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In 1970, the U.S. Army sent Adib Sabree to Vietnam. Peggy Kelly was already there.
“I thought it was so unfair that all the men were getting drafted and they did not have a choice,” Peggy told me. “And women had a choice. I wanted to help out the guys.”
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And so Peggy joined the American Red Cross’s Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas program, in which female college graduates from the ages of 21 to 24 were sent to Vietnam or Korea to boost troop morale. She left Rochester, N.Y., for two weeks of training in Washington and arrived in Vietnam in November 1969.
“My mom and dad, they always knew I was sort of an adventurous type,” said Peggy, 76.
Adib was drafted after losing his student deferment. The football scholarship that had taken him from his hometown of Savannah to Kentucky State College ran out of funding. Several freshman members of the team got called up.
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“My mother was scared to death for me,” said Adib, 74. “My father just told me to go and do my best.”
Peggy started out at Tuy Hoa Air Base. There was an actual Red Cross Center there, a building where men could relax by shooting pool or playing ping-pong. A few months later she was sent to the more spartan base at Cu Chi. Adib was nearby, at a firebase outside of Cu Chi.
“That city was famous — or infamous — because we couldn’t figure out how the enemy would disappear,” Adib said. “It turned out they had a whole city underground.”
Red Cross workers like Peggy were called “Donut Dollies.”
“No, we did not have doughnuts,” she said. “That name came from World War II and the Donut Dollies in Europe. It was just a term of endearment that stuck.”
In the morning, Peggy and another Donut would don their light blue outfits, board a helicopter and chopper to a firebase. There, they’d present a TV-style quiz game to engage the soldiers, remind them of home “and have them forget where they were for an hour,” she said.
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One time, Peggy was walking from her Quonset hut, pink rollers in her hair, her head covered by what they called a boonie hat when a gust of wind swept away the hat.
“These GIs saw the curlers in my hair and they went crazy,” she said. “That was America to them. They hadn’t seen curlers in like a year.”
Adib remembers the Donut Dollies visiting. Was his morale boosted?
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“Do you know, it really was,” he said. “It was short-lived, but it was fun. I know it sounds sexist, but we were soldiers. We were men. To see American women, it was a boost to our morale.”
In June 1970, Adib and his unit were deposited by helicopter in what was called a “hot LZ.” The enemy was firing at them from the minute they touched down in the tall savannah grass.
“My job as a machine-gunner was to work my way to the front of the column and force them to get their heads down,” he said. “At some point they were lobbing grenades. One exploded close enough that I got a stomach wound.”
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Adib received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for his actions that day. He later received a second Bronze Star.
At the first Thanksgiving after she was back home in Rochester, the only person Peggy could really talk to at dinner was her cousin Larry, who had served in Vietnam
“You come back and people are talking about very trivial things,” she said. “Your mind wasn't really on trivial things after being there for a year and seeing what people saw.”
After Vietnam, Adib left the Army. He moved to Rochester, N.Y., and worked for Kodak for a while. He put off visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
“It was too emotional,” he said. “Finally a buddy of mine said in ’92 or ’93, ‘I’ll go with you.’”
Adib lives in the District now and is retired from a job at the Census Bureau. This past May, he saw on TV that there was a Vietnam War exhibit on the Mall. He grabbed a handful of photos he’d taken in ’Nam and headed down.
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“Out of curiosity, I went into one of the tents,” he said. “I was being sarcastic. I said, ‘Anybody know this lady here?’”
It was a photograph of a 21-year-old Adib in flak jacket and boonie hat, leaning against the sandbags of a firebase, his right hand grasping the hand of a young woman in a light blue skirt and top.
One person did know that woman. One person is that woman: Peggy Kelly, who lives in Vienna.
On Veterans Day, Adib will think about the men who didn’t make it home and those who did.
“We’re not looking forward to any special attention,” he said. The vets, he said, are just happy to be remembered — and for people to understand that “to varying degrees some of us are still suffering from that experience.”
Peggy will think about those days, too: “We were trying to make it better for our guys, who are still our guys no matter what.”
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