Lady Trades Drapes for Control Tower

     It began when Sgt. Fox called me to his desk and said he wanted to send me on an assignment. I had only been in-country for a few weeks and was anxious to go on a story, visit some of those cities our helicopters were flying to every day.  More importantly I wanted to know if I could write a real magazine story.

“Where am I going, Sarge?”

“You’re not really going anywhere for this one, Phil. There’s a female air traffic controller working at the Bien Hóa Airfield Air Field, the only one in Vietnam we think. There’s probably not that much to it but we thought it might make a good story that we can put in a press release.”

“A press release?”

“Yeah, a press release. You know what those are, don’t you?”

Well of course I knew what a press release was and we had covered the subject a little bit at Journalism school but for the past few weeks I had kind of grown attached to the idea of being a storywriter for a magazine—not a common run-of-the-mill news reporter.

But as every soldier in every war eventually learns, it’s almost always not about you.

“We’ve got an interview set up for tomorrow—shouldn’t take more than an hour. Someone will drive you over.”

Suddenly I remembered the kid in the recruiter’s office when I signed up to be an Information Specialist—the one that couldn’t become a truck driver because he didn’t have a license. I also didn’t have a military driving license. I was approved for shooting a rifle should the need ever arise and before my tour ended I would have interviewed everyone from privates to generals but I couldn’t drive myself five miles to the airfield.

“It will probably only be picked up in her hometown paper,” he reminded me, “so make sure you get her hometown.”

“Yeah sure.”

“No really. I mean it. Make sure you get her hometown.”

With that he gave me a roll of black and white film and told me I was scheduled to meet with her the next morning at ten.

Next morning I received a ride to the airfield, conducted the interview, bummed a ride back to the office and wrote the story—a press release intended for, “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

My first official story as a war correspondent—yeah, that’s right, we considered ourselves war correspondents, not information specialist and had the patch on our shoulders to prove it—and it was being sent out to anyone who might read it assuming any paper wanted to print it.

There were information offices in every city and every unit in Vietnam putting out press releases of some nature and we were already in the last half of a decade-long war that everyone was all ready tired of hearing about. Still the releases went out to anyone and everyone.

Stories that began like—

The 218^th operating out of Dong Tam killed two insurgents today in a gunfight on the outskirts of the city. A third combatant was captured and is being interrogated. There’d be a little more description and a quote or two but not much more. About the only thing we didn’t add was, more to follow as this story unfolds, because no one cared where the story was going.

Or—

The 34^th Tactical Air Squadron, a bunch of real bad asses, broke out of their mold for a few hours to host a picnic at a local orphanage to raise money and maybe improve the unit’s image among the locals. Sergeant Mahoney from Sioux Falls was speaking for all his buddies when he said, “It sure feels good to help these people.” Sergeant Mahoney’s family and the folks back in Sioux Falls might appreciate the story but no one else cared. The only part of the release we cared about was the “real bad asses” part because it represented a challenge of sorts to get something past editors but even we knew that “real bad asses” wouldn’t make the final cut.

Every soldier in every war eventually learns it’s not always about him. But that doesn’t mean it won’t sometimes be personally rewarding, even when you least expect it.

On a Tuesday afternoon, August 25, 1970 Sergeant Fox walked over to my desk and dropped a copy of that day’s Stars & Stripes, opened to page 7. There at the bottom was an article about air traffic controller Spec 4 Donna L. Giordani, entitled “Lady Trades Drapes for Control Tower.” It seems, as my article pointed out, that before joining the Army she had managed an interior decorating factory specializing in custom-made draperies and Stars & Stripes liked the story enough to pick it up.

Sergeant told me it was the only 1^st Aviation Brigade press release to be picked up by Stars & Stripes in years, which I am sure, was a lie but that was okay. I knew for a fact that it was my first press release to be picked up by the Stars & Stripes. And in the next few weeks when several other military publications picked the story up I began to feel less like an Industrial Management major who couldn’t find a job only to become an Information Specialist in the Army as a last resort and more like the writer—something I had never even dreamed of being.