When we think of the Vietnam War, we bring to mind countless images of men in uniform and recall stories of the men who fought and lost their lives during the war. What most people don't realize is that women also played a crucial role in this war and had been making their own contributions for several decades.
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
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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