A Shau Valley was a dangerous place to be.

- I didn't find out until a couple of months ago that it was an entire North Vietnamese battalion that had attacked the fire base.

- They didn't have on boots, and they were punchy sticks all over the place.

They did have on helmets.

We got mortared all the time.

They didn't get a weapon.

They came wearing their flat shoes, skirts, that beautiful smile.

I just wonder sometimes if people at the air force knew that they were sending them through a war zone.

- In retrospect now, we felt like we didn't know enough, we're too naive, figured the military would keep us safe.

And we were there to do a job and we did our job and we went wherever we could.

(dramatic music) - I was stationed in a small village with four other Americans.

One day we got a radio call that the helicopter was coming in and we didn't know.

Much to our surprise, when the helicopter landed, two women in blue dresses got out.

We were speechless.

These women get off and they start talking and it's like lullaby.

It's like the softest sound in the world.

I would never say there was a happy time in Vietnam.

It wasn't even happy when you left because you were leaving behind people you had been with for a tour, would help keep you alive and you'd help keep them alive.

But they brought a bright spot into a very dark time.

(gentle music) - We provided a touch of home for those guys, 19 year olds that were away for the first time in their life.

But the unique thing, they were away for the first time in their lives in a war zone.

And you know, we didn't have any better training than they did.

- I'll tell you one thing, you could see our little blue dresses from a very long way away.

There was one time we were flying back and the guys way over there could see us and they're waving and we're waving back.

Pretty soon, three guys came over.

One guy said, "Can I ask you something?"

I said, "Sure."

You know, big smiles.

He said, "Could we hold your hand?"

Sat like, "Sure."

So we stood there and talked and he held my hand the whole time.

That really meant something to the guys that these girls would drop out of the sky and come in and talk to them and play games and the games didn't matter.

It was a way to bring home to them that somebody cared about them.

- These girls gave me a feeling that, okay, everything's gonna be fine.

You're gonna make it.

You're gonna go back to your girl, going back to your family.

Just do your job and you're gonna be fine.

I said to myself, "Now I know what I'm fighting for."

- They got out where the bullets were flying and they really made a difference.

Those women were as strong-willed and tough and courageous as any man I ever saw in Vietnam.

- I remember talking to guys in the hospital, "Come on down, we're gonna have some fun at the end of the hall."

And one guy didn't come.

So I went over to him, "Why aren't you coming down?"

He said, "I don't have any feet."

So we brought his bed down.

He had a great time and he forgot for a little while that he didn't have feet.

(gentle music) - There's been a lot of rumors about us handing out donuts and about a lot of other things.

But when we look back at our history of the same brave women who volunteered in World War II to go and give out coffee and donuts, those gestures were just as meaningful back then as our gestures of using the little programming that we did.

- Jesse James?

- Some type of shoot in the back, like Sheriff.

- Ford.

Is that what you said?

- Okay, what is a dead man's hand in poker?

- Aces and eighths.

- Aces and eighths, right?

You can tell who plays poker.

- When you are in a position where your job is to care for others and then you experience trauma, how do you handle that?

Usually we'd be gone six in the morning to six at night, six days a week.

On the seventh day you'd have a mandatory dinner with the general, it was really difficult for me because the people that would be at that dinner would be men that had been in the field for a year and they'd probably been eating C-rations, hadn't even used a fork.

And now they're sitting at this fancy table of the generals in their dress uniform.

The idea of me sitting next to a guy with all those emotions, I know he was having a hard time.

I was having a hard time 'cause I had to be jolly golly.

And well, where are you from, you know?

So that was really the thing that was hardest for me to go out every day and- (gentle music) Sorry.

Go out every day and watch them, see their faces, feel their feelings.

And none of us ever gave a guy anything but a smile.

And then you'd come back and you got the other side of it and we never talked to each other.

So you never got a release of any kind.

- If a day was over, it was over, period.

You didn't talk about it because what you go and you talk and cry and hug each other.

No, because you had to wake up the next morning and do it again.

'Cause once you open that door, God only knows when you could close it again.

I was so unprepared.

Guys, and these are 17-year-old boys, they would come up to confess something they'd done.

You know, this one little boy, he was horrified at what he'd done and he wanted to see what I thought.

I mean, was he a monster?

"You know, what is this, am I a monster?"

And really, he wanted me to tell him.

- A man came into our center and for the first time he'd experienced hand to hand combat.

And I didn't really realize until he was sharing his story that most of the time the guys would shoot at an enemy that was distant so that they weren't encountering a person.

But here was a case where one of our guys was in an actual hand-to-hand fight with a person whose face he could see, and he was really undone by it.

You know, I was 22.

A lot I didn't know about that, a lot I still don't know about it.

So I was there for him the best I could.

I listened deeply and I cared.

I tried to empathize with him.

I just hope that I was a step along his journey of trying to process what that might mean.

I got very depressed and I called Saigon, which was like our headquarters, and I said, "You need to send me home."

My area director came out and she said, "Marrilee, you're very good at what you do.

Now, what you need to do is give what you know and teach the women that come behind you so that they can teach somebody else."

If I had gone home depressed, feeling like I let the other women down feeling like I let the men down, that would've changed the whole trajectory of my life.

And I believe for the military that because we did that and we did it so well that other women followed behind us who could fly an aircraft or fly a helicopter.

So it made a difference, it made a big difference.

That's one kind of difference.

The other difference is when you would be with those men, you would see the difference you made.

The moment you appeared.

(gentle music) - Christmas of 1969 was absolutely the best experience I think I've ever had.

- We had red pants, white cuffs, and Santa Claus hats.

We made it to every single unit with 9th Infantry that year, just trying to bring a sense of home for that one day.

(gentle music) - We go to places where there might be only 20 men.

We go to places where there were a couple hundred men laughing at us and laughing with us, but nobody then was special.

The commanding officer had asked us to come up there first on Christmas Day because the men had written home to their newspapers.

Oh, poor us we're on this mountain all by ourselves, and they had been flooded with presents.

The CO said that he would like for us to help hand out presents to the guys.

So we went up, we served breakfast to them and had breakfast with them and we were called outside and they didn't have us up there to hand out presents.

They had us up there to give us a present.

You have to understand that when we were over there, we were women out in the field all day and finding restrooms was not easy.

They had built a single outhouse with pink paint and it was called the far outhouse.

And we had a ribbon cutting for the far outhouse on Christmas Day.

That was the best Christmas of my entire life.

(gentle music) - By the time Christmas rolled around, I was at Phan Rang Air Base and Ben was trying to get down to see me.

He knew that I loved green pimento stuffed olives.

- I think it was just as soon as I got there, we were talking and I said, "I brought you something."

- He hands me a jar of olives.

He opened the jar for me.

Then I looked down and I saw this sparkle, sparkle, sparkle.

And that was my ring.

We got engaged on Christmas Day, 1969 in South Vietnam.

(dramatic music) - One evening the Donut Dollies were invited to a party right next door from the Dollhouse.

And some of the guys, we didn't really know them, but we're sitting at the bar and one captain, he was so excited he was gonna see his wife in Hawaii in a couple weeks and later that evening, one of the other pilots walked me back to the Dollhouse.

The next morning we found out both of them had been killed.

It was the beginning of the Cambodian Invasion in May of 1970.

(helicopter whirring) - I was so glad I was there early on because it was during the buildup and it wasn't nearly as bad as it got later.

There was a lot more drug use and that sort of thing later in the war.

- My first tour was 1967, '68.

My second tour was 1970, '71.

The difference between my first tour and second tour, the respect was changing.

You know, the respect for us being women and where we were and what we were doing.

- I very clearly remember in Nha Trang I was sleeping and I heard somebody come in my room and then I heard the click, the safety on the gun go off.

It was a security guard that came in and took my camera and all my jewelry and things off the dresser.

- I think there were a lot more cases of peeping Toms I know of one rape.

I'm sure it wasn't the only one, you know, and there may have been more that never got reported.

- I knew two guys who worked for Air America and one of them killed one of the civilian nurses because she was dating somebody else.

We almost always had a man that had a gun around.

So you were always aware of that balance.

(dramatic music) - Certainly toward the end we were losing.

- We lost the war.

We knew it, we saw it.

No one could tell you any different.

- It was really kind of surprising.

When I went back, it was bad.

(dramatic music) - I don't remember a whole lot about leaving, but mixed emotions.

Really excited about going home, but also sad to be leaving some of the good experiences of the girls.

- And most of the girls, it's the only life we had known for a year.

- Yeah, yeah.

(gentle music) - Reentering the world was pretty difficult.

The hardest thing was trying to get your fingernails clean and your hair clean and your skin clean.

Your parents were so glad to see you, but they didn't know how to talk to you.

- I came home and I realized what I had done did not matter to anybody back here.

There we were royalty.

Suddenly nobody cared.

Nobody cared and if they did care, it was usually negative.

- There were still riots going on.

A lot of anti-Vietnam sentiment.

I had people ask me over and over again, "Why did you go, are you some kind of super patriot?

Are you some kind of reactionary warmonger type of thing?

You were supporting these baby killers."

That wasn't it at all.

And I didn't talk about it, like a lot of girls, I didn't, I didn't say much.

- I remember sitting with one of my friends in San Francisco, we went to a bar and said, "We just got back from Vietnam."

The bartender looked at us and walked to the other end of the bar.

And the guys, it was worse for them coming back.

- For me, I was coming home to see Diane and to get married and that was great, but the reaction of the civilian population was not good.

People would try to spit on you.

People would say baby killers, they would shout all kinds of things at you.

When I see the video of troops coming back from the Middle East and the people stand up and applaud and say, "Welcome home."

My reaction just, "Where in the world were you people when we were coming home?"

There are a lot of other things that remain with you.

It changes your life and what you think about things.

- It took years to replay some of those scenes and go, "Oh my God, that's what that was."

Yeah, years.

- Yeah.

- The kind of accumulation of all of those emotions and experiences kind of came home with me.

I mean, here I was watching people give their lives for their brothers and it wasn't people they were related to or even knew or were even from their hometown or state.

That was really moving to me.

And when I came home, I remember trying to grasp how it is that I learned a really important universal human truth in a war zone that I never learned at home.

I had some real embedded experience of what it means to be human.

(gentle music) (gentle music) - The one thing that makes me mad about the US is that the government doesn't recognize them as a combat veteran.

These girls, 21, 22, 23 years old, left their families came over that combat zone as volunteers.

They came under mortar attack, sniper fire.

But the United States government does not give them any recognition.

I would give my right hand to help these girls.

- When people said welcome home to us in 1993 when we were in Washington for the dedication of the Women's Memorial, I found myself in tears.

It's the first time I felt publicly acknowledged of having even been there.

And I was surprised at how much it meant to me.

- It was November and Veterans Day and they asked us to march in the parade.

So we did as a unit.

And as we were marching down the parade, several men came out of the sides that were watching and recognized some of the other girls from having been there in Vietnam and just came out and grabbed them and gave them a big hug.

And I think that's when we realized that we had made a difference.

All of us.

We realized then that what we did was something worthwhile.

- We had terrific gals in the program and they volunteered and they put their life in danger, although they may not have known it at the time.

I just do not want this history to be forgotten.

- In retrospect, I believe they were maybe the bravest people that served in Vietnam.

I can't say enough about them, I really can't.

- We didn't know in what little ways and what huge ways that we affected their everyday being.

And you know, when you're in Vietnam, you get up every morning and put on your makeup and you go out and you don't think about how impactful your actions might have been when you're just doing your job.

I was speaking to a large veterans group about 2 years ago.

I had a couple almost running up to meet me before I left.

He came up to me and he said, I just wanna thank you for serving in Vietnam.

But then he followed by saying, "You saved my life."

And I said, "No, no, I was, I wasn't a nurse, I was a Red Cross worker."

And he said, "Oh no," he said, "You saved my life."

And I said, "What do you mean?"

And he said, "Well, I had been out on this fire base for about six months, been eating the C-rats."

He had been sleeping in terrible conditions and of course losing his friends and going through the perils of battle.

And he said, "I had decided that I was gonna commit suicide.

I walked into a Red Cross center and he said there was this Red Cross girl there.

She took the time to sit down next to me and she listened.

She listened intently to my story and got me talking about my family and the people back home and took my mind off that war temporarily."

And he said, "That Red Cross worker, if that hadn't happened, had she not taken the time to listen to me, I would've committed suicide.

I would not have had the children that I've had and I would've not have had this wonderful wife that I had."

And he said, "You know, the nurses in Vietnam, they doctored our wounds and our battle scars, our physical disabilities."

But he said, "The Red Cross girls, they were the doctors for our hearts and our minds and our souls."

He said, "I just can't thank you enough."

Could I have ever had a better recognition for what we did in Vietnam?

Never.

So I've tried to share that story as much as I can because how many other lives did we touch like that?

You know, how many other lives?

And not even knowing that we did by our little gestures and just giving them that touch of home that meant so much.

(gentle music) (lively music) - Did you ever see- Did you ever see a donut, a donut in Vietnam?

- Never.

- Never.

No donuts.

- You're a hero (people talking indistinctly) Thank you.

- You know they say.

- So much history has been lost, women's history in particular because the historians were all white males.

- Today is the first time we've been recognized by the government, formally.

- The fact that everybody is being honored and rightly so after all these years is amazing to me.

- Proceed with today's ceremony.

Let's remember that price that was paid and let's continue to honor them now.

- There were 627 of us.

We consider ourselves a special group.

Not arrogance, not self importance, but we did something unusual and we did something important.

We did help give a touch of home.

That was our mission.

And I think we did it well.

To be formally recognized is really special to all 627 of us.

Whether they're here now or not.

(gentle music) - For me it's always special to get together with women who served.

- That's what coming to something like this is mostly about not the recognition so much.

We just bond, there's no other way to put it, may have a wonderful time - Even though we have some very different experiences, different units, we were there at different times of the war, we had this core that unites us, really.

- These women are people I admire and that I follow and I want to emulate.

'Cause there's so much older than I am.

(people laughing) - It is kind of bittersweet because we are getting older and frailer and this may be one of the last times that we have a big group together.

So it's important for us to see and talk to each other.

(crowd cheering) - Three cheers.

Hip hip.

- Hooray.

- Hip hip.

- Hooray.

- Hip hip.

- Hooray.

- The experience of being a Donut Dolly with all the positives and all the negatives is something no one can ever take away from us.

- In Vietnam and everywhere we try to find the joy because you understand the importance of laughing and singing and taking joy out of every moment that you happen to have.

- War, of course is hell.

And it's really not the best of the human condition.

But every time a person does something really caring, that's so important for helping us rise above the difficulties that we have to face.

Every one of us can do that.

- I'm proud to have been a Donut Dolly.

I'm proud of everyone I served with, who have done so many different things since.

But Vietnam brought out the best in all of us, I think.

- It gave us a confidence that we could do.

I mean, if you can do that, you can do anything.

Women can do anything.

(helicopter whirring) (gentle music) (lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues)