# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Table of Contents

1. U.S. Army Women in Vietnam

2. Women in the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marines in Vietnam

3. Civilian Women in Vietnam

Women in the Vietnam War served as soldiers, health workers, and in news-gathering capacities. Though relatively little official data exists about female Vietnam War veterans, the Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation estimates that approximately 11,000 military women were stationed in Vietnam during the conflict. Nearly all of them were volunteers, and 90 percent served as military nurses, though women also worked as physicians, air traffic controllers, intelligence officers, clerks and other positions in the U.S. Women's Army Corps, U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marines and the Army Medical Specialist Corps. In addition to women in the armed forces, an unknown number of civilian women served in Vietnam on behalf of the Red Cross, United Service Organizations (USO), Catholic Relief Services and other humanitarian organizations, or as foreign correspondents for various news organizations.

U.S. Army Women in Vietnam

The great majority of the military women who served in Vietnam were nurses. All were volunteers, and they ranged from recent college graduates in their early 20s to seasoned career women in their 40s. Members of the Army Nurse Corps arrived in Vietnam as early as 1956, when they were tasked with training the South Vietnamese in nursing skills. As the American military presence in South Vietnam increased beginning in the early 1960s, so did that of the Army Nurse Corps. From March 1962 to March 1973, when the last Army nurses left Vietnam, some 5,000 would serve in the conflict.

Five female Army nurses died over the course of the war, including 52-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Annie Ruth Graham, who served as a military nurse in both World War II and Korea before Vietnam and suffered a stroke in August 1968; and First Lieutenant Sharon Ann Lane, who died from shrapnel wounds suffered in an attack on the hospital where she was working in June 1969. Lane was posthumously awarded the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Palm and the Bronze Star for Heroism. Colonel Graham is one of eight women whose names are listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, a monument designed by 21-year-old female college student Maya Lin.

Did you know? In November 1993, the Vietnam Women's Memorial was dedicated at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. in front of a crowd of some 25,000 people. The centerpiece of the memorial is a bronze statue by Glenna Goodacre, which depicts three female nurses assisting a wounded soldier.

Early on, the U.S. Army resisted sending women other than nurses to Vietnam. The Women's Army Corps (WAC), established during World War II, had a presence in Vietnam beginning in 1964, when General William Westmoreland asked the Pentagon to provide a WAC officer and non-commissioned officer to help the South Vietnamese train their own women's army corps. At its peak in 1970, WAC presence in Vietnam numbered some 20 officers and 130 enlisted women. WACs filled noncombat positions in U.S. Army headquarters in Saigon and other bases in South Vietnam; a number received decorations for meritorious service. No WACs died during the conflict.

Women in the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marines in Vietnam

Members of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps also played an important role in the conflict beginning in 1963. Five Navy nurses were awarded the Purple Heart after they were injured in a Viet Cong bombing of an officers' billets in downtown Saigon on Christmas Eve 1964; they became the first female members of the U.S. Armed Forces to receive that award in the Vietnam War. Apart from nurses, only nine Navy women-all officers-served in Vietnam, including Lieutenant Elizabeth G. Wylie, who worked in the Command Information Center on the staff of the Commander of Naval Forces in Saigon beginning in June 1967; and Commander Elizabeth Barrett, who in November 1972 became the first female naval line officer to hold command in a combat zone.

Women also served as members of the U.S. Air Force Nurse Corps and the Women's Air Force (WAF) during the Vietnam conflict. Captain Mary Therese Klinker, one of the eight military women killed in Vietnam, was the flight nurse on the U.S. Air Force C-5A Galaxy that crashed April 1975 near Saigon. (The plane had been on a mission for Operation Babylift, which placed Southeast Asian orphans with families in the United States; some 138 people were killed in the crash, including many Vietnamese children and a number of female civilians working for U.S. government agencies.) Klinker was posthumously awarded the Airman's Medal for Heroism and the Meritorious Service Medal. The U.S. Marine Corps had a more limited female presence in Vietnam, as until 1966 only 60 female marines were permitted to serve overseas, with most of those stationed in Hawaii. From 1967 to 1973, a total of 28 enlisted Marine women and eight officers served in Vietnam at various times.

Civilian Women in Vietnam

In addition to the U.S. military women who served in Vietnam, an unknown number of female civilians willingly gave their services on Vietnamese soil during the conflict. Many of them worked on behalf of the American Red Cross, Army Special Services, United Service Organizations (USO), Peace Corps and various religious groups such as Catholic Relief Services.

Other American women traveled to Vietnam as foreign correspondents for news organizations, including Georgette "Dickey" Chappelle, a writer for the National Observer who was killed by a mine while on patrol with U.S. Marines outside Chu Lai in November 1965. According to the Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation, 59 female civilians died during the conflict.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
U.S. Army Women in Vietnam Women in the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marines in Vietnam Civilian Women in Vietnam Women in the Vietnam War served as soldiers, health workers, and in news-gathering capacities. Though relatively little official data exists about female Vietnam War veterans, the Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation estimates that approximately 11,000 military women were stationed in Vietnam during the conflict.

# data[].attributes.body
AS OTHERS CALL FOR HELP, TEENAGER MARY ANN VECCHIO (CENTER) KNEELS BESIDE THE BODY OF KENT STATE UNIVERSITY STUDENT JEFFREY MILLER (1950 - 1970) WHO HAD BEEN SHOT DURING AN ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATION ON THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS, KENT, OHIO, MAY 4, 1970.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Antiwar Movement Begins

In August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. By the time U.S. planes began regular bombings of North Vietnam in February 1965, some critics had begun to question the government's assertion that it was fighting a democratic war to liberate the South Vietnamese people from Communist aggression.

The antiwar movement began mostly on college campuses, as members of the leftist organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began organizing "teach-ins" to express their opposition to the way in which it was being conducted.

Though the vast majority of the American population still supported U.S. government policy in the Vietnam War, a small but outspoken minority was making its voice heard by the end of 1965, especially after Johnson began an increasingly aggressive air and ground war in Vietnam.

This vocal minority included many students as well as prominent artists, intellectuals and members of the "hippie" movement, i.e., the growing number of mostly young people who rejected authority and embraced the counterculture.

Did you know? Boxer Muhammad Ali was one prominent American who resisted being drafted into service during the Vietnam War. Ali, then heavyweight champion of the world, declared himself a "conscientious objector," earning a prison sentence (later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court) and a three-year ban from boxing.

Widespread Disillusionment

By November 1967, American troop strength in Vietnam was approaching 500,000 and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. The Vietnam War was costing the United States some $25 billion per year, and disillusionment was beginning to reach greater sections of the taxpaying public.

More casualties were reported in Vietnam every day, even as U.S. commanders demanded more troops. Under the draft system of conscription, as many as 40,000 young men were called into service every month, adding fuel to the fire of the antiwar movement.

On October 21, 1967, one of the most prominent antiwar demonstrations took place as some 100,000 protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial-around 30,000 of them continued in a march on the Pentagon later that night.

After a brutal confrontation with the soldiers and U.S. Marshals protecting the building, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. One of them was the author Norman Mailer, who chronicled the events in his book "The Armies of the Night," published the following year to widespread acclaim.

Also in 1967, the antiwar movement got a big boost when the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. went public with his opposition to the war on moral grounds, condemning the war's diversion of federal funds from domestic programs as well as the disproportionate number of Black casualties in relation to the total number of soldiers killed in the war.

At a march of over 5,000 protestors in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25, 1967, King called the Vietnam War "a blasphemy against all that America stands for."

Vietnam War Protest Songs

The Vietnam War protest inspired many popular songs that became an anthem for that generation. Phil Ochs wrote "What Are You Fighting For?" in 1963 and "I Ain't Marching Anymore" in 1965. Other songs whose very titles were a protest themselves included Pete Seeger's "Bring 'Em Home" (1966) and Joan Baez 's "Saigon Bride" (1967).

Nina Simone's "Backlash Blues" (1967) took a civil rights poem by Langston Hughes and adapted it into a protest of Vietnam: "Raise my taxes/Freeze my wages/Send my son to Vietnam." Marvin Gaye 's "What's Going On?" from 1971 went on to be one of the most popular songs of all time.

John Lennon's first song after leaving the Beatles, "Give Peace a Chance," hit airwaves in 1966. " Imagine," from 1971, has transcended the Vietnam era to be a timeless song of peace and unity.

Political Consequences of Vietnam War Protests

The launch of the Tet Offensive by North Vietnamese communist troops in January 1968, and its success against U.S. and South Vietnamese troops, sent waves of shock and discontent across the home front and sparked a most intense period of antiwar protests. By February 1968, a Gallup poll showed only 35 percent of the population approved of Johnson's handling of the war and a full 50 percent disapproved.

Joining the antiwar demonstrations by this time were members of the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War, many of whom were in wheelchairs and on crutches. The sight of these men on television throwing away the medals they had won during the war did much to win people over to the antiwar cause.

After many 1968 New Hampshire primary voters rallied behind the antiwar Democrat Eugene McCarthy, President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.

Later that year, Hubert Humphrey accepted the Democratic nomination for president at the 1968 Democratic Convention, held at Chicago's International Amphitheatre. Meanwhile, outside the convention hall, 10,000 antiwar demonstrators showed up, clashing violently with security forces assembled by Mayor Richard Daley.

Humphrey lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard M. Nixon, who promised in his campaign to restore "law and order"-a reference to conflict over antiwar protests as well as the rioting that followed King's assassination in 1968-more effectively than Johnson had.

Silent Majority

The following year, Nixon claimed in a famous speech that antiwar protesters constituted a small-albeit vocal-minority that should not be allowed to drown out the "silent majority" of Americans. Nixon's war policies divided the nation still further, however: In December 1969, the government instituted the first U.S. draft lottery since World War II, inciting a vast amount of controversy and causing many young men to flee to Canada to avoid conscription.

Tensions ran higher than ever, spurred on by mass demonstrations and incidents of violence by officials such those at Kent State in May 1970, when National Guard troops shot into a group of protesters demonstrating against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, killing four students.

At the Mayday Protest in 1971, thousands of antiwar protestors tried to shut down Washington, D.C., completely, all but crippling the U.S. government. Traffic was stopped for a few hours, and CIA director Richard Helms later remarked that Mayday was "one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the [Nixon] administration to try and find some way to get out of the war."

Vietnam War Ends

As antiwar fervor grew, in mid-1971, Daniel Ellsberg brought about the publication of the Pentagon Papers -which revealed previously confidential details about the war's conduct-and misconduct by government and military officials. Ellsberg called the Pentagon Papers "evidence of a quarter-century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder."

These and other revelations caused more and more Americans to doubt the accountability of the U.S. government and the integrity of the U.S. military establishment.

Finally, in response to an almost overwhelming antiwar mandate, Nixon announced the effective end to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia in January 1973. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, effectively ending the Vietnam War.

Sources

Vietnam War. Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium: University of Washington.
Anti-War Protests of the 1960s-70s. The White House Historical Association.
Anti-War Movement. PBS.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vietnam War Protests: Antiwar & Protest Songs - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vietnam War protests began among antiwar activists and students, then gained prominence in 1965 when the U.S. military began bombing North Vietnam heavily.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Unexploded bombs leave a deadly legacy in Vietnam

# data[].attributes.body
More than 50 years later, this image still has the power to startle and sicken. It was published on the front page of newspapers like The New York Times in February 1968, days into the Tet Offensive, massive coordinated attacks by the North Vietnamese government. In the photo, a South Vietnamese police chief calmly executes a Vietcong fighter in the streets of Saigon. The image, which won a Pulitzer Prize for photographer Eddie Adams, caused many Americans to openly question the morality of the war.

# data[].attributes.headline
TEACHING KIDS IN VIETNAM TO AVOID A DEADLY, EVERYDAY LEGACY OF WAR

# data[].attributes.subject
TEACHING KIDS IN VIETNAM TO AVOID A DEADLY, EVERYDAY LEGACY OF WAR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
TEACHING KIDS IN VIETNAM TO AVOID A DEADLY, EVERYDAY LEGACY OF WAR

# data[].attributes.body
1968 was the deadliest year for American soldiers in Vietnam, and this image, captured by freelance photographer Art Greenspon, summed up the tremendous cost being paid by young men fighting in what increasingly felt like a futile war.

The sense of brotherhood in the photo is palpable, as is the sense of anguish and desperation. Nearly half of the company had been killed in a firefight and the survivors waited two days for a medevac helicopter to arrive. The First Sergeant raised his arms in the air to signal the chopper, but he might as well have been lifting them in prayer.

Greenspon’s indelible image landed on the front page of The New York Times and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

# data[].attributes.headline
'CHASING MEMORIES' IN THEIR REFUGEE CAMP 40 YEARS AFTER FLEEING VIETNAM

# data[].attributes.subject
'CHASING MEMORIES' IN THEIR REFUGEE CAMP 40 YEARS AFTER FLEEING VIETNAM

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'CHASING MEMORIES' IN THEIR REFUGEE CAMP 40 YEARS AFTER FLEEING VIETNAM

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This year, The Donelson Fellowship is honoring veterans of the Vietnam War. Thank you for your sacrifice and service.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I Was A Boat Person: Vietnamese Refugees Look Back

# data[].attributes.body
On June 11, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc sat calmly in a busy intersection near Siagon’s Presidential Palace as a fellow monk doused him with gasoline. After saying a short prayer, Thich Quang Duc lit a match and dropped it into his lap, instantly engulfing his body in flames. Images of the monk’s stoic self-immolation, taken by AP journalist Malcolm Browne, sent shockwaves around the world.

Thich Quang Duc gave his life in protest of the brutal, anti-Buddhist policies of the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch Catholic. Browne’s unforgettable photographs called into question America’s growing support for the South Vietnam regime. President John F. Kennedy is reported to have said, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” But it didn’t change Kennedy’s mind on America’s position on Vietnam.