Stationed in Pleiku, Allred and a group of fellow soldiers spent their off-duty hours assisting a Catholic orphanage run by Montagnards. They discovered the Viet Cong were stealing food from the children as a form of 'taxation.' In response, Allred and his team built secret hiding places within the orphanage to secure food supplies. To fund their efforts, Allred—who did not smoke or drink—sold his military allowances of cigarettes and liquor to other GIs, using the proceeds to buy food for the children in the local market.

Returning from an LDS mission in 1967, Quinn Allred found himself caught in the height of the Vietnam War draft. With Utah colleges refusing undergraduate deferments, he faced an inevitable call to service. Rather than being passively drafted into the infantry, Allred exercised a moment of agency, joining the Army Security Agency (ASA), a branch of the National Security Agency requiring top-secret clearance. This decision set him on a path of high-stakes intelligence work, moving him from potential front-line combat in the infantry to a role as a linguistic and technical analyst.