Joe Kline / The Bulletin Debby Maynard holds up a hat covered with pins from military units in Vietnam during her time working in the U.S. Armys Special Services program. Maynard recently returned to Bend from a visit to Vietnam.

Debby Maynard was looking for something that would give her a chance to serve her country and satisfy her desire for adventure when a counselor at San Francisco State College told her to give the U.S. Army’s Special Services program a try.

“They were looking for people who were outgoing and interested in the world,” said Maynard, a 67-year-old Bend resident who served with the program in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970. “I thought this would be my chance to see the world.”

According to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation’s website, an estimated 300 to 600 civilians — three-fourths of whom were women — worked as contracted employees with the Special Services program in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972.

They managed dozens of libraries, craft rooms, photography labs, and social clubs that were located at military bases throughout the country and designed to give the soldiers something to do during a few hours of down time.

At 21, Maynard, who went by the name Debby Alexander before she married at the end of her service, was the youngest woman to join the special services program when she started her first assignment as a recreational specialist at the Army’s Soc Trang Airbase in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. She was one of only two American women at a facility that housed 400 men.

She went on to serve at the Cu Chi Base Camp, which is on the outskirts of what is now Ho Chi Minh City, and signed up for a second one-year assignment that placed her at the Qui Nhom and Dong Tam base camps in central Vietnam.

“It’s probably the biggest single thing that shaped my life,” Maynard said as she looked back at her time with the program.

Last month, Maynard visited Vietnam for the first time in more than 40 years with a distinguished officer she met during her first year with the program. She said that while a lot has changed since she was last there, some things are still the same.

The service

Special Services workers lived in the same facilities as the soldiers who fought in the war and were responsible for running dozens of social clubs, photography labs, craft shops and libraries that kept the men occupied while they were on the base.

“We went through tons of cards,” said Maynard, whose main job was to serve the soldier’s “intellectual and competitive needs” by making sure they had everything they needed to play card games, ping pong or pool.

Like other Special Services employees, Maynard worked closely with people from United Service Organizations (USO) to put on shows and concerts — some of which involved visiting celebrities — that entertained the soldiers while they were on the base. She also visited the villages that surrounded some of her military bases with nurses from the Red Cross to run health clinics that tended to their children’s medical needs.

But because she was one of only a handful of American women who were stationed on each base, Maynard said she also played an unofficial role as being the base counselor or a trusted friend the soldiers confided in when something that either happened at the base or back home was bothering them.

“For the most part, a lot of the guys felt they could talk to us about how they felt,” she said, explaining these interactions had more of a brother-sister feel to them because the program’s employees were banned from dating the enlisted men they served and everyone seemed to respect that rule.

During her first year with the program, Maynard became close friends with members of the Dust Off units — helicopter crews trained to pick up wounded soldiers in the field — that were stationed at her base. Because of this connection, she managed to log 26,000 air miles in a helicopter as she traveled across the country for her job or just for fun.

Maynard also formed close friendships with many Vietnamese people — including one man who helped her refill a stuffed animal she got when she was 8 years old — and formed tight friendships with many soldiers and fellow program participants that have lasted her the length of her life.

But not every moment from her experience in Vietnam was glamorous.

During one helicopter ride, Maynard’s trip was interrupted when her pilot announced he had to make an emergency detour to rescue an Army of the Republic of Vietnam patrol that had been attacked by the Viet Cong. The pilot landed the helicopter at the scene of the attack, loaded it with the soldiers’ bodies and sped back to the closest base.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, they aren’t bleeding it can’t be that bad,’” she said, looking back on one of the more gruesome memories from her time with the program. “But what I didn’t know is that they weren’t bleeding because they were dead.”

Going back

When she finished her time with the Special Services program, Maynard married her former husband, Lt. John Steven Maynard, at a June 1970 ceremony in Vietnam attended by some of the officers and Vietnamese people they met during their time at the 8th Transportation Group’s headquarters in Qui Nhom.

After their wedding, the couple went back to the United States but didn’t stay for long because John Maynard got a job that sent him back to Southeast Asia from 1973 to 1978. The couple and their two children — a son who was born in Thailand and a daughter who was born in South Korea — moved to the Los Altos, California, area at the end of this adventure. Maynard settled into a nice life where she raised her children and managed the children’s programs offered by the local parks and recreation department.

The couple divorced in 1990. Maynard and her second husband moved to Bend when they retired 10 years later, but have now been legally separated for quite some time.

Through all of this, Maynard has kept in close contact with many of the women she met while serving in the Special Services program and gets together with them every few years. She also traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the dedication ceremony for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in 1993 and its 20th anniversary in 2013.

Maynard said she never thought about going back to Vietnam even though she knew it might give her some closure and help her put some bad memories behind her. She said she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder because of the things she experienced during the war and didn’t want to spend time telling nonveterans what her experiences were like.

Her outlook changed this past November when Maynard was reunited with Col. Doug Moore, a retired helicopter pilot who flew Maynard from Soc Trang to Cu Chi and was given the Distinguished Service Cross — the highest military honor after the Medal of Honor — for rescuing eight men with his helicopter after he had been shot in the head by an enemy bullet.

Maynard said she and Moore had talked about making a return trip to Vietnam. This summer, she agreed to join him. Their tour group left on Aug. 23 and came back Sept. 6.

“I’m glad I went back,” Maynard said, explaining the tour conjured up some feelings, both good and bad, that she had about her experience in Vietnam but had never really dealt with until she went back.

She said “it was a special trip for sure” because she had a chance to revisit some of the places she lived in during her time in Vietnam — for instance, the Cu Chi base camp is now part of national park featuring an elaborate tunnel system the Viet Cong built there — and see some of the villagers she met while she was there.

On the whole, Maynard said she was impressed by the considerable amount of progress the country had made since she was last there. She said the people, particularly the middle class, seemed to be a lot wealthier than they were during the war.

While there were still millions of motorbikes on the street, Maynard said she saw a considerable number of luxury cars in the cities that were clear signs of wealth because Vietnam has an excise tax of about 100 percent on certain imported goods. The women also wore Western clothing — as opposed to the traditional Vietnamese dresses they wore during the war — and some of the cities were unrecognizable because they were full of skyscrapers and high-rise apartment buildings.

Though just like her time with the Special Services program, Maynard said not every part of her trip back to Vietnam this summer was glamorous. She said her group was detained by the Vietnamese Border Patrol for six hours because their bus “strayed too close to the Vietnam-Cambodia border.” .

She said the chaos of being detained by a foreign government was only heightened when Moore — a man whom she had admired from afar but had never thought about romantically because he was happily married during his service in Vietnam and was at least 10 years older than she was — decided that would be the perfect time to ask for her hand in marriage.

“I thought he was joking but he wasn’t,” said Maynard, who is looking forward to pursuing a relationship with Moore, who lives on the East Coast, but for the moment does not have any permanent plans. “(When you’re in Vietnam) you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com