The summer after Peyton Wooldridge of Chester, S.C. graduated from Mary Baldwin University in 1968, two of her female classmates went to Vietnam to serve during the war. One of those classmates wrote to her, encouraging her to also come and serve, saying, “This will change your life.” So, following in her mother’s footsteps and inspired by her family’s history of military service and patriotism, Wooldridge joined the American Red Cross and signed up to serve in Vietnam as part of their Supplemental Recreation Aid Overseas (SRAO) program.
In April of 2024, Wooldridge and her friend since childhood, David Aiken, sat down with StoryCorps to discuss how the Red Cross used its SRAO program to provide U.S. soldiers some relief from the stresses of war.
TRANSCRIPT:
Wooldridge: We would visit service people in field hospitals. We would visit them in foxholes. We would visit them in large gathering lounges where they would either be brand new to Vietnam or leaving Vietnam. And the Red Cross was responsible for staffing those lounges. We had a lot of poignant times with the men, either coming in scared or angry, or leaving…relieved and also scared that something would happen before they actually touched American soil. One of the things that I enjoyed, and I was in Da Nang, and that was one of the larger centers, they had a radio station. And, so, they invited us to come and be DJs on the radio station. We would collect people's names and a song that they would like to hear. And then we'd have a program, and we would say, “This is for all the guys at Company C…you know where you are!” We couldn't tell them location. Or we would say a first name or a nickname, just kind of a morale booster. Or to let people know that we realized they were people. And I really enjoyed doing that.
Aiken: You were like the “Adrian Cronauer,” who was the disc jockey that Robin Williams portrayed in Good Morning Vietnam.
Wooldridge: Yes.
Aiken: You were playing a lot of Motown. Animals were a good example of that. Hard rock and roll. That type of thing. Something that kids could, the young men could relate to on the radio.
Wooldridge: And, of course, they had their favorites. The most favorite was “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”
Aiken: Oh, yeah, Animals.
Wooldridge: Animals. And then, “American Pie.”
Aiken: Yeah.
Wooldridge: And “Jeremiah was a Bullfrog.” I'm not sure about Jeremiah, but I think it was kind of, they all wanted to morph into an animal and hop out of there!
Aiken: What did you gain from that experience, and how long were you over there, number one?
Wooldridge: I was there a year.
Aiken: All right, what did you gain from that experience in the one year you were there?
Wooldridge: Great insight into the predicament of war on all sides. That there's no easy way to wage a war.
Aiken: What you did, and what a lot of women like you did, and a lot of other folks who worked with the Red Cross did back in those days, you're seeing now over the conflicts that we've had, are worldwide, basically. Being there for the body and the mind was probably more important as it started in Vietnam, and now continues to this very day.
Wooldridge: Right. Some of what we did was sort of trivial.
Aiken: You thought it was trivial, but it probably wasn't trivial.
Wooldridge: It wasn't. I mean, I asked my doctor friend, I said, “What did you write down about it?” And he said, “Oh, they would come and play these silly games, but the men liked it.” And we would do things like take TV shows like Concentration or…
Aiken: …you’re taking them out of the element of war, is what you were doing.
Wooldridge: Right, just for a few minutes. Of course, you know, and just letting them be just regular folks.
Aiken: Well, over all these years, think how many lives you've touched because you did that. You and the other folks who worked in your organization in that regard, there are more, other than you, that did that from that standpoint.
Wooldridge: About 600 in Vietnam, now there are others that have served.
Aiken: Peyton Wooldridge, thank you very much.
Wooldridge: Thank you, David.
