The year was 1967 and Jenny Thomas was on a plane, heading to Vietnam to work for the American Red Cross. She was 23 and had just graduated from college with a degree in sociology.
“It was like a morgue on the plane, very few saying little and most of us saying nothing,” she writes. “We were lost in thoughts about the immediate future. I, too, was pensive, too naive to even think about coming home in a body bag.”
A young woman who grew up in southern California, Thomas was so taken by a television program about the children in orphanages in Vietnam, she sought out a way to get there and help care for those kids.
“They were considered half-breeds,” she said. “They were part Vietnamese and part American, French or something else. Because of that, they weren’t accepted in their own country and they were just being warehoused in these orphanages. Some of them, too, had parents, but their fathers were fighting for the Viet Cong and their mothers couldn’t afford to care for them.”
She looked into enlisting in the military or going to work for the Peace Corp. But only the Red Cross would guarantee her that she’d be sent to Vietnam. So she signed up for a year’s service in DaNang, South Vietnam.
Those days seem like a long time ago to Thomas, who today sells real estate in Silverdale. But Thomas knows that her experiences have helped her to be the person she is. And her hope is that others can share her experiences — and see the Vietnam War in a different light — by reading her book, “A Different Light, The Vietnam War from a Woman’s Point of View.”
Her book was published in 2010 through a self-publishing company, Xlibris. Since publishing the book, Thomas has done most of the book promotion herself.
The year she spent in Vietnam — October 1967 to October 1968 — is told in first-person in her book, based on the diary she kept that year.
“I wrote every day,” Thomas said. “I also wrote letters home and my father kept them and I used them in my book, too.”
Her work in Vietnam for the Red Cross consumed her days. She kept records and was a communications assistant, which meant she got to relay messages from home to U.S. service members.
“Sometimes it was great,” she said. “I got to tell young soldiers that they were fathers — that they had new babies at home.”
But she also had to tell them about deaths back home, or houses fires that had affected family members, or even relay deaths of military personnel from where she was to Red Cross officials back in the States.
On her days off, or after work, she spent time in the orphanages helping with the children.
“It was worse than I knew from what I’d seen on TV,” she said. “The Catholic sisters were doing what they could, but there were so many children — hundreds of them. The places were dirty and there was very little to feed the children. And all of them were starving for attention.”
From time to time, she’d take along GIs and the children were so taken with them.
“One little girl would just cling to this Marine lieutenant’s leg, every time he came,” she said. “She wouldn’t turn loose of him.”
Thomas experienced two events in her year in Vietnam where she thought her life was over. One was when she came face-to-face with a Viet Cong who held a gun to her.
“It was one night during the Tet offensive,” she said. “The Viet Cong hit a 500 gallon tank of jet fuel and the sky just lit up like it was day time. I had to get pictures of it so I ran up to the roof of one of the buildings in the complex and ran right into a man with a rifle. We locked eyes.”
But just that minute, a soldier arrived and told her to run and she did.
The other time was also during the Tet offensive when everything “just blew up” and a soldier with an M16 told her to get in a bunker. She hid there for three hours before she was able to come out to the compound where she was staying.
“It was difficult to know who the good guys were,” she said. “Many times the Viet Cong were just regular people who worked in the villages and even cut the generals’ hair by day,” she said. “They wore regular clothes. But by night they’d put on what we called their black pajamas and they’d kill for the North Vietnamese leaders.”
Thomas’s life in Vietnam was a distraction to life at home. Her mother died of polio when she was only 3 years old and her father had remarried a woman who was abusive to her, she said. Her childhood was not easy.
Despite that, she had a calling to help others and stayed working for the Red Cross for several years after Vietnam. She was assigned to work in San Francisco, two years in Germany and then the naval base in Bremerton.
There, she met her husband and they spent their lives in Bremerton and had three sons. She’s been married 38 years and now has three grandchildren. She still sells homes and is in the middle of writing her second book, “The Color Plaid.”
“It’s about my father, who was a B-17 bomber pilot in World War II,” she said. “He flew 35 missions and always brought his crews back safely.”
The title refers to a small piece of plaid fabric that she learned from her father in his later years, he had carried in his wallet since the day her mother died. It was a piece of her dress.
As for the title of her first book, it comes from the fact that she experienced two Vietnams when she was there.

“There was the ugliness of war and the beauty of a country that was green and was once peaceful,” she said.
The cover is a combination of two photos she took, one showing the beauty of Vietnam in a Formosa tree with rolling mountains and soft blue sky. Below the tree lie dead bodies, which she photographed in a village nearby after 500-pound bombs were dropped. The bodies, she said, were left out for days as a warning to others in the village to fear the Viet Cong.
“Everyone was confused by the war and the politics of the war,” she said, reflecting on Vietnam. “For me, it was a time to grow up.”
To get a copy of her book, email jennythomas1944@hotmail.com, or call 360-509-3367. Each copy is $25 and includes mailing charges.