Vietnam veterans will tell their stories at 50th year anniversary event at Heinz History Center

Rose Gantner volunteered as a Donut Dolly during the Vietnam War, bolstering young soldiers’ morale and offering them a diversion from the hell they were in.

Bill Silver, a U.S. Marine Corps corporal from Aliquippa, fought in Vietnam’s jungles from 1969-70. Silver made a commitment to honor God however God wanted if he made it out alive. He honored that vow when he returned to the U.S. and long afterward.

Both will tell their stories on Saturday, March 29, as featured speakers at the Veterans Breakfast Club’s final event marking the 50th anniversary of the war’s end at the Heinz History Center in the Strip District.  The free Vietnam Veterans Day event will honor and recognize all veterans who served on active duty in the U.S. armed forces at any time during the period of Nov. 1, 1955, to May 15, 1975, regardless of duty location, according to Veterans Breakfast Club Executive Director Todd DePastino. The then-Veterans Administration chose the date, approved by Congress, and the commemoration began in 2017.

This is the second consecutive event VBC has held, the largest in Pennsylvania. “In 2024, over 400 attendees joined us in commemorating and recognizing Vietnam veterans and their service to our country,” DePastino said in a news release. “It is always a moving experience to connect with veterans through their inspiring service stories.”

The 50th anniversary is ongoing because the dates of the Vietnam War are fluid, he said. He wrote an article explaining this, published on the VBC website. 

As of last week 300 people had registered to attend in person and 200 to view it online. DePastino said 750 veterans and guests participated online and in person last year.

Gantner served two times with the American Red Cross, from 1966-67 and 1969-70, only one of four front-line volunteers who did so. She traveled about the country via choppers with her companion volunteer and was taken by Jeeps and sometimes tanks to reach the men. The Pittsburgh native who grew up on the South Side spent one day a week in Saigon and the other six in the field.

She explained that “Donut Dolly” is a term that stuck after World War II and the Korean War. “The young vets called us Chopper Chicks,” she explained. “That was much more appropriate.”

Gantner had been teaching health and physical fitness at Chartiers Valley High School when she volunteered, inspired by a childhood friend who died in the Vietnam War and an uncle who served as one of WWII’s Merrill’s Marauders in Burma and was “married to the military.

“I could always go back to teaching. I wanted to go to either Vietnam or the Peace Corps,” she explained. “Something was calling me that I am supposed to go there. That changed my life forever.”  Just 22, she joined 626 other women who answered that call, too.

She emphasized that she never saw one doughnut on either tour. She and her fellow volunteers did serve lots of Kool-Aid, something the guys called bug juice.

The young women brought games and “Jeopardy”-like programs to the soldiers six to seven hours every day, starting early each morning. In the evenings they headed to hospitals to work with wounded soldiers.

“We tried to help them emotionally,” she said. “It was mainly morale, empathy and compassion and to listen to them and make them feel important.” 

And it worked, she said. Young soldiers, average age about 19, told Gantner the best morale builders were receiving mail from home – except for Dear John letters – and seeing the Chopper Chicks. The visits normally lasted about an hour, giving them time to relax.

She said she worked with all the military branches except the Navy. One time she did get invited to a Navy ship for a dinner, the first time in two tours she saw china plates and silverware, and ate a three-course meal. She and the other women had a diet of C-rations, just like the soldiers, and lived mostly in tents and trailers.

She recalled one close call. She and her partner arrived right after the Viet Cong had attacked a unit, leaving three soldiers wounded and one killed. 

“Two minutes more we could have been dead,” she recalled. She told her partner they had to do something different because the soldiers were all so sad.

So they asked for fatigues that would fit them, changed out of their usual blue and white culotte uniforms, and jumped into the creek. “I asked, ‘Who wants a shave?’ I had never shaved a guy in my life,” Gantner said. 

A soldier gladly volunteered, and a Stars and Stripes photographer captured the moment. “I just had to do something to change pain and agony of seeing someone killed right in front of you,” she said. 

The Red Cross did not agree with that change to its program, she said, and Gantner almost had to head to Saigon to explain. U.S. Army Col. Williams Farmer, a mentor who led the 25^th Infantry Division in Pleiku, stepped in for her. 

Another time he arranged for her to make a surprise visit to a cousin, Jules Bobik. Drafted to serve in the war, he was stationed along the Mekong Delta, an experience chronicled in the Village Voice, a publication of the Masonic Villages in Sewickley, where the 81-year-old now lives after retiring.  

Farmer also flew to Pittsburgh after his return home to tell Gantner’s mother how wonderful she was to the soldiers as well as a big influence on the officers’ wives. “It still makes me tear up to think of that,” she said.

Between tours Gantner gave talks around Pittsburgh and recruited others to volunteer. The Red Cross asked her to come back to Vietnam, and she worked on “big picture” planning, such as deciding placements and promotions and matching volunteers’ skill sets and personalities.

The executive director, Quinn Smith, that she worked with was brilliant, Gantner said. “Her slogan was work hard and persevere; there’s no free lunch in life. She used to be an accounting professor, but after Vietnam she became a hospital administrator, too. Like Col. Farmer, she was instrumental in my life.” 

After coming home, Gantner finished the doctoral studies she started at the University of Pittsburgh at Auburn University after marrying an Army guy and moving to Fort Benning, Georgia. They divorced after 12 years of marriage, she said, and the experience led to her writing a book on resilience.

Gantner served as CEO for three hospitals, vice president of a managed care company, regional vice president for a health care system in Arkansas and directed her own counseling and psychology practice. She also worked as a health management consultant to state government agencies, private organizations and commercial groups, and she taught courses and workshops.

Most importantly for her, she provided free treatment to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and their families for over 15 years through her Center for Life Coping Skills in Columbus, Georgia. She received a $250,000 industrial revenue bond from Georgia to create it.

“My real love is a combination of counseling and teaching,” she said. “I loved working and helping veterans. So special for me after being in Vietnam.”

She returned to Pittsburgh to help take care of her mother. After retirement she took her two sisters, Mim and Alexandra, for a tour of Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong so they could see some of where she served. “[Vietnam’s] a beautiful country with beautiful people,” she said. 

Not one for reunions, she helped DePastino arrange for fellow Red Cross volunteers to come to Pittsburgh and see the Heinz History Center’s special exhibit on the war. She donated her footlocker and other mementos, including a white angel icon reflecting her Serbian Orthodox background. 

She appreciates all DePastino has done to bring veterans together. “We didn’t talk for 15 years about Vietnam,” she said. “I was afraid to mention it. Finally, thank God, after a while we decided we had to tell our stories.”

Silver is ready to explain his Combined Action Platoon – called CAP – operations on Saturday and some life-changing experiences during his deployment.

He dropped out of Youngtown State to enlist, 19 and unsure of his direction except that he always wanted to be a Marine. One merit badge shy of earning Boy Scouting’s Eagle Scout rank and a baseball player and cross-country runner, he said those activities helped him through boot camp at Camp Lejeune and more preparation at Parris Island. Then he had follow-up training at Camp Pendleton in California and Vietnamese language school in Da Nang so he could be an interpreter.

“It’s within my family line,” he said. “My sister was a Marine; my brother-in-law a career Marine master gunnery sergeant. So it was very attractive to me. I always believed – still do to this day – they are the best that they are trained for. I wanted to be part of something that was the best.”

For all that preparation, “My life was turned around in Vietnam.”

His CAP squad included, at full strength, 12 Marines, a Navy corpsman and about 20 Vietnamese militia whom the Americans trained. Silver stayed mostly in Tam Ky, an area in Quan Tin Province. He spent the entire year in the jungle, his CAP responsible for three villages. Their counterinsurgency work was one of the most successful programs initiated during the war, he said, with not one of those villages reverting to the Viet Cong.

The Marines moved at night and slept during the day, a tactic to throw off the North Vietnamese Army. They’d go out on patrols, set up ambushes and take on firefights. He said this was a noncommissioned officer operation, the highest ranking officer a sergeant. During his tour he served with two of them; both had to leave after being shot. A corporal, Silver led the others until the end of his service.

So at 21, he had his fellow Marines’ lives in his hands. He also developed an anger. And that anger intensified when he saw a Stars and Stripes article about riots in his hometown. “There’s my neighbors, my community, at war with each other,” he recalled. “All these things were playing on my mind.”

The CAPs would back up each other, he said. One day a report came over the radio of 200 NVA moving into the area, and his group had to help. The other CAP was almost completely wiped out.  He said during the other corporal’s call, he knew he heard a death scream.

Sometime after that fight, his squad returned to rest. Trying to sleep, he caught a Vietnamese boy trying to steal a box of C-rations. “I grabbed that boy. I could have killed him, that’s how angry I was at everything,” Silver said. “Thank the Lord, my buddies came, and I stopped. I told them I have to leave for a while. This isn’t me. That boy was around 12 years old. Looking back on it now, he was only doing it because he was hungry and he was poor.”

Silver hitched a ride with the Army to Tam Ky and found an orphanage associated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. A young boy invited him in, introduced him to his parents. The father told him about their conversion to Christianity, and they wanted him to come back for a church service.

He did return, sitting up front with the family of 12. “When I left, I was a changed person,” he said. “All that anger had melted away. It was at that point that I again committed if I made it back, I would follow the Lord wherever he wanted me to go.”

He feels fortunate that he only had to endure some small shrapnel wounds. He said parasites caused him intense stomach problems, once requiring hospitalization, though.

He said he “literally walked out of the jungle and returned back to this country – back home again. No deprogramming or anything. They didn’t have that for us. You didn’t have an opportunity to bring your mental state back where it should be to fit back into civilization again.”

He married, found work with Duquesne Light Co., raised two sons and started lay preaching. He became a supervisor, overseeing contracting crews responsible for street lighting in Allegheny and Beaver counties and later the city of Pittsburgh. After earning theology degrees up to a doctorate, he retired early and turned his part-time preaching into a new career. He retired in 2018 from the historic Bridgewater Presbyterian Church in Beaver County.

Before that he searched for the Vietnamese family he met at that orphanage, starting with the father’s business card. Silver found they had escaped and settled in Akron, Ohio. The father was leading a Vietnamese church, a position his son now holds. Silver is helping DePastino plan a program featuring the son later this year.

The 75-year-old Silver is grateful for this opportunity to speak and explain the CAP squads’ successful operations.

“One thing that I did that was opposite of many of the veterans, I committed before I got out of Vietnam that I was going to tell the story,” he explained. “So many people back then were against the warriors – calling them baby killers and so forth. They were going to hear about it. I was going to tell the story. And I have, so people would know what happened and what I experienced.”

DePastino has written a history book about the Vietnam War, basing it on a course he taught and his VBC work. Every veteran who registers will receive a copy.

He is pleased this observance honors their service, the only military group to be recognized like this. The response here has been overwhelming.

“I had no idea that the veterans would be so moved to be recognized by the community in the way that they are,” DePastino said. “Vietnam veterans really needed [the day]. The trauma of their homecoming was so awful that I think that it needed special treatment. The whole thing was awful.”

Local dignitaries scheduled to attend and provide brief remarks include Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and state Sens. Devlin Robinson and Wayne Fontana. A Castle Shannon Vietnamese family who escaped will be recognized, too.

Registration is required for the 2-4 p.m. event. For additional information, contact DePastino or visit https://veteransbreakfastclub.org/event/march-29-2025/