A few days ago, while working on my recent article about the Left, I was looking for information about the numbers of US servicemen who died in Vietnam when I came upon the Virtual Wall site. I haven’t been a fan of this site since I found erroneous information about one of my fellow loadmasters at Clark AB, PI who died when his C-130 was shot down at Katum, an airfield on the Cambodian border, on June 23, 1969. On a whim, I decided to look at George Peters page to see if the information had been corrected. It hadn’t. I wrote a not-so-gracious Email expressing my dismay. To my surprise, I received an Email from Jack Morrison, one of the site managers, who admitted that the information was erroneous, and that he was surprised because they had a copy of his casualty report which has all the correct information. He corrected the page. During our conversation, I decided to bring up something that has been bothering me for a half century.
The Vietnam War was fought by men, at least as far as Americans go. No women were in combat and while some were exposed to rocket and even ground attack at some rear area bases, they were not in any great danger most of the time. Neither were most male Vietnam veterans either. Only those who served in the field or flew combat missions were actually “in the line of fire.” There were women in Vietnam, mostly nurses, particularly Army. Female Air Force flight nurses flew in and out on Military Airlift Command C-141s and on Pacific Air Forces C-118s and C-130s on missions moving patients around the country and to out-of-country hospitals, particularly the one at Clark AB, Philippines. The Air Force had a few enlisted WAFs in Saigon starting in June 1967 when five enlisted women and an officer, the fourth WAF officer assigned to Vietnam, were assigned to Seventh Air Force headquarters in Saigon. (I saw exactly ONE WAF, a blonde staff sergeant, in an Army NCO club in Cholon near the hotel where aircrew from my C-130 wing were billeted.) A girl I knew at Clark told me she had volunteered for Vietnam and was going to Saigon so her younger brother, a Marine, wouldn’t be sent there. (This was in the summer of 1970 and the Marines were being withdrawn. She might have volunteered for nothing.) A few female Air Force officers were assigned elsewhere than Saigon but enlisted WAFs were not. There were a few WACs but no female Marines and no enlisted female Naval personnel. There were Navy nurses at the naval hospital at Da Nang and on hospital ships offshore. Eight nurses, seven Army and one Air Force, are shown as having died in Vietnam (the Air Force nurse died in the crash of a C-5 at Saigon in 1975 after the US had withdrawn all troops from the country two years before). Four of the seven died in aircraft accidents, two in a helicopter and two in the crash of a Caribou, one died of a mysterious illness, and one died of a stroke. One Army nurse died due to enemy action. That’s what they say. However, there was another, a young nurse who died when an Army compound at Cam Ranh Bay was hit by sappers in the early morning hours of August 7, 1969. I know, I carried her body to Saigon the next morning.
My introduction to Cam Ranh came in the fall of 1965. I was a fairly new aircraft loadmaster with a Tactical Air Command C-130 squadron based at Pope AFB, NC. My job was supervising the loading and offloading of our airplane and dropping cargo by parachute. My squadron was on temporary duty at a tiny island in the Philippines called Mactan. We were on our way back to Mactan after two weeks flying out of Bangkok when we were told we would be stopping on the way to drop off some pallets of teak lumber at a brand-new base that was under construction. Enough pierced aluminum planking had been laid to accommodate a C-130 and we would be the first airplane to land on the new runway. Cam Ranh Bay is a natural port, and the Army was developing a large logistical base there. The Air Force had decided to build a brand-new base north of the port facilities. (Although Cam Ranh is known as the base of the 12th Tactical Fighter Wing, its main purpose was to accommodate transport missions flying cargo and passengers all over South Vietnam.) When we landed, we were met by the base commander, a full colonel, driving a forklift! He off-loaded a couple of the pallets then turned the forklift over to an enlisted air freight technician. There were sand dunes on either side of the runway higher than a house. All we saw was sand.
We went back to Pope in December and the crew went on leave, which happened to be over Christmas. When I walked in the barracks after returning from leave after New Years, the squadron clerk met me right after I came through the door and told me orders had come in for me to Naha, Okinawa. I was shocked. A squadron from Pope had just transferred to the Pacific but I had escaped, although most of my buddies went. I arrived at Naha sometime around the middle of February on a blustery Sunday evening. My new squadron sent me out the following Sunday with an instructor to check me out on the C-130A – I had been flying C-130Es. The trip was to Cam Ranh where I found an entirely different place. The aluminum runway had been completed and the dunes had been leveled. Civil engineers had built facilities for a base east of the runway next to the South China Sea. A TAC fighter wing had moved in and was flying missions in F-4s, and an aerial port facility had been set up to handle cargo and passengers. We were directed to a pierced steel planking parking area where a couple of C-130Es were parked. They were from my old wing at Pope, part of the squadron that transferred overseas. We were at Cam Ranh for two weeks, flying missions every day ferrying cargo, mostly ammunition, into Tuy Hoa and Ban Me Thout in support of an Army operation between the two cities.
A few months later I was on temporary duty at Ubon, Thailand flying flare missions over North Vietnam and Laos when we learned that Naha had started supporting a temporary duty mission at Cam Ranh. The Naha C-130 squadrons would supply airplanes, crews and support personnel for a detachment that would operate all over South Vietnam on cargo and passenger missions, some logistical and some tactical. (Tactical missions were in direct support of combat operations.) I was not happy – it was not my idea of a place to be! As it turned out, I spent a good part of my time at Cam Ranh during the remaining year of my 18-month tour at Naha. We’d go down for 16 days of flying transport missions around South Vietnam then we’d go back to Naha and after about three or four days, it’d be back to Cam Ranh or Bangkok where we had another mission. We lived in Quonset Huts on the east side of the runway on the main base and ate our meals out of mess kits in the field dining hall. A permanent runway made of concrete was built west of the PAP runway and a large parking ramp was constructed on the other side. Naturally, it was called the West Ramp. We started operating off of the West Ramp but continued living on the east side.
Cam Ranh Bay is a large natural port and it became a destination for ships coming in from the United States with military cargo. The Army built a large transportation facility south of the airbase where they processed cargo that came in on the ships then transported some of it to the airbase for air shipment. There was a road around the perimeter of the airbase that went on to the north, although I had no idea where it went nor did I care. As it turns out, the Army was constructing additional facilities a couple of miles north of the airbase, including a hospital. Sometime in 1966 the 6th Convalescent Center was set up to provide medical care for men who had been injured elsewhere and would be returning to their units. Some were evacuated out of the country to hospitals in Japan and at Clark in the Philippines and some went to the States, although I’m not sure if they were handled by the 6th CC. The Army’s 22nd Replacement Battalion operated a processing center for newcomers and troops leaving the country in the same complex.
Cam Ranh was touted as the safest place to be in South Vietnam. The US facilities were on a long peninsula between the South China Sea and Cam Ranh Bay, which had a long inlet reaching off it to the north. The area to the north was patrolled by the South Korean Tiger Division. The ROKs had a reputation as a fierce fighting unit, and they were responsible for the region from Cam Ranh to Nha Trang, a beach town which lay about ten to fifteen miles to the north. There were mountains about ten miles to the west that were known to be occupied by Viet Cong. At the time, the Viet Cong’s primary (only) artillery were mortars, which only have a range of a mile or so. Cam Ranh was thus immune from attack, at least in theory. It was a safe place, there were no attacks while I was there.
For all practical purposes, Cam Ranh airbase was an American base. Other bases were Vietnamese with American units based there. Not Cam Ranh. The United States had leased the land from South Vietnam. The rumor was that the lease was for ninety-nine years. No Vietnamese military were based on Cam Ranh Airbase and civilians were not allowed on base after dark. Vietnamese weren’t allowed on the flight line. At other bases, Vietnamese civilians worked in the aerial port squadrons building pallets and loading cargo. Not Cam Ranh. I never saw a Vietnamese on a loading crew during the three years I flew out of there. Vietnamese who came in as passengers on Air Force airplanes couldn’t leave the passenger terminal. It wasn’t until late in the war that a Vietnamese military unit was based at Cam Ranh. Cam Ranh had been built to be a secure base. It was.
After my eighteen months at Naha, I went back to the States to a new assignment at Robins AFB, Georgia. I had reenlisted before I left Naha – at Cam Ranh – and received an assignment to Military Airlift Command which had a squadron at Robins that was in the process of equipping with new jet C-141s. I flew missions to Vietnam and often landed at Cam Ranh. Some missions were air evacuation on the return flights. I had flown a few air evacs during my TDYs from Pope and at Naha, but MAC missions were a world apart from the in-country missions. We had a medical crew with two female flight nurses and four enlisted medical technicians. We also carried a lot of human remains, the military term for bodies, or parts of bodies, that had been processed at the mortuaries at Tan Son Nhut, the big airbase at Saigon, and Da Nang. Unlike the olive drab rubber body bags I had carried in Vietnam wit KIAs, human remains were in special aluminum shipping containers. (The Air Force made a distinction between KIAs, which were un-embalmed remains in body bags and human remains, which had been cleaned up and embalmed, if there was enough to embalm.) The containers were identical to other aluminum shipping containers, some unpainted and some painted olive drab, used for other cargoes. (Human remains were considered cargo but received special handling.)
After I had been at Robins a little over a year, I was notified that I was going back to C-130s overseas and back to the war. This time I was going to the 463rd Tactical Airlift Wing at Clark Field, Philippines. I left Robins the night before Thanksgiving and arrived at Clark in early February after leave and completion of survival school at Fairchild AFB, Washington. At the time, my new wing was supporting a rotation at Tan Son Nhut and we were staying downtown at the Merlin Hotel in Cholon. However, the wing was getting a new mission dropping ten-thousand-pound M-121 bombs to make instant helicopter landing zones in the jungle and by May we were operating out of Cam Ranh where the huge bombs were rigged. My wing swapped rotations with the Naha wing I had been part of two years before.
A lot had changed at Cam Ranh since my previous time there. I’d been there numerous times on C-141s but hadn’t left the airplane. The only real difference as far as the flight line was concerned was that steel revetments had been erected to protect the airplanes from rockets. Rockets had started hitting the base the previous year. Although the mission was still the same, C-130 crews no longer lived in the Quonset Huts on the east side. A complex called Herky Hill had been constructed about a mile north of the base on a rise. Herky Hill was immediately north of a large hill, probably manmade, with a large white tank on it which I recollect was the water tank for the airbase. Herky Hill consisted of a complex of quarters. Some were single-story and housed personnel from the 14th Aerial Port Squadron, the people who processed cargo and passengers and loaded the airplanes. Several two-story barracks on the north side housed maintenance personnel from the 463rd and 314th Tactical Airlift Wings. Other two-story barracks at the top of the hill housed the officer and enlisted aircrew members. Those barracks were air-conditioned. C-130s operated around the clock and the crews needed air-conditioned quarters to be able to sleep in daytime. There was a balcony on the east side of the barracks that ran around to the south side. The latrine was on the first floor right after you came inside. A concrete blast fence with sandbags piled against it ran around the first floor. The 463rd enlisted aircrew barracks was furthest north. The barracks next to it housed the enlisted aircrew from the 314th Tactical Airlift Wing. The officers’ quarters were behind the enlisted barracks nearer the beach. Quonset Huts across the road north of our barracks housed the Red Cross recreational center. One was sleeping quarters for the girls who ran the center. An all-ranks club occupied a building just east of the rec center and the chow hall was on down the hill. The chow hall served steaks on Sundays. There was an open-air theater just down the hill from the chow hall. We’d sit there and watch AC-119 gunships firing at targets in the mountains ten miles to the west. The compound was fenced, with guard posts manned by Air Force security police with M-60 machineguns at intervals around the perimeter. There were bunkers around the compound. I never went there but there was an Army complex on past and north of Herky Hill. I didn’t know what was there but assumed It was where the Army’s replacement depot was located (it was). I also assumed it was where the evacuation hospital that took care of men bound for hospitals out of country was located. I didn’t know there was a convalescent hospital there.
My first permanent aircraft commander turned out to be a ding-a-ling and after he took an airplane with a known low tire into a Marine base south of Da Nang during an operation and blew two tires, he was removed from aircrew duty and sent to supply. Our crew was broken up. The squadron notified me I had been selected to check out on the M-121 bomb and upgrade to instructor loadmaster. I was going in-country for a few days with a crew from another squadron and their loadmaster, who I had known since maintenance tech school, would check me out then I would return to Clark and join a new crew that was being formed. We flew to Clark around the end of May. I was gone about five days. Dropping bombs was almost identical to dropping heavy equipment, with a few modifications. The lesson plan called for me to drop four bombs under an instructor’s supervision then be signed off. We flew a bomb mission the first day after we got to Cam Ranh. There was no bomb mission the next day, so I elected to sit it out. I didn’t need instruction in hauling cargo. As it turned out, the crew was landing at Katum, a “hot spot” on the Cambodian border, when they started taking hits from a large-caliber machinegun. Fortunately, no one was hit but one round came up through the left paratroop door which is where I had a habit of standing when landing at forward airfields. We dropped two more bombs the next day and the instructor signed off the lesson plans the following day and I returned to Clark that evening. A few days later I returned to Cam Ranh with my new crew.
Based on an event that happened on the last day of our shuttle – we referred to the 16-day rotations as “shuttles” because we shuttled around South Vietnam – I believe we probably flew in on June 8, 1969, which is in line with when I went down to check out on the bomb. We flew in on the 8th because we rotated back to Clark on June 24th. This is important. I know this because the crew George Peters was on was shot down on June 23rd, our last day on the shuttle. We had dropped bombs that morning then spent the rest of our crew duty day shuttling out of Bien Hoa to airfields along the Cambodian border, one of which was Katum where the crew I went in-country with to check out on the bomb was shot up a few weeks before. Peters was loadmaster on a crew commanded by Captain Gary Brunner. They were on a mission to Katum my aircraft commander (AC) had turned down because we were over our crew duty day. They were getting ready to leave Cam Ranh when we came in. Our officers talked to theirs in C-130 Ops. I had a hard time dealing with it because I couldn’t remember Peters even though my buddies insisted I knew him.
Two months later I was in-country. On the night of August 6, the engineer, Ken Bruchlacher, and I went to bed sometime before midnight. We had flown a bomb drop that day but were scheduled for a cargo mission the next day with a takeoff around 0800. When we were at Cam Ranh, we were assigned to Detachment 2, 834th Air Division for operations. Det. 2 was made up of permanently assigned officers and enlisted men whose job was to command and direct the C-130 crews. One of the enlisted men was a qualified C-130 loadmaster. Among other duties, the Det 2 loadmasters flew as second loadmasters on bomb drops. Unless I had a student with me or was checking another loadmaster out on the bomb, the Det 2 loadmaster flew as my second. The Det 2 loadmaster at that time was Staff Sergeant Fred Sowell. Fred had arrived at Cam Ranh sometime in July. I know this because Fred volunteered for a consecutive overseas tour to Clark. He was still at Cam Ranh when I was there on my last shuttle in July 1970 but arrived at Clark a few days after I got back. He came to my trailer after he got there. Vietnam tours were for one year, meaning Fred got there in July 1969 and left in July 1970.
Sometime after midnight, Ken and I were awakened by the sound of explosions and the alert siren going off. Although Cam Ranh was still considered secure, the North Vietnamese had started launching Soviet-made rockets in harassing attacks on the base. The rockets weren’t highly accurate – they had been designed as barrage weapons in World War II – but they had a range of twelve miles and could reach Cam Ranh from launching sites in the mountains to the west. Our room was toward the north end of the barracks on the second floor. We went out on the balcony to see what was happening and heard explosions and saw fires breaking out at the Army facility to our north. I don’t know the exact distance from Herky Hill to the Army facility but I’m guessing it was around a mile. At the time, I thought there was water between us and it, but maps don’t show any water there. Helicopters started coming in right over us and landing at the facility. We watched for a little while then went back to bed. We had to get up the next morning for our day of flying.
We walked down the hill to the chow hall for breakfast the next morning as we normally did. If we overheard any conversation about the attack the night before, I don’t remember it. After breakfast, we caught the shuttle bus and got off at C-130 Ops. There was a wooden catwalk across the sand from the bus stop to the entrance to the building. Fred Sowell came out of the building and met me. He said, “Hey Sam, a nurse was killed in the attack last night. You’re taking her body to Saigon. They’ve got her in a refrigerated CONEX over at air freight.” I don’t recall hearing anything about a nurse before we met Fred. I’m sure people in the chow hall and on the bus were talking about the attack early that morning but this was the first I’d heard about a nurse being killed. We went on in C-130 Ops where the briefing officer briefed me on our load which included the remains of the nurse. Our first leg of the day was to Tan Son Nhut where one of the two mortuaries in Vietnam was located. The other was at Da Nang.
Ken and I went on out to the airplane. A while later, a truck came out and backed up to the crew entrance door. We were loading the remains through the crew entrance door because there were four pallets of cargo aIready on the airplane. I don’t remember if it was a panel truck or a covered pickup, but it wasn’t an ambulance. Graves registration or hospital personnel had brought the body bag with the remains from the Army complex and turned it over to aerial port, who brought it to the airplane. Like all the body bags I hauled in Vietnam, it was on a stretcher. Air Force protocol calls for KIAs and human remains to be loaded headfirst. I don’t remember if I helped load the body or if aerial port did it all. Aerial port may have handed one end of the stretcher to me and passed it through the door. I know the body was taken out of the truck and turned around, so it was loaded into the airplane headfirst, then we turned it around and put it on the floor at the front of the cargo compartment. Air Force policy called for human remains/KIAs to be the last thing jettisoned in an emergency, so they were always loaded in front of other cargo. Normally, we would have had five pallets, but one had been left off to leave space for the KIA. After the stretcher was placed on the floor, I tied it down with two tiedown straps, one at each end. I didn’t put a strap over the body. Body bags had slits on each end that slipped over the handles of the stretcher to secure it. There was a tag attached to the body bag with the girl’s name, rank and serial number. I read it like I usually did when I carried KIAs. I don’t remember her name. They also gave me a manifest with her name on it. (Everything we carried, cargo, passengers, KIAs, was manifested but loadmasters didn’t keep copies.)
When they got to the airplane, the officers came inside the cargo compartment to look at the pitiful bag. We had all carried KIAs before, but they were men. I once had a Marine die on my airplane, but this was different. This bag contained the remains of a young American woman, the object of every young man’s affection. Some aerial port troops and maintenance men also came into the airplane to look at the bag. If anyone said anything, I don’t recall what was said. I thought about taking a picture of the body bag but decided not to out of respect. We started engines and flew to Saigon. I’m sure I rode in the back with the body rather than going upstairs and sitting on the crew bunk as I usually did. I don’t remember if we had passengers, but I don’t think we did. Graves registration came out in Saigon and picked up the body. I assume they took it to the mortuary. A few days later the girl’s name was on the daily casualty list in Stars & Stripes. It gave her rank and it seems to me it gave her age. It may have given her hometown. I seem to recall she was 22 and a second lieutenant. I didn’t look in the bag and have no idea what she looked like. I somehow imagined a blonde, but that image may have been from a young blonde flight nurse I had flown with on a C-141 in MAC.
I won’t say I forgot about it because over the years I told people my crew had carried the body of a nurse who was killed at Cam Ranh. I’m sure I told my buddies at Clark and I told other veterans years later after I returned to civilian life. (I was employed as a corporate pilot and there were several other Vietnam veterans in the department.) I wrote a book about the C-130 and mentioned it. Then in the nineties, along came the Internet. I had been married and divorced and found myself in Findlay, Ohio with little to do when I wasn’t flying as a corporate pilot but surf the net. I put up a number of pages on America Online, including one about the nurse. At some point I came across a page devoted to the handful of women who died in Vietnam. I was shocked to see that none were listed as having been killed at Cam Ranh! Only one woman was shown as having been killed in action, and she was shown as being killed at Chu Lai, a Marine and Army base in I Corps south of Da Nang. I thought there must be a mistake, that they were showing her as killed at Chu Lai when she had actually been killed at Cam Ranh. It was many years later that I learned that there were two separate incidents some two months apart. The nurse killed at Chu Lai died when a rocket exploded in her ward. The attack at Cam Ranh was by sappers, people armed with satchel charges they threw as they ran through the complex.
Somehow, I heard from a couple of women who were in Vietnam. One was an Air Force nurse at Cam Ranh and the other was a civilian librarian there. They insisted that no women had been killed at Cam Ranh. “If a woman had been killed, I’d have heard about it.” That was their refrain. They insisted that the body I carried was that of Lieutenant Sharon Lane, the nurse who was killed at Chu Lai. No, it wasn’t and here is why:
1. Lt. Lane died at Chu Lai, which is some 37 miles from Da Nang. There were two military mortuaries in Vietnam, the one at Tan Son Nhut (Saigon) and the other at Da Nang. The Da Nang mortuary processed more than 5,000 remains in 1969, more than half of those who died that year. Chu Lai lies in what was then Military Region I, along with Da Nang. Lt. Lane’s remains would have gone to Da Nang, not Saigon. Since the hospital where she died was less than fifty miles from Da Nang, her remains could have been transported there by ground transportation. Furthermore, had somebody decided to send her remains to Saigon for some reason, they wouldn’t have sent them through Cam Ranh. There were several C-130 flights each day transitioning Chu Lai and some of them were from the detachment at Tan Son Nhut.
2. Lt. Lane died at 6:05 on the morning of June 8. At the time of her death, I was on a shuttle input flight that had just departed Clark on the way to Cam Ranh by way of Cubi Point. Our shuttle inputs departed Clark at 0700 and I reported for duty two hours prior. There was an hour time difference between Clark and Cam Ranh. Our normal route was a short hop to Cubi Point, the Navy base on Subic Bay, where we picked up cargo and passengers for Chu Lai where we arrived in mid-morning. We’d offload our Chu Lai cargo and passengers then continue to Cam Ranh. I don’t remember details of that flight, but I know for a fact we didn’t carry a KIA to Cam Ranh. I flew the nurse’s body from Cam Ranh to Saigon. It is possible that I didn’t even go in-country until the next day, Monday, June 9, but I believe it was probably the 8th. We did not fly missions on the day we arrived at Cam Ranh or the day we left. I know we left Cam Ranh on June 24 after sixteen days in-country. My first flight on that shuttle wouldn’t have been until Monday, June 9, the day after Lt. Lane was killed shortly after daybreak. Since there were flights in and out of Chu Lai all day, I can’t see where her remains wouldn’t have been flown to Cam Ranh until that night for shipment to Saigon the next day. For that matter, I can’t see why she would have been flown to Cam Ranh for shipment to Saigon since there were C-130s based at Tan Son Nhut and they fledw missions to Chu Lai. Since there was a mortuary at Da Nang, I can’t see why her remains would have been sent to Saigon at all. I am also pretty sure my mission on June 9 was a bomb drop. Although we typically finished our day hauling cargo after a bomb drop, we didn’t return to Cam Ranh until the end of the day.
3. Had the Army wanted to send Lt. Lane’s remains to Saigon, I can’t understand why they would have waited until the following day or even that night and sent her by way of Cam Ranh. Chu Lai was a major US installation, with a Marine airfield and the Army’s 23rd Infantry Division, of which the 44th Medical Battalion was a part. Lt. Lane was assigned to the battalion’s 312th Evacuation Hospital. 834th Air Division C-130s and C-123s made frequent flights to both Chu Lai and Da Nang. There would have been no reason to wait until even that night, much less the following night, to ship her remains out of Chu Lai. For that matter, human remains were moved to the mortuary as quickly as possible because flesh starts to decay in the hot, tropical climate. Remains picked up in the jungle and marshes after a battle is one thing, Lt. Lane died in an Army hospital on a major military base with air and ground transportation readily available.
4. I am positive that Fred Sowell told me I was carrying the nurse’s body on the catwalk leading to C-130 Ops. Fred wasn’t at Cam Ranh in June. If he was, he wasn’t flying bomb missions and I didn’t know him. I didn’t meet him until he started flying bomb drops. I flew the first drops with TSgt Otis Fuller. Fred started flying with me after Otis left. Fred definitely flew with me the day before the attack on August 7.
As for “I would have known” – not if the death was kept quiet! I can think of several reasons officers at the hospital would have wanted to keep the death of a nurse quiet. The attack occurred shortly after midnight. I first became aware that a nurse had been killed sometime around 0600 when Ken Brucklacher and I reported for duty at C-130 Ops about five hours after the attack. I have no idea how long the nurse’s remains had been in the Conex at air freight. I can see how people in the hospital would have wanted to get the girl’s remains out of there for morale purposes. The time the Marine died on my airplane, the flight nurse didn’t cover his face because he didn’t want the other patients to know he had died. The 6th Convalescent Center housed men who had been wounded or injured elsewhere and were sent to Cam Ranh to recuperate before returning to duty. (Some men were flown out to hospitals in Japan, at Clark and the United States, but I’m not sure if they passed through that facility.) The knowledge that a young woman had been killed in the attack would have been demoralizing to men who had just gone through an attack at “the safest place in Vietnam”. Hospital staff would have also been affected. Initially, two men were reported killed and scores wounded although the number of wounded was revised downward. I did not carry the remains of the two men, only the nurse. One of them died on the way to the Air Force hospital so his remains would have gone there. I don’t know about the other one. The only available information about the attack comes from news reports published several days later.
After I learned that no woman was shown as having been killed at Cam Ranh, I speculated that the girl’s death had been classified for morale purposes because Cam Ranh was supposed to be safe. However, there appears to have been more to it. It turns out that President Richard Nixon had visited Vietnam on July 30, a week before the attack. An article came out in TIME on August 8 in which Nixon commented that he didn’t go to Cam Ranh Bay, as his predecessor had done, because “Cam Ranh isn’t Vietnam.” (In many respects, this is true. Unlike other bases which belonged to the Vietnamese, the United States had leased Cam Ranh and the base was 100% American. No Vietnamese were based there and Vietnamese civilians were only allowed on the base in daylight hours to work.) To have word come out that a nurse had been killed at Cam Ranh soon after he made that remark would have been fodder for Nixon’s critics and the antiwar movement. Increasing attention was being paid to the Vietnam dead. In early June after the Battle of Hamburger Hill, Life magazine featured an article with the photographs of 242 men who had died in Vietnam in a week (only five were killed on Hamburger Hill). The antiwar movement seized on the opportunity to criticize the war. The August 11 issue’s letters section was devoted solely to response to that article. The death of a woman at the hands of the enemy would have had propaganda value. There is also the fact that Sharon Lane had been killed by a rocket just two months before. No women had died due to enemy action prior to her death; now another woman was killed at supposedly “secure” Cam Ranh, and in a ground attack at that! Rocket attacks are random but the attack on the convalescent center was carried out by a team of men (and possibly women) carrying satchel charges which they flung in the buildings as they ran by them.
It is my assertion that the nurse’s death was classified and not publicly released – although her name was listed in Stars & Stripes but not in conjunction with the attack – to hide it from the public. I don’t think her body was spirited away or anything like that, but I do believe news of her death was withheld from the public by the DOD. Then when women veterans started compiling the short list of women who died in Vietnam, she fell through the cracks, probably because records of her death were classified and thus inaccessible.
The attack on the convalescent center (and possibly other Army facilities in the compound) was the first ground attack at Cam Ranh of the war, but it was not the last. I was at Cam Ranh again later in my tour when my engineer and I were awakened by the sound of a machine gun firing. We didn’t think much of it since the security police would often fire bursts out over the water to discourage the Vietnamese fishing boats from getting too close to shore. I don’t think we even got out of bed. Flares had popped down the hill from Herky Hill. We could see the light through our window. That didn’t concern us either, flares were common around Vietnam. We learned the next morning that sappers had attempted an attack on Herky Hill, but they stumbled over tripwires and set off the flares. The alert security policemen mowed them down. I seem to remember there were ten of them. (This attack is not mentioned in anything I’ve found on the Internet, possibly because it was broken up before the sappers were able to do any damage.) Another group had headed for the flight line but met a similar fate. Another attack met with success on June 12, 1970, when sappers attacked the Naval air facility north of the West Ramp. A year later the communists achieved their greatest success when they managed to infiltrate the Air Force ammo dump and attach explosives to ammunition and bombs, including some of the massive 15,000-pound Blu 82s the Air Force developed to replace the M-121s.
It's been over half a century since I hauled that pitiful cargo to Saigon. Had she lived, the woman would have been in her late seventies or possibly in her eighties. While her family no doubt knew about her death and mourned her, the thousands of women who served in Vietnam didn’t, much less the men. Some may have known but kept quiet because they had been told not to talk about it. Hopefully, her identity will someday be found and she’ll be recognized, not that she would care.