The Women On The Wall

2Lt. Carol Ann Elizabeth Drazba and 2Lt. Elizabeth Ann Jones were assigned to the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon. They died in a helicopter crash near Saigon February 18, 1966. Carol Drazba was from Dunmore, PA, and Elizabeth Jones from Allendale, SC. Both were 22 years old.

Capt. Eleanor Grace Alexander of Westwood, NJ, and 1Lt. Hedwig Diane Orlowski of Detroit, MI, died November 30, 1967. Eleanor Alexander, stationed at the 85th Evac, and Hedwig Orlowski, stationed at the 67th Evac in Qui Nhon, had been sent to a hospital in Pleiku to help out during a push. With them when their plane crashed on the return trip to Qui Nhon were two other nurses, Jerome E. Olmstead of Clintonville, WI, and Kenneth R. Shoemaker, Jr., a Owensboro, KY. Alexander was 27, Orlowski 23. Both were posthumously awarded Bronze Stars.

2Lt. Pamela Dorothy Donovan died of pneumonia July 8, 1968 at the age of 26. Pamela was assigned to the 85th Evac in Qui Nhon, and was from Allston, ME.

1Lt. Sharon Ann Lane died from a shrapnel wound when the 312th Evac at Chu Lai was hit by rockets on June 8, 1969. From Canton, OH, she was a month short of her 26th birthday. She was posthumously awarded the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Palm and the Bronze Star for Heroism. In 1970, the recovery room at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver was dedicated in her honor. In 1973, Aultman Hospital in Canton, OH, where Lane had attended nursing school, erected a bronze statue of Lane. The names of 110 local servicemen killed in Vietnam are on the base of the statue.

LTC Annie Ruth Graham, from Efland, NC, was Chief Nurse at the 91st Evac Hospital, 43rd Medical Group, 44th Medical Brigade, in Tuy Hoa. In August, 1969, she suffered a stroke and was evacuated to Japan where she died four days later on August 14, 1968. A veteran of both World War II and Korea, she was 52.

Capt. Mary Therese Klinker, from Lafayette, IN, was an Air Force flight nurse with the 10th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, Travis AFB, and temporarily assigned to Clark AFB in the Philippines, was on the C-5A Galaxy which crashed outside Saigon while evacuating Vietnamese orphans on April 4, 1975 (this is known as the Operation Babylift crash). Capt. Klinker is officially listed as dying on April 9, 1975. She was 27. Capt. Klinker was posthumously awarded the Airman's Medal for Heroism and the Meritorious Service Medal. [See: Operation Babylift]

Source: Vietnam Magazine, Summer 1990, Vol. 2, Number 2, Pg 61.

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Courtesy of The Northwest Veterans Newsletter