Caroline woman, former Miss Virginia, looks back at 1972 USO tour

By J. STEVEN MOORE FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR

All these years later, it is the faces that stand out.

“I saw the amputation of the soul,” said Linda Jean Moyer, Miss Virginia 1971, recalling the young soldiers she met in military hospitals on a USO tour to South Vietnam. “Their eyes were dead. ... The amputees, they didn’t have any hope.”

Ironically, what brought Moyer thousands of miles from her home to a war zone many people her age were doing anything to avoid was a beauty pageant. Her journey, so different from that of others of her generation, began when she became Miss Virginia and went on to compete that same year in the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, N.J.

After a year touring Virginia as part of her official duties, which involved riding in parades and taking part in ribbon-cutting ceremonies, Moyer was recruited by the USO, along with several other Miss America contestants, to go overseas to see the troops. One group visited Germany; Moyer and five others went to South Vietnam.

“It was not a glamorous trip,” Moyer said, looking back. “I was told what an opportunity it was to go and see the troops. They did tell us it would be very dangerous.”

In preparation for the three-week trip, Moyer had to sign papers and take multiple shots for diseases like malaria and cholera. She and her fellow contestants from Louisiana, Maine, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Carolina stayed in the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, in the Meyercord Hotel and traveled by helicopter to Army bases in Da Nang, Phu Bai and Pleiku. They also visited Navy aircraft carriers off the coast, the USS America and Midway among them.

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“That was really the best part of the experience for me,” Moyer said, “Because I got to talk one-on- one with the people on the ground, the people doing the fighting.”

By the time of Moyer’s visit in August 1972, America’s role in the Vietnam War was already more than a decade old, having begun during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. Peace negotiations had gone on for years, but the end that would bring the return of American POWs was still months away.

“I knew about the war,” Moyer said. “I didn’t really understand it.”

Moyer and her fellow contestants entertained the troops, performing a song-and-dance routine learned two weeks before their departure. She remembers that the temporary stages built for them in Vietnam were not nearly as big as the one they rehearsed on back in Atlantic City.

Being August in South Vietnam, the heat and humidity were terrific, Moyer recalled, hot enough to melt their makeup. Cockroaches in their hotel were huge and numerous enough to cover the wall of their shower. On one occasion when they spent the night near the border with North Vietnam, they slept in flak jackets.

Of course, the discomforts were minor compared with the hardships faced by so many others, Moyer said. The experience—her first time overseas, in fact—both broadened her horizon and also grounded her, she said, making her more thankful for her family, as well as the blessings of this country.

“I was starry-eyed going into it,” Moyer said. “I didn’t learn it in school.”

Returning home, she resumed her normal life now that she was no longer the reigning Miss Virginia. She attended classes at the University of Richmond and worked as a concierge at the Hotel John Marshall in Richmond. Later, she became the “weather girl” at WTVR CBS 6, also in Richmond.

“We didn’t have computers back then,” Moyer said. “We got our report from the airport. I did that for a year before they hired a meteorologist. I’m glad they did, I had no fricking idea about the weather.”

Moyer reunited with her fellow contestants for the Miss America pageant in 1992, when they reprised their USO show on national television, with Moyer singing a solo of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” to host Bert Parks.

Born in New Jersey and raised in Norfolk, Moyer now lives in Caroline County, where she has worked as a real estate agent since 1982. She quickly learned that customers in the rural community often assumed they would be dealing with a man, so she started using her initials L.J. for her business name. Today, she is the owner and broker of her Century 21 office.

Even in the quiet surroundings of her successful business, the war continues to cast a long shadow a half a century after it ended; one of her employees had a brother who was killed in Vietnam. Moyer’s views on the war, formed a lifetime ago in the blush of youth, have changed little over that time.

“If I didn’t see first-hand the boys, 18 and 19 years old, with legs blown off and arms blown off —some were blind—I probably wouldn’t have had all the questions I had about the war,” she said. “I felt great sorrow for these boys. I still can’t figure out why we were there.”

That is a question perhaps best answered by historians. For now, the service and sacrifice of those soldiers and sailors she met so long ago is reason enough for her to tell her story again this Veterans Day.

“I love the veterans. There is no American hero greater than our veterans,” she said.

J. Steven Moore is a freelance writer in Caroline County.

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