In late 1965, the men of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade were already learning what Vietnam could take from them. The 173rd had arrived earlier that year, and for the men of Bravo Company, life had become a cycle of heat, mud, patrols, helicopters, firefights, casualties and long stretches of waiting for the next trip into the field. Somewhere in the middle of that existence, Second Lieutenant Jack Price came up with an idea that sounded almost ridiculous enough to work. The men pooled their money for a $150 lifetime subscription to Playboy and wrote Hugh Hefner asking that the magazine honor an old promotional promise by having a Playboy Bunny personally deliver the first issue. They did not want just anybody. They asked for the magazine's 1965 Playmate of the Year, Jo Collins. Company clerk Larry Paladino typed the November 13, 1965 letter, and the men waited to see whether anyone back in America would actually take them seriously.

At first, it appeared they would not. Sending a young civilian woman into an active combat zone presented problems considerably more serious than arranging a publicity appearance in Chicago or Los Angeles. The Defense Department was unwilling to officially involve itself in the trip, and Playboy's own people understood the obvious risk. Then the situation changed. Price was badly wounded during combat in January 1966, suffering a devastating wound to his left arm. Doctors expected him to be evacuated from Vietnam soon. What had begun as a joke and a morale stunt suddenly had a deadline. Playboy began scrambling to make the trip happen. Collins, only twenty years old, agreed to go. Rather than waiting for the machinery of official approval to grind along, arrangements were made to get her to Saigon and then into the military system in Vietnam.

Jo Collins arrived in a country that could not have looked less like the world represented by Playboy. This was not a nightclub appearance with photographers and champagne. At Bien Hoa she entered an Army hospital filled with wounded men. Price was there with his damaged arm immobilized in a heavy cast. Collins walked to his bed carrying the newest issue of Playboy, fulfilling the strange promise that had begun months earlier in a jungle base camp. The lifetime subscription had finally been delivered personally. But Collins did not simply hand Price the magazine, pose for photographs and leave. She moved through the ward, talking with wounded soldiers, signing autographs and spending time with men who were far removed from home. Accounts of the visit recall her helping some of them finish letters and doing small, ordinary things that suddenly meant a great deal in a place where very little felt ordinary anymore.

That may be the part of the story that gets lost beneath the Playboy Bunny logos and the publicity photographs. To the men, Collins was beautiful, certainly, and nobody involved was pretending otherwise. But she also represented something much larger. She was twenty years old, American, familiar and completely out of place amid hospital wards, sandbags, helicopters and jungle fatigues. For a few hours she was a reminder that another world still existed beyond Vietnam. Army physician Captain Kris Keggi later remembered the effect she had on the wounded men. Generals and politicians had visited the hospital before, but Collins brought a different kind of relief. Men who had been living with pain were suddenly smiling.

Then she went looking for the rest of Bravo Company.

The men she had come halfway around the world to meet were returning from ten days in the field. Their homecoming was not triumphant. Before reaching the helicopters that would carry them back to Bien Hoa, the company encountered a mine explosion. Sergeant Richard Harper, only twenty-two years old, was killed and two other men were wounded. The survivors climbed aboard the Hueys carrying the exhaustion and shock that followed them everywhere in Vietnam. Waiting at the landing area was Jo Collins.

That is the moment captured in one of the photographs accompanying this story. Collins walked among men who had just come out of the field, many dirty, exhausted and wearing uniforms that had been punished by days in the Vietnamese countryside. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Men who had spent months looking at her photograph pinned to a wall were suddenly standing a few feet away from the woman herself. According to accounts from the company, the supposedly hard-bitten paratroopers became almost shy around her. Then their commander, Captain Les Brownlee, was asked by photographers to give Collins a dramatic welcome for the cameras. Brownlee, who was married, wisely decided that particular historical honor could belong to somebody else. He pushed Larry Paladino forward.

Paladino needed little encouragement.

He embraced Collins and kissed her while the company erupted around them. Collins responded in kind, wrapping her arms around the soldier as cameras captured the moment. It became one of the enduring images of her Vietnam visit. What the photograph cannot show is what those men had carried back with them only a short time earlier. One of their own was dead. Others were wounded. They had been living in a place where a routine movement down a road could become fatal without warning. For a few seconds, however, Bravo Company was laughing.

That is why Jo Collins's visit deserves to be remembered as something more than a strange footnote involving Playboy and the Vietnam War. There was certainly publicity involved, and Playboy unquestionably understood the value of the story. But Collins actually went. At twenty years old she boarded the airplanes and helicopters, entered the hospital wards and stood among soldiers who had just returned from combat. She did not have to understand everything those men had experienced to understand that her presence mattered to them.

The soldiers gave her the nickname “G.I. Jo.” The Playboy rabbit appeared on military vehicles and helicopters around Bien Hoa, and Collins became closely associated with the 173rd Airborne Brigade during the visit. The unlikely relationship between a Playboy Playmate and a company of paratroopers endured long after the photographs were taken. Veterans continued telling the story at reunions, and Paladino's famous welcome became part of Bravo Company's collective memory. Decades later, Collins described the Vietnam trip as one of the most important experiences of her life, second only to the birth of her daughter.

In the end, the story is not really about Playboy.

It is about what happens when people have been away from home too long, when friends have disappeared from the formation, when the next helicopter might take you someplace from which you will not return, and when something completely unexpected suddenly reminds you that the world contains things besides war.

For the men of Bravo Company in January 1966, that reminder walked across the pierced-steel planking at Bien Hoa wearing a smile.

Her name was Jo Collins.

And for a little while, Vietnam became somewhere else.