Red Cross girls, who were universally called Donut Dollies in
lang=EN-US style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Nam, were usually tall, blond, beautiful women, between twenty-one and thirty, straight out of Middle American campuses. They smoked pot often when they weren't working as high-priced call girls for the officers in their air-conditioned mobile quarters at various camps and air bases. I know this because I often sold them pot as an enlisted man assigned to serve as a perimeter guard around their barbed-wire compound at night. This caused some loud arguments some nights when whiskey-filled officers would walk from the bar across the dirt road into their trailers for a fuck and would yell at the girls for filling the trailers full of pot smoke. I listened to several good fights between Donut Dollies and majors and colonels about pot.Sometimes these women would be sent out to entertain the troops at very small, temporary fire bases in the afternoon. The straighter ones would be puzzled to find the audience of grunts sitting on the ground in a circle, prepared to play some silly game like Concentration. Most of us would be so stoned that we could only play their games very slowly. I remember hearing one Red Cross girl explain to another not to mind our inane behavior because we were stoned. The new girl was incredulous and angry, and said she was going to report this to her general, but the older girl convinced her to forget it because the problem was universal, and the generals were well aware of it. Even Bob Hope was reduced to making jokes about pot in his shows, and any antipot jokes cost him a lot of booing. I was one of the louder booers at one show he gave in Cu Chi during the Christmas week of 1969.
A letter from another veteran tells a very different part of the
story. In March 1971, while assigned to the forward command headquarters of the
Laotian incursion, this man wandered to the edge of the base:
It
was then that I heard the sound of voices coming from the thicket beyond what
was a normal place for the troops. In trepidation I inched closer to what I
first suspected to be a Vietcong camp. When I got close enough I heard the
Grateful Dead's "Casey Jones" broadcast on 600, the North Vietnamese
radio station. As I got closer, I yelled, "I'm an American," and I
saw the six U.S. Army soldiers going for their M-16s.
They proceeded to pass me a pipe. I smoked their dope as we sat
inside the sandbagged bunker every night while I was stationed there. The weed
was so good that we used to lay on top of the bunkers near the helipads staring
into space.
Although I had done mescaline prior to my trip across the pond, I
had never tasted weed before this. At first I would sit inside the bunker, a
candle burning, listening to American radicals and English-speaking Vietnamese
Communists between the popular songs. At night the NCOs and officers were
always too drunk to notice that we were wasted, or they just plain did not
care. In a week's time I was sitting inside the General Officers' Club shortly
after they left, smoking from pound bags of herb, watching the latest flicks
from the U.S.A., totally blown out with other GIs.
During the day I stuffed my tropical fatigues' pockets with the
finest smoke available. One friend of mine would fill up a large-size Tide
detergent box for me as I sat in his tent listening to Rare Earth crank out
"If I Die" on a tape recorder, while the GIs inside the sweltering
tent passed around pipes. Sometimes they would charge me two dollars for this
quantity of weed, and sometimes there would be no charge at all.
A number of guys expressed to me that they wished marijuana was
soon to be made legal in the States, and that even those people who opposed the
peace and tranquillity we found through smoking grass at war would try it and
like it. For many of these guys, that was their last day of life, and their
last few moments of peace.