“I Always Wanted To Help. That’s Been My Life”: A Donut Dollie In Vietnam

Mary Melinda (Koester) Pendino was born in 1947 and grew up in Tampa, which she describes as a town rich with diverse culture. Her mother (who had served in the Red Cross during WWII) stayed home to raise her daughters (nicknamed Chick and Mo), and her father was a CPA. Melinda and her younger sister loved the water, boats, the beach, and the community on Davis Island, where the family had a beach house. She attended H.B. Plant High School and she felt that it was what she needed academically. She visited a lot of colleges, but selected Sweet Briar College in Virginia, which was fun and “intellectually current.” She spent her junior year in Madrid on a program with New York University, and lived with a Spanish family. While in Europe, she experienced riots in Madrid and worked as a governess in Paris before returning to finish her senior year at Sweet Briar. Watching the news every day, she was aware of the death toll in Vietnam and thought, “Why is this happening? What am I doing to help?” She decided to become a Donut Dollie in the Red Cross. Not having a car, she convinced her friend Peggy Gibbs to give her a ride to the interview. Peggy, whose boyfriend Joe had graduated from West Point and was serving in Vietnam, tried to convince Melinda not to go to Vietnam, but Melinda signed up for the September 1969 Red Cross Class. She had to go to D.C. for training, and her parents drove up from Tampa to see her. At one point, Melinda was concerned that she was going to be sent to Korea, but apparently her mother intervened and her orders were changed for Vietnam. Even though she received lectures on what to expect, and on how to prepare programs for the Soldiers, Melinda states, “There is no training to prepare you for going to war.” She remembers, “I met wonderful girls” preparing to go overseas. She describes what they were supposed to do in Vietnam and the uniforms they were supposed to wear, which included a knee-length light blue dress (some Dollies shortened their skirts) with a unit patch, a name tag, and a Red Cross Badge. Many had their impractical culottes made into boonie hats. They flew to San Francisco, where Melinda and her friends spent a few days enjoying the town, including going to a gay bar. She flew from San Francisco in a plane full of Soldiers and she remembers, “We were all afraid.” She found Saigon to be a fascinating mix of French and Vietnamese cultures, and she was assigned to Bien Hoa. Sadly, Donut Dollie Hannah Crews had just been seriously injured in a jeep accident and soon died of her head injuries. With the Dollies at Bien Hoa struggling to cope with their grief, Melinda states that the aftermath of her death “was poorly handled.” After Hannah died, the Unit Director at Bien Hoa, Anna Copeland, departed, leaving behind with the Dollies a kitten named Baby Cross, but then the kitten died unexpectedly. Concerned that it had rabies, the Dollies all had to get 21 shots in the stomach. Melinda was stationed at Bien Hoa for 6 or 7 months, and she worked at the Rec Center. She describes going to the base at Phu Loi to support troops there. One night, she was playing bridge with a Soldier she was friends with, Bobby Wehunt, and the next day he was killed on an operation. “This happened to many of the girls,” Melinda remembers. When traveling to remote sites, she carried a canvas bag full of games and programs for the day. Next, she was stationed at Da Nang and Quang Tri, which was “not a good place to be,” but “I knew I was doing something.” She describes traveling to Quang Tri by helicopter. She remembers helping out at the hospital, and how great the nurses were. She describes being told to “sit there and hold his hand” when mortally wounded Soldiers were dying. Outside the hospital, Soldiers were watching over body bags, and she took the time to talk to them, stating “we went to the guys.” She remembers being at a remote site away from Quang Tri when another Red Cross volunteer found her to notify her that her grandmother had died (which remains a core Red Cross mission today for deployed Soldiers). She describes the relationship she had with her grandmother, noting that “she was feisty.” The Donut Dollies in Vietnam represented a “slice of home.” They were the mother, sister, cousin, or friend the deployed Soldiers were missing. Melinda took R&R in Hong Kong and her aunt and mother flew over, and she took another R&R in Bangkok. She describes being under fire and learning to differentiate between incoming and outgoing artillery and rockets. Overall, she remembers that the “people were nice.” When she came home, she became a child abuse social worker. Even though there was a local newspaper article written about her, she “didn’t talk about it,” trying to put her Vietnam service behind her. In the 80s, Donut Dollies in Florida began to get together, and Linda Bryant developed a database of the Vietnam Dollies. Occasionally, she experiences Post Traumatic Stress. Near the end of the interview, she describes seeing her second husband in Vietnam. They had dated in high school and were deployed at the same time. He was in the Navy on a destroyer off Da Nang. When she mentioned that to an Admiral at a social event, he arranged for the two of them to meet out in the South China Sea. She was so nervous, all they did was hold hands. Later, Tommy wrote a poem about seeing her in Vietnam. Reflecting on her service to the nation, she states it means everything to her, adding that her parents’ service defined their lives, and now her daughter has the same appreciation for her parents.