From Newsgroup: rec.aviation.military

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Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club
Terry Grimm
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August 9 at 4:38rC>AM
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Enlightening Facts
August 7 at 6:40rC>AM
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Some invitations change the person who receives them. Not because of
what they ask, but because of who is doing the asking and what it costs
them to ask at all.
In March 1965, a petition arrived at Ann-Margret's home in Hollywood. It
had not come from a studio or a producer. It had been signed by three
thousand American soldiers serving in Vietnam. They were not asking for
much. They were asking her to come.
She was twenty-four years old. She had come to America from Sweden at
age five, sailing from a small village called Valsj||byn to Wilmette,
Illinois in 1946 to reunite with her father. She had grown up inside the particular gratitude of someone who understands, from childhood, what it
means to be given a country.
She wanted to go that day.
The government required months of coordination. She waited. In July
1966, she left for Vietnam.
Bob Hope was touring the same region that year with a company of eighty
people rCo a large production, secure bases, layers of logistics and protection between the performers and the war itself. Ann-Margret booked
four plane tickets. Herself. A guitarist named Johnny Rivers. A bassist.
A drummer. No security detail. No handlers. Just four people with
instruments and fifteen days.
They landed in Saigon and played their first show at a USO venue built
for two hundred people. Eight hundred soldiers arrived. Four hundred
pressed inside, shoulder to shoulder in suffocating heat. Four hundred
more stood outside in the dark, trying to hear through the walls.
She performed anyway.
From Saigon they flew to the USS Yorktown, an aircraft carrier
operating off the coast. As the helicopter descended toward the flight
deck, Ann-Margret looked down and saw something that she would carry
with her for the rest of her life. The sailors had arranged themselves
into letters across the deck, visible only from above.
HI ANNIE.
A human message written in bodies, legible only from the sky.
She kept a three-foot aerial photograph of that moment. It still hangs
in her home today.
Their next stop was the Iron Triangle rCo one of the most actively
contested and dangerous regions in the country. They performed twice a
day. Gunfire could be heard during the shows. They kept singing.
One morning, flying toward Phu Bai in a helicopter, enemy ground fire
tore through the air around them. The aircraft shook. American soldiers
on board immediately moved to surround her, positioning their bodies
between her and the source of the fire.
She later said she was never afraid. Not in 1966 and not when she
returned in 1968. Her guys were there, she said. That was enough.
She wrote in her memoir that she regarded the trips as a moral
responsibility rCo something she owed to the soldiers and to the country
that had taken her family in when she was five years old.
In 1968 she went back, this time as part of Bob Hope's Christmas USO
tour, a much larger operation with eighty performers and crew. More than twenty thousand troops turned out for the Saigon stop alone. The scale
was different. The safety was greater.
What stayed with her from that second trip was not the danger. It was
the hospitals.
She walked through wards of young men with missing limbs, bandaged
faces, and the particular blankness that comes from having seen things
that cannot be explained to anyone who was not there. She understood,
moving through those wards, that many of these men would return home to protesters and silence and a country that had decided not to look at
what it had sent them to do.
She did not look away.
For sixty years after those fifteen days in 1966, Ann-Margret kept
showing up. Military hospitals. Veterans' centers. Fundraisers and
reunions, long after the cameras stopped coming, long after supporting
Vietnam veterans had ceased to be a visible or fashionable thing to do.
She continued donating the full proceeds from a limited-edition perfume
to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. In 2003, the USO honored her with
the Spirit of Hope Award, named for Bob Hope. In 2022, the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial Fund gave her a lifetime service award at their
fortieth anniversary gala.
She still calls them her gentlemen.
At performances across the decades, small folded notes have found their
way to her from the audience. Sometimes with photographs. Sometimes just
a few words written on whatever was at hand. I saw you in Cu Chi. I saw
you in Da Nang. She keeps every one.
When asked whether the Vietnam trips had mattered to her, her answer is immediate and without hesitation. One of the most important things in
her life, she says. Not the films. Not the awards. Not the fame that
came before any of it.
The fifteen days in 1966 when she was twenty-four years old, flying into
a war zone with three musicians and no security. The sailors who spelled
out her name in their own bodies on a flight deck so she could read it
from the sky. The soldiers who put themselves between her and the
gunfire without being asked.
And the men in the hospital wards who came home to a country that was
not ready to receive them, whom she has been visiting, in one form or
another, for six decades since.
She came to America at five years old. She has spent her adult life
trying to account for what that arrival gave her.
For those who have ever felt that gratitude is not an emotion but an obligation rCo that it demands something more than feeling, that it has to
be paid forward in time and presence and the willingness to show up rCo Ann-Margret's sixty years of showing up speaks in a language that does
not require translation.
What has this country, or this community, or someone in your life given
you that you have not yet found a way to repay? See less

comments include

Leonardo Pili
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My favorite actress/Singer! From a retired old squid saw her performance
in Danang Vietnam with about 20 thousand military personnel in attendance.. Reply
Hurston Dodgen
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She did a show on the Ranger to. Everyone was trying to film it with 8mm
movie cameras. I never understood why since they had no sound.
Reply
Bruce Johnson
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I was her escort from the Danang airport to the Navy's Camp Tien Sha
where the Swift Boats were stationed. Security was me in an open jeep
and my 38. An amazing dancer and just a really nice person.
May be an image of cymbal
Reply
Mike Kauntz
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Complete opposite of Jane.
Reply
Kenneth L. Upton
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She came aboard the USSHancock in December 1968 with Bob Hope. Had
picture of her kissing me on the left cheek and Miss World kissing my right. Stars and Stripes had the headline
What a Way to Start a Navy Career.
N++
IrCOd on board ship for three days.
N++I love that woman to this day.
Reply
Doug Jacques
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She is/was a Great woman. And so beautiful!!
Reply
Robert Hamilton
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Great lady! She was also a great and loyal wife to Roger Smith! And a
great talent!
Reply

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From Newsgroup: rec.aviation.military

"a425couple" wrote in message news:q2NgS.45403$G%Nd.18196@fx45.iad...

In March 1965, a petition arrived at Ann-Margret's home in Hollywood. It

had not come from a studio or a producer. It had been signed by three
thousand American soldiers serving in Vietnam. They were not asking for
much. They were asking her to come.
----------------------------------------
Thank you for posting this. She had the courage to do what was unpopular in much of her community.

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