he considers magical. Out of that
helicopter came two young women
dressed in light blue. He was about to
meet the “Donut Dollies,” an extraor-
dinary cast of women working with
the American Red Cross who risked
their lives flying into combat zones to
spend a few hours playing word
games with soldiers or holding story-
telling sessions or just sitting and
talking to give GIs a respite from the
SEE VIETNAM ON C2list of call signs used by friendly forces.
Nothing.
“That can be good or bad,” he
thought.
Sometimes helicopters arrived to
scoop them up without warning for
assignments they hadn’t been briefed
on. Sometimes it was just a routine
stopover.
As Roberts waited for the Huey to
touch down, he had no idea that he
was about to experience somethingBY MANUEL ROIG-FRANZIAIn 1971, a 25-year-old high school
science teacher named Jim Roberts
found himself in a muddy hamlet 50
miles outside Saigon, a “wide spot in
the road,” as he called it, where the
long slog of the Vietnam War felt
particularly endless and futile.
Roberts, the son and grandson of
military men, had enlisted over the
heated objections of his father, who
feared he would never return alive to
his small West Virginia hometown.
For Roberts, an Army infantry 1st
lieutenant, the Vietnam conflict had
become a “lonely war.” Photos he took
one day of two kind women he met
during that tour have led him on a
50-year quest to find them and thank
them for breathing a little joy into his
life so long ago.
Roberts was part of a mobile advi-
sory team, one of only five soldiers
sent to Dong Xoai to live among
displaced farmers and to train region-
al forces, assisting as observers and
strategists when they went into the
field to fight. He witnessed things so
traumatizing that he still can’t talk
about them five decades later.
“I don’t want to go back there and
think about it,” Roberts, now 75, said
in an interview. “We did what we had
to do.”
As the fighting waned his col-
leagues, one by one, began to go home.
Five became four, then three.
One day, in that blur of awful days,
his team got a radio call: incoming
helicopter. They scrambled for theirKLMNO
Style
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 , 2021. SECTION C EZ REBRIAN WILLIAMS
MSNBC late-night host will step
down at the end of this year. C3BY MAURA JUDKISEven with good
reasons to bail,
Facebook has
emotional
connections
that are hard
t o cut looseB
eth Wanamaker was done with Facebook for
good after the 2016 election. Sure, it was fun in
college, when it was all party pictures and
cheeky posts on her friends’ walls. But once it
began its evolution into a killer of time, then relation-
ships (“I would honestly rather not know some of my
relatives’ opinions on politics”), and then even democ-
racy itself, she left the platform, certain she would
never return.
But the 36-year-old communications professional in
Ann Arbor, Mich., realized some of her photos were
only stored on Facebook, so she periodically “would
reactivate to like, find a funny picture of a friend on
their birthday or something like that, and then I would
immediately deactivate my account,” she says. “I did
not want to get sucked back in.”
She got sucked back in.
It happened in 2019, when Wanamaker had a baby
and was up, alone, for late-night feedings.
“I was so bored. I felt like I had reached the end of the
Internet,” she says. “I’d read all the books I wanted to
read. I would watch, oh my God, I watched so many
shows on HGTV.”And when there was nothing left to watch, the siren
call of former classmates and past co-workers and
so-and-so from that one conference five years ago
proved too irresistible to ignore.
“I’m just going to look around for a couple hours to
see what’s going on, and see what’s on this dystopian
hellscape,” is what she told herself. Sure, Beth. A couple
hours turned into days, which turned into joining a
Facebook group for local moms, and then an active Buy
Nothing group, which turned into still being here, 2½
years later, even though she disapproves of pretty
much everything the company has done recently.
Which is a long list. Here’s a quick summary from the
Facebook Papers, a trove of leaked documents: The
platform fomented the storming of the Capitol on Jan.
6, fueled covid misinformation, prioritized “angry”
emoji reactions to circulate provocative and violent
content in users’ feeds, fueled hate speech and violence
in India, and chose growth over safety. Internal
research found that its sister platform, Instagram,
makes body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls. And
then there was the Cambridge Analytica scandal from
SEE FACEBOOK ON C2BY INKOO KANG“Impeachment: American Crime Sto-
ry” was supposed to be a lot of things.
Revisiting President Bill Clinton’s sex
scandal from the point of view of the
person arguably hurt most by it —
Monica Lewinsky, who provided feed-
back on “every scene in the series” — the
FX drama was intended to be a conversa-
tion starter, an awards magnet, a ratings
experiment and, above all else, a pop-cul-
ture event. It may yet become more than
one of those things, but, at least on the
morning after the finale, “Impeachment”
just feels like a grand disappointment.
Initially announced nearly five years
ago, shortly after the first season of
“American Crime Story,” “The People v.
O.J. Simpson,” was feted by critics as one
of the best shows of the year, “Impeach-
ment” felt like a no-brainer. One of FX’s
tentpole shows, the anthology series also
seemed well poised for a comeback after
its divisive and somewhat bait-and-
switch sophomore outing, “The Assassi-
nation of Gianni Versace,” which dove
deep into the life of the fashion design-
er’s killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren
Criss). Executive producer Ryan Murphy
applied his usual stuntcasting magic to
l’affaire Lewinsky — Beanie Feldstein as
Monica! Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp!
Clive Owen as Bill Clinton?????!?!?! —
and it seemed like the season was well on
its way to TV juggernaut-dom.
Instead, the show that seemed to have
everything going for it, including a
splashy media rollout and Lewinsky’s
imprimatur of authenticity, fizzled out.
SEE NOTEBOOK ON C3
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
I t depends
on what the
meaning of the
word ‘meh’ is
BY PAUL FARHI
Edward Durr was such a long-shot
candidate in his New Jersey state Senate
race that no one seemed to notice some-
thing rather striking about him: He had a
history of posting bigoted, misogynistic
and derogatory comments on social me-
dia.
“Mohammed was a pedophile!” he
wrote in 2019 in a tweet that also de-
scribed Islam as “a false religion” and “a
cult of hate.” In other online posts since
last year, he has called the coronavirus
“the China virus,” blamed an “influx of
#illegalAliens” for spreading disease,
used the motto of the far-right QAnon
conspiracy movement and compared
vaccination mandates to the Holocaust.
He also denigrated Vice President Harris
on Facebook, writing that she had earned
her position only as a result of her race
and gender.
Yet none of it rated news coverage, even
after Durr, a commercial truck driver who
had never held office, became the Repub-
lican nominee for New Jersey’s 3rd Legis-
lative District in April. According to a
search of the Nexis database, which cata-
logues thousands of news sources, there
were no published or broadcast reports
about Durr’s posts in the six months
leading up to Election Day.
Durr’s comments made plenty of news
after last week’s election, when reporters
finally caught up to his social media
history. But by then he had already
scored a stunning upset over Democrat
Steve Sweeney, one of the state’s most
powerful officials. Durr, 58, won the
Senate seat by roughly 2,200 votes out of
65,000 cast.
SEE DURR ON C4N .J. candidate
wins as media
fails to cover
online slurs
BOOK WORLD
“The War of Jenkins’ Ear” draws
you in right from the title. C4CAROLYN HAX
Her partner is “really stubborn.”
Proceed with caution. C8A bright presence in a bleak war
Vietnam vet has been on a 50-year quest to thank the ‘Donut Dollies’ who visited him
J IM ROBERTS
An unidentified “Donut Dolly” visits U.S. Army troops in Dong Xoai,
Vietnam, in 1971. Army veteran Jim Roberts has been searching for the two
women from the Red Cross who brightened his day so he could thank them.Can you log o≠
and leave it all behind?
WASHINGTON POST
ILLUSTRATION;
ISTOCK