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Entertaining Vietnam Documentary
	Click here for story and photos of Mamie participating in a documentary about entertainers in Vietnam

As I write this, the evening news is telling the story of the Vietnamese video store owner in the Little Saigon area of Westminster here in Orange County, California. He has hung a picture of Ho Chi Minh and a Vietnamese flag in his store and there is such outrage that thousands of people have crowded the shopping center parking lot outside his store to protest. They angrily shout obscenities. Television reporters interview bystanders who say things like: "If he likes Ho Chi Minh and the Communist flag so much, he should go back to Vietnam!" and "What he's doing is wrong! People died fighting Communism over there!" The storeowner says that he is doing this as a kind of protest too. It is an effort, he says, to bring the people of Vietnam back together.

He has begun this quixotic crusade during the Vietnamese New Year, Tet.

Tet. The word brings back the memories. The sounds. The smells. The sights.

The horrible Tet offensive of 1968 in Vietnam coincided with my first tour to entertain there. The fighting was intense when my plane touched down at Ton Son Nhut airfield. Very quickly I got a feel for the grim realities of the Vietnam War. Standing on the tarmac in the deep wet heat that follows the monsoon rains, I could see a long line of men queued up at the back of a dusty C-130 transport plane.

The men stood quietly, their eyes riveted to the big clamshell cargo doors of the giant aircraft. They were waiting to leave. Their tours completed in 'Nam, they waited anxiously to climb aboard for the first leg of their journey back to safety, to loved ones, to whatever private fantasy they harbored about what home would be like when they returned.

"Hey!" one shouted, pointing in my direction. "Hey, Mamie!" Their heads turned in unison to watch me.

I crossed the few yards to the line of men and they crowded around. Their smell engulfed me: the flat and lonely smell of military-issue clothing mingled with sweat and the thin, sweet odor of gun oil.

Some of the bolder ones asked for autographs; two in the long line even produced my Playboy beer-bath picture to be signed. The torn-out pages were dirty and creased from folding and refolding, and stained from being carried in sweaty shirt pockets.

The shy ones stood back and watched. Their eyes held mine for a moment before sliding away. The look was part unnamable fear; part curiosity; part sexual deprivation; part longing for the softness of a woman.

"What are you doing here, Mamie?" one soft-voiced Southern boy asked.

"I came to do some shows for you guys."

He shook his head sadly. "Don't stay here, Mamie." He hitched up the carbine slung over his shoulder and glanced up at the waiting airplane. "This is an awful place. Stay here too long, you stay forever."

There was a deep thud and the ground shook. The men nearest me jumped.

"Incoming!"

"Mortar attack!"

"Mamie!" called the steward on the Air France jet that had brought me in. "Get back here. Viet Cong are shelling the airfield again!"

I dashed back to my plane and up the boarding ladder. As the door closed, I could see the long line of short-timers scattering for cover. There was another thud as a mortar exploded nearby. I understood then part of that fear in the eyes of those men: the fear of dying on the steps of the plane that's taking you home.

During the now-famous Tet Offensive of 1968 many Americans were killed and wounded. It was the deadliest time of the war. It was then that I saw the hospitals.

Battlefield casualties, thanks to faster helicopters, could be moved quickly from the spot they were wounded. They were flown to airfields where transport planes ferried them directly to the large military hospitals at Clark and Subic bases not far from Manila.

I visited the first hospital one night between shows.

"These casualties are from all over Vietnam, Miss Van Doren," the chief nurse told me as we walked through the wide main corridor toward the wards. "Have you ever visited a military hospital before?"

"Yes," I answered. "I went to several in Germany a couple of years ago."

"But you've never been to a hospital that had battlefield casualties?"

"No."

"Then I suggest you brace yourself."

There is no way to be prepared for viewing the results of war. Nothing in the experience of the average person offers a hint about the various horrors that can be wrought on the human body by explosives and howling bits of metal. When confronted by the reality of battlefield injuries, the mind tries to reject what the eyes see.

I spoke to all the men in the long rows of beds as we worked our way through the first ward. The injuries to these men were comparatively minor. Not many were missing limbs. The nurse was breaking me in slowly.

In the next ward there were fewer men sitting up in bed. They were flatter. The sheets bulged less in all the places where the limbs should be. Their faces were grayer, seamed in their youth with the tracks of pain. Moans and cries mingled with the "Hello's," and "Hiya Mamie's!" of the ones whose awareness was less deadened by painkillers. The boys tried to be men. They laughed bravely while we talked. The ones seriously wounded and maimed clung, hungry for a caress.

We continued through the hospital like a journey down through hell. There was a ward with men who had lost multiple limbs. Some had lost all of them. They stared back with the faces of old babies. Their brains swam behind their eyes, drowning in the rising horror of their plight.

Between two of the wards was a brightly lit little hallway with windows that looked out onto the tropical vegetation that grows so riotously in the Philippines. I leaned against the open window, breathing in the heavy night scent of jasmine and willing my knees not to collapse.

"Do you want to go on, Mamie?" the nurse asked gently.

"In a minute," I whispered. "How do you do it? How do you stay sane, looking at them day after day?"

She gazed out the window for a long time. Two creases appeared between her eyebrows. Finally she sighed wearily.

"I don't know. They just keep coming. Some die, some live. Some of those that die--you find you're glad they did. Some that live are in such bad shape, you start thinking that death is a gift. Our medicine is so good, so efficient, sometimes it's cruel. We save their lives much more often than we would've even five years ago. But what kind of lives are we condemning them to? What are we sending home to their wives or parents?"

She looked at me briefly and I could see the pain kept carefully hidden beneath the thick layer of her nursing professionalism. "To answer your question, Mamie, I do it day after day because it's my job. I will myself not to hurt with them. I try to relieve a little suffering, make them a little more comfortable. But staying sane? I ask myself sometimes if I am anymore, or if anyone else is either. Is any of this sane? Can anything be sane that destroys so?" She forced a laugh and turned from the window. "I guess it doesn't make much sense, does it?"

I put my hand on hers. "It makes perfect sense."

"Are you ready to go? If you're feeling queasy, you should probably stop now. The next ones are really bad. The burn ward."

"Can they recognize me? Hear me? Are they conscious?"

"I can't promise that they're fully conscious, but even if they just hear your voice it can help them."

"Then let's do it."

It was cool and dark inside the burn ward. I could smell burned flesh. I could hear the metallic click of the ventilators that kept them breathing and the soft whoosh of oxygen. I had a short conversation with each conscious man; I leaned down and spoke softly to the unconscious ones; told them that I loved them; tried to enter their private twilight world.

When we left, I brushed away the tears while we stood in the hallway.

"I think I've had enough for today. Sorry."

"It's okay, Mamie," the nurse said. "You can't imagine what you've done for them."

"And you don't know what you've done for me," I told her. "Your courage is some example."

She was not the only woman with iron courage and determination I saw in Southeast Asia. Little is said about the women in the war zone when there is talk about Vietnam veterans, and more credit ought to be given them for their bravery and ability to cope with the massive human tragedy they witnessed daily.

I made many more visits to the hospitals during my stay. There seemed to never be enough time to do what needed to be done. Often I performed my first show, went directly to spend some time visiting the men in a hospital, then returned to do my second show.

My 1968 tour also included visits to Okinawa, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tokyo, and Bangkok. I played dates in nightclubs as well as service clubs. I became intimately acquainted with the Asia. But I told myself that for all its beauty and fascination, I wouldn't go back there until the war ended. I was wrong. I would return in 1971.

Memories fade. The television comes back into focus and I see the crowd outside the Little Saigon video store. Now, three decades after that troubled season when I visited the hospitals, the hate of this noisy crowd seems out of place. Here there is relative peace and prosperity. There may be crime and gang violence, drive-by shootings and liquor store hold-ups, but it is only a fraction of the organized, mechanized, propagandized, de-humanized violence of war.

Calm will eventually return to Little Saigon. The fears of the people there of a backlash from the surrounding community will fade. If now there are fewer tourists and visitors to this uniquely ethnic area, before long business will return.

Part of freedom is the freedom to be unpopular, the freedom to express ideas that others find objectionable. We need not listen if we don't like someone else's views. Turn the dial. Change the channel. Go home.

But some of us can never go home from the Vietnam War. We are there always, hearing it, seeing it, smelling it, living it.