This Day in History: "Colonel Maggie" Raye

On this day in 1916, the future Martha Raye is born. You may know this talented entertainer for her long career in television and movies, but Raye was much prouder of something else: Her support of our military during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Our boys loved her right back. Indeed, she was so loved by the troops that they began calling her Colonel Maggie.

Maggie first began traveling to see our troops during World War II, but her efforts perhaps shone the brightest during Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1972, she made eight trips to that war zone, spending four months, on average, in Vietnam each year.

She hoped to counter the war protests back at home, noting that it “isn’t [the troops’] fault that they’re there. They should be helped.” She hated that more people wouldn’t stand up for them.

1944 publicity photo of Raye; 1967 photo of Raye in uniform.

“They ask so little and give so much,” she said. “The least we can do back home here is give them the love, the respect and the dignity that they, our flag and our country deserve.”

Other USO personnel traveled to Vietnam, of course, but many of these individuals stuck to major cities and base camps. Not Maggie! She wanted to go where she could help the most: the front lines and isolated outposts. She was especially impressed by our Special Forces, and she visited their camps whenever she could.

Flight surgeon Dr. Carl Bartecchi marveled that Maggie went to “places where you usually didn’t go. Yet, these are the places that people like Martha were most needed, and there was nobody who could pick up your spirits like Martha Raye.”

Naturally, Maggie did more than just entertain. She hung out with soldiers and Marines, playing cards with them and getting to know them. They gave her phone numbers for their wives and parents, and she would call those boys’ families to give them personal updates anytime that she returned to the States.

Maggie also helped in field hospitals, serving as a nurse’s aide. She donated blood. She visited patients to lift their morale. Some days, she spent her morning cleaning wounds, then spent her evening putting on such an entertaining performance that she had the troops howling in laughter.

“[Maggie] helped everybody she could in Vietnam,” one veteran later told Soldiers Magazine. “She told jokes and played cards with us, treated our wounds . . . . She was one of us. She loved the Green Berets, and we all loved her.”

Indeed, Maggie was made an honorary Green Beret. She was also an honorary colonel in the Marines and an honorary lieutenant colonel in the Army.

She reportedly loved to pull rank but would do it only to help others. For instance, she would order pilots to go directly to a wounded soldier rather than dropping her off in a safe location first.

“[Maggie] loved these soldiers with the purest kind of love,” her biographer Jean Maddern Pitrone explains, “a blend of admiration with the sacrificial maternal love . . . . There was no selfishness involved on Maggie’s part, no sense of furthering her own career through the publicity engendered by her role in Vietnam. For Maggie, it was not a role at all but a thorough immersion of self on behalf of a greater cause . . . .”

Maggie later received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her efforts, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But would she have appreciated the honor she received at her 1994 passing even more? 

She was given special permission to be buried in the military cemetery at Fort Bragg, where she was buried with full military honors. She was the first civilian woman to receive this privilege.

“She was Florence Nightingale, Dear Abby, and the only singer who could be heard over the artillery fire,” Bob Hope concluded of his friend.

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Primary Sources: 

• Blake Stilwell, Why This Singer Is the Only Woman Buried In Fort Bragg's Special Forces Cemetery (Military.com; Nov. 18, 2021)

• Frank Blazich, “Maggie of the Boondocks”: Martha Raye and a lifetime of service to the U.S. Armed Forces (National Museum of American History; November 9, 2021)

• Jean Maddern Pitrone, Take It from the Big Mouth: The Life of Martha Raye (1999)

• Lawrence W. Reed, Martha Raye: The Freedom-Loving ‘Big Mouth’ From Butte (Foundation for Economic Education)

• Samantha L. Quigley, Martha Raye: Healing Through Humor (USO website)