Colonel Maggie

About the same time as Arlo was writing his song about Thanksgiving, a woman who didn’t have to face a draft was willingly in Vietnam. 

...just before Thanksgiving ’67 and we were ferrying dead and wounded from a large GRF west of Pleiku. We had run out of body bags by noon, so the Hook ( *CH-47 CHINOOK*) was pretty rough in the back. All of a sudden, we heard a ‘take-charge’ woman’s voice in the rear.

There was the singer and actress, Martha Raye, with a Special Forces beret and jungle fatigues, with subdued markings, helping the wounded into the Chinook, and carrying the dead aboard.