Donna Rowe just can’t help herself.
She is a serial volunteer. Need her help to build a Habitat for Humanity house? Or someone to walk to raise money for diabetes? Or help hurricane victims? Or to help raise funds for educational purposes or discuss patriotism in talks at schools and before civic groups?
Just ask. She couldn’t say no when the Roswell Rotary Club asked her to make the keynote speech at its upcoming Memorial Day event, the largest in the Southeast. She’s been volunteering since she joined the Army during the Vietnam War and became a busy, often blood-soaked nurse.
Only men were subject to being drafted, but thousands of women like Rowe, 67, joined up anyway.
“I felt it was my duty,” she says.
Because combat medicine has been at the top of the news in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it didn’t take David Young, 54, chairman of this year’s Roswell Memorial Day event, to decide to ask Rowe, who is still a volunteer nurse for the American Red Cross.
Of course, she immediately said she’d be “honored” to accept.
“Nurses didn’t serve in the trenches, and war nurses have never gotten the recognition they deserve,” says Young. “I heard an incredible story about her becoming a Godmother for an orphan when she was a nurse in Vietnam, and I thought that this would be an appropriate story for Memorial Day.”
Or any day, really.
Rowe was on duty in a bloody, busy emergency room on May 15, 1969, in Saigon, and a chopper pilot radioed that he was bringing in a baby, barely alive, that had been found in her dead mother’s arms.
Rowe and another Atlanta-area soldier, the late medic Richard Hock, saved the child’s life, going against protocol that required wounded Americans to be treated first.
Rowe named the baby Kathleen, after the Irish ballad “I’ll Take You Home Kathleen,” and the little girl was adopted by a U.S. Navy corpsman.
Rowe and the “baby” got together again in 2003. Kathleen Cords Epps is now about 40 and has three children of her own.
“The story is relevant today, maybe more so than ever, because of what it means,” Rowe says. “It was the right thing to do, so we did it. That’s what Americans do.”
Rowe, who was grand marshal of Marietta’s Veterans Day Parade last Nov. 11, has two grown sons of her own. She and Epps still communicate by email and talk by phone every few months.
She also volunteers with veterans groups to counsel or just say “welcome home” to those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Post traumatic stress disorder is going to be a very large problem, I’m afraid,” Rowe says. “I try when I speak to clubs and schools to talk a little about this. It is something we’ll be dealing with for a very long time.”
Mark Justice, of Cobb EMC, which has enlisted Rowe’s help for a number of projects, says she also has helped the Metropolitan Marietta Kiwanis raise thousands of dollars for the Georgia Vietnam Veterans Holiday Food Bank “and spoke on the topic of patriotism at Due West Elementary,” which the students loved.
He says Rowe “has a love for people and a love for her country.”
He adds: “She told me once, ‘All you have to do is reach out to me and I’ll be available.’ And that’s the kind of woman she is.”
Rowe and her husband, Al, a retired colonel, live in east Cobb. She is a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker.
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