C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 , 2021
to talk about the war. Not his
friends. Not his family. He didn’t
want to talk about it with anyone
either.
“Not even your wife,” Linda
Roberts could be heard saying in
the background as she slid into
the passenger seat of the car
where her husband, whom she
married shortly before he left for
Vietnam, was talking on his cell-
phone.
“When you first got back you
were strange,” she said, again in
the background, a few moments
later.
During their long marriage
Jim Roberts has told her almost
nothing about his experiences in
that faraway village in that far-
away time. It wasn’t until he
started to write a self-published
book about his posting in Viet-
nam that they began to talk in
detail about those days. (The
proceeds go to the Veterans
Breakfast Club, an organization
that connects veterans to talk
about their wartime experiences
and the challenges of returning
to civilian life.) Putting down on
paper his recollections became a
way for Roberts to process what
he’d experienced, in a way he’d
never been able to before.
There was no way for him to do
that without also revisiting the
two young women who passed
through his life in an instant, but
stayed with him.
Maybe someday he will be able
to tell them what they meant to
him.
manuel.roig-franzia@
washpost.comAlice Crites contributed to this
report.book to change its policies and
practices so that it is protecting
users’ privacy.”
“It’s not a light ask to ask
people to log out or even think
about logging out because we
have a lot on these platforms,”
says Jelani Drew-Davi, Kairos’s
campaigns director. The cam-
paign has helped people prepare
practically — by showing them
the steps to log out, something
many people have never actually
done before — and emotionally.
“Is it someone’s birthday dur-
ing that time? Do you want to
send them a card instead of
writing on their wall? Or do you
have something that you need to
pick up from your no-buy swap
group? Like, maybe do that be-
fore the log out,” says Drew-Davi.
Or you could just quit and
overcome the FOMO. Jamie Man-
grum, 35, of Largo used to be a
self-described “avid user.” Her
relationship with the platform
became unhealthy, she says,
when she found herself “seeing
that what other people were do-
ing was kind of like, a commodity
for me,” and comparing herself to
her peers constantly. So she quit.
Ten years ago. And hasn’t looked
back.
Yes, she’s missed more than a
few invitations to parties that
were organized on Facebook. And
it made her sad, she says, to think
about people she might never see
or hear of again. People she might
forget, and who might forget her.
The little updates on loved ones’
lives she would miss.
“I had to be okay with that for
my own peace of mind,” saysleaving Facebook, where he had
been active since the eighth
grade.
“I am making the conscious
decision to permanently delete
my Facebook account as I see very
little benefit of using this plat-
form any longer,” he wrote. Two
months later, he was back, with a
post that began “LIFE UP-
DATE!!!!!” He was starting a po-
litical podcast.
“Even though I’ve been trying
to grow that audience on other
platforms, Facebook is my largest
audience,” he told The Post.
Or you could post that you’re
leaving, and give everyone multi-
ple ways to contact you, and hear... crickets.
“I made a post on Facebook
saying, ‘I’m done,’ ” says Shadrach
Stanleigh, 55, of New York, who
gave friends a grace period, and
alternate contact info. “No one
has reached out to me through
any other means.”
He’s not asking for pity. Rather,
Stanleigh thinks it’s an example
of how Facebook has made us all
lazy communicators: “Maybe
people just get so conditioned to
it when they can just send a direct
message in lieu of a phone call or
an email,” he says.
T
hat’s also why the tech ac-
countability group Kairos is
easing people into its Face-
book Logout campaign, which
encourages users to log out Nov.
10-13. The goal isn’t to get people
to leave Facebook permanently,
says Mariana Ruiz Firmat, execu-
tive director at Kairos and a
Facebook user. It’s “to get Face-member getting my acceptance
letter while I was a senior in high
school and then going to the
computer lab at my high school to
set up an account.” She friended
upperclassmen at random. She
updated her status when Face-
book still prompted people to do
so in the third person. She never
thought that 15 years later, she’d
find the site “sketchy.”
Aside from the Facebook Pa-
pers’ findings, studies have found
that spending time on Facebook
“negatively correlates with
mood,” and that it causes “con-
stant social comparison to other
network members, which trig-
gered jealousy, anxiety, and other
negative emotions.” People who
reported being concerned about
time they wasted on Facebook
“were more likely to be extrovert-
ed, neurotic, and anxiously at-
tached.”
Hence, the recent spate of “I
quit” announcements that have
been flitting across people’s news
feeds. (“This is not an airport, you
don’t have to announce depar-
tures,” is inevitably someone’s
reply.)
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger
(D-Md.) issued a news release last
week that he will “deactivate his
Facebook and Instagram ac-
counts until both its parent com-
pany and Congress make sub-
stantial reforms that protect our
children, health and democratic
values.” (The release notes that
constituents can reach out to him
via Twitter, phone, email, snail
mail and, helpfully, fax.)
Jaden Perkins, 21, of Omaha,
posted on Aug. 13 that he wasMangrum. “I knew that if I was
intended to know that informa-
tion, if I was intended to under-
stand it, it would have come to
me.”
That’s Lape’s logoff fear: being
forgotten. The Texas mom’s posts
on Facebook are basic family
updates.
“It’s just kind of a reminder,”
she says. “Hi, it’s us, we’re alive.
We have kids. They’re doing
great. Don’t forget about us.”
If a Facebook news feed is a
collection of all of the people in
our lives, there’s a certain com-
fort in knowing how those people
are doing. How else will you
know when your high school
chem lab partner has a third kid?
Or that your former hairdresser
has become an “energy healer?”
Or that your neighbor just took a
lovely trip to Greece? Having a
Facebook-only relationship
doesn’t preclude you from getting
a fuzzy feeling when you see that
someone’s kid learned how to
walk, or sparing a thought for
them when you see that their
grandpa died. Even if all you did
was click that huggy-heart reac-
tion button.
Yes, we lived many decades
without knowing quite so many
things about so many people, and
that was fine, and we were fine.
And some people would be happy
to return to the blissful days of
not having to waste any brain-
space on the relationship status
of your sophomore roommate’s
friend who came to your Hallow-
een party once. But for others —
maybe the more sentimental
among us — going back to that
ignorance feels like a loss.
“Maybe that’s a little bit of
what ties me to it, is just a bit of
my own personal history, and all
the people I’ve met along the way
that I may not remember their
names or have much direct con-
tact with them,” says Lynda
Laughlin, 44, of D.C. They remind
her of who she used to be, and
how far she’s come.
It makes real-life interactions
easier, too. When Delgado’s fa-
ther died, she posted about it on
Facebook as an efficient way to
not have the same sad conversa-
tion several dozen times.
“When someone says, ‘What’s
going on? You don’t want to jolt
someone on the spot by saying,
‘Oh, my dad just died,’ you know?”
Acquaintances who saw it online
offered their in-person condo-
lences. “I found it all extremely
comforting,” she says, and not
just when she was grieving. “Even
with the birthdays, to have people
all reach out.”
Is one day of birthday wishes
worth 364 other days of bad takes
and antivax posts and political
disinformation? A few hours af-
ter she spoke with a reporter,
Wanamaker wrote back with a
status update: “So I just deacti-
vated my Facebook again.”
Godspeed, Beth. Maintain
your resolve. See you again, in a
few months, or years.
[email protected]the 2016 election, the antitrust
lawsuit last year, a 2019 data
breach, and the PTSD its content
moderators developed after re-
viewing horrific images every
day. Now the company has
changed its name to Meta, k eep-
ing the original name for the
website, moving on with its plans
for what sounds a lot like total
brain domination.
The takeaway from all of this?
Facebook is bad! Nevertheless,
more than 2 billion of us are still
there — some reluctantly, some
enthusiastically. Because even
though the platform is a cesspool
of toxicity, there are reasons to
stay. Maybe it’s the only way you
keep in touch with your aunt. Or
find out what’s happening in your
hometown. Or catch up with
gossip from your high school
friends. That’s Facebook’s trap:
The emotional connections are
inextricable from the algorithm
that keeps us clicking against our
own best interests.
“I kind of hate Facebook, but
also can’t cut ties,” says Abbie
Grotke, 54, of Silver Spring. She’s
still here because it’s the easiest
way to keep in touch with family
living abroad, and certain
friends.
“We don’t talk all that regular-
ly. So like, cousins and things like
that, some photos and then light-
hearted news,” she says. “ I would
probably just email them. But it’s
also — t hey’re all there.”
We’re all there, which is why
it’s hard to leave.
Kathy Delgado, 55, is a Los
Angeles importer of French an-
tiques. Though she describes
Facebook as “a very toxic place,”
many customers buy things
through her Facebook and Insta-
gram business pages.
“I made three sales this morn-
ing,” she says. “If you don’t re-
spond in a timely fashion, people
spend their money elsewhere.”
Tori Matejovsky, 40, of Wolf
Point, Mont., says Facebook is
“not even fun anymore,” but she’s
trapped, because “That’s where
everything is,” including critical
information about her children’s
schools, like weather closings.
“They might send out a text, but
they put it on Facebook first.”
Those are practical concerns.
But what about the emotional
ones? The love/hate for Facebook
runs deep among millennials of a
certain age, who joined the plat-
form in the m id-aughts and have
chronicled their lives there ever
since. They can’t quite bear to
part with an archive of their
burgeoning adult years: from
keggers to graduation to first job
announcements to big “relation-
ship status” updates. It’s like a
digital scrapbook — one that now
happens to be mixed up with
people’s furious political rants
and cringey “Minions” memes.
“I just wanted the college
[email], the dot edu, so I could
have a Facebook,” says Laura
Lape, 33, of Fort Worth. “I re-
FACEBOOK FROM C1
It’s hard to leave the ‘likes’ and memories behind
NICK OTTO/BLOOMBERG NEWSA sign for Meta,
Facebook’s name
change amid recent
controversies, outside
the company’s
headquarters in
Menlo Park, Calif.,
last month. People
have both practical
and emotional
connections to the
social media platform
— like promoting a
business or staying in
the loop with far-off
friends — making it
hard to log off
permanently.boxy numbers that have faded
into nostalgia. He’s kept the pho-
tos he took of the women that day
with him all these years — as he
returned stateside to his bride, as
he taught junior high science at a
prep school in Philadelphia, as he
spent three decades teaching
computer science at Carnegie
Mellon University, and as he
entered retirement seven years
ago in a Pittsburgh suburb. In the
images Roberts captured that
day, it’s the easy smiles of the
women that stand out. Such
smiles were few during Roberts’s
nearly year-long stint in the vil-
lage.
One of the women, her long
blond hair parted in the middle
and framing a face that is all
sharp, nicely defined angles,
leans back in her seat. Her left
arm is slung casually over the
back of a folding chair. She’s
looking toward the camera. She
might have been sitting in a
church hall or school gymnasium
instead of a war zone.
Roberts snapped the other
woman in profile. She’s leaning
forward, looking at someone else.
She’s got a simple hoop in her
hair. She’s laughing. Laughter
was just as much in short supply
in the camp.
In recent years, Roberts has
taken those photos to conferenc-
es, shown them to former Donut
Dollies, and placed them on the
Internet. No one has been able tohorrors they were encountering.
“I do remember some men just
breaking down,” Linda Jager, a
former Donut Dolly who now
lives in Oregon, said in an inter-
view.
The women had embraced
that name even though they
didn’t make doughnuts for the
troops anymore as they’d done
during World War II. It’s an
“affectionate term that has been
passed on from war to war,” Jager
said. More than 600 Donut Dol-
lies served in Vietnam, according
to the American Red Cross, and
three of them died there.
Roberts barely remembers the
details of the few hours he spent
with the two Donut Dollies who
had descended into his life unan-
nounced. While the helicopter
pilot was returning to base to
deal with a mechanical problem,
he gave them a tour of the camp.
They ate lunch together. They
talked.
What he remembers most,
what still sounds like music in his
head, isn’t what they said, but
what they sounded like. They
sounded like home.
“Their voices,” he said, pausing
to gather himself, his voice crack-
ing. “Their voices were wonder-
ful.”
While they talked, Roberts
pulled out a single-lens reflex
Mamiya camera, one of those
VIETNAM FROM C1
Soldier’s 50-year search
for the ‘Donut Dollies’
reunited with his wife, Linda
Roberts, who was in medical
school preparing for a long ca-
reer as an internist. The return-
ing soldiers were thought of by
many Americans as murderers of
innocents. They were pariahs.
“The people on the plane got
up and moved to other seats,”
Roberts recalled.
As he settled on the East Coast
to resume his former life as a
teacher, it seemed no one wantedthem on.
Roberts has a hard time artic-
ulating just why this is so impor-
tant to him. But as he talks, there
are faint echoes, like the sound-
ings of a radar scanning the
ocean bottom, about what’s go-
ing on inside his mind and his
heart.
He talks about the journey
home from Vietnam. He was in
uniform on a flight from San
Francisco to Philadelphia to beidentify the women. But he has
persisted in the search. There
lives in Roberts a deep human
desire to express gratitude.
If the women had been making
a planned stop rather than a
hastily arranged landing in a
remote outpost, there might have
been more clues. The Donut Dol-
lies usually wore name tags. But
in their hurried disembarking, it
seems they’d left their name tags
behind or just forgotten to putJIM ROBERTS
Another unidentified “Donut Dolly” visiting troops in Dong Xoai, Vietnam, in 1971. More than 600
Donut Dollies served in Vietnam, according to the American Red Cross, and three of them died there.“I kind of hate Facebook, but also can’t cut ties.”
Abbie Grotke, 5 4, who uses Facebook to keep in touch with family living abroad, and certain friends