CityView Magazine

the USO again proved an indispensible weapon in the battle against the enemies within: homesickness, sadness, fear. Charles Curtis, a former Special Forces soldier from Clin- ton, attended a Bob Hope Christmas Show while serving in Vietnam in the late sixties. Being in such an alien place with no winter, mortar blasts in the distance, he said that USO show made the anxiety melt away, if only for a night. "There is no one like him," he told me. "There will never be another like him. Bob Hope can make you laugh, Bob Hope can make you cry, and make you forget all your troubles." "Bob Hope can make you laugh, Bob Hope can make you cry, and make you forget all your troubles. " stroll by himself through the North Carolina Veterans Park in Fayetteville one warm aſternoon. Ayers, who now lives in Chattanooga, Tenn., was searching for a comrade's hand cast in bronze, a friend who also served in Vietnam. He at- tended several USO shows during his 13 months in country. "You couldn't pass up the USO, that was the best thing in the world," he told me. "When you were in Vietnam, if you didn't get R-and-R out of the country, the USO was all you got as far as entertainment goes." Unlike these days, troops didn't have cell phones or email I found Doug Ayers, a retired Marine, on a contemplative Bob Hope appeared in or hosted 199 USO shows between 1941 and 1991. Below, he talked with actress Barbara Eden during a USO show aboard the amphibious assault ship USS OKINAWA in 1987. or Skype, and they rarely even had access to pay phones. But the USO shows kept Ayers in tune with American pop culture, even if the entertainers belting out those American ditties oſten came from the Philippines and Australia. "You could go up to this Filipino who could not speak a word of English, and he would sing a song absolutely correct. You would have no idea he was Filipino." On a night like that, in a jungle humid with tension and foreboding, the troops could feel like they were back at home in their Chevelles and Chargers with the radio cranked up. "It would hype your day up aſter all the crap you had to deal with," Ayers told me. "But you had to do your job." And a USO show made that job a bit more bearable. The USO opened its first center in Saigon in September 1963. By the beginning of the U.S. drawdown in 1972, the USO had 18 centers in Vietnam and seven in Thailand. Along with that old standby Bob Hope, the USO summoned a vir- tuoso roll call of entertainers to Vietnam: Sammy Davis, Jr., John Wayne, Wayne Newton, Charlton Heston and Nancy "These Boots Are Made For Walking" Sinatra. From 1965 through 1972, famous figures performed more than 5,600 USO shows in Vietnam, including eight Bob Hope Christmas Shows. The lack of support for the Vietnam War on the home front made USO centers and shows all the more treasured among the troops. CityViewNC.com | 53

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