For these flight attendants, there were no parades after the war, nor much movement to celebrate their role or their place as accidental pioneers in military history.
In the winter of 1968, a Boeing 707, heavy with American troops and body bags, took rounds of antiaircraft fire immediately upon takeoff from Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. At once, a right engine burst into flames. It was the middle of the Tet Offensive, when coordinated Viet Cong raids pounded American installations in South Vietnam.
For a small and unrecognized group of women, now mostly in their 70s, such high-drama, meet-cute moments are the personal and pedestrian memories of a war that otherwise divided a nation. These Pan Am stewardesses were volunteers and got no special training for flying into war, though their pilots were mostly World War II or Korean War vets. Their aircraft routinely took ground fire. The pilots, all male, received hazardous-duty pay for flights into the combat zone. The women aboard did not.
The Vietnam airlift crews got no medals or congressional citations for their work, though they were a necessary part of national security. There were no parades, nor much movement to celebrate their role or their place as accidental pioneers in military history. Where airlift crews for the 1991 Gulf War were celebrated with service medals from the Air Force, the pilots and flight attendants of the Vietnam War have not been similarly recognized.
Some volunteered to staff the airlift through the duration of the conflict, from the troop buildup under President Lyndon B. Johnson to the very last flights out of a surrendering Saigon in April 1975. No other women — and few men — can say they saw as much of the Vietnam War for as long.Former stewardesses repeat the refrain: Despite the horrors of war, flights out of Vietnam were joyous, the happiest places in the Pacific; GIs often broke into applause on takeoff.
Stewardesses could be as bawdy as they were compassionate: Some cabin crews taped suggestive magazine ads to the tray tables, so when the trays were brought down for meal service, soldiers were greeted with images of scantily clad models in bikinis. On one flight, the purser announced a surprise: “Dessert is going to be served topless,” recalls John Marshall, a former Pan Am flight engineer, now an aviation safety inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration in St. Louis.
A white passenger airplane with a big blue ball on its tail was a standing target, visible above the tree line. The airfield at Danang was littered on either side with downed military aircraft and blown-up trucks. When the city fell in April 1975, Duong Iwafuchi evacuated Saigon on the very last commercial flight out, a “mercy flight” carrying the Vietnamese families of Pan Am personnel as well as Vietnamese orphans. Her five sisters escaped on that flight by wearing surplus Pan Am uniforms.As jets came to dominate the R&R service, troops could take leave as far away as Australia and Hawaii.
Over the base loudspeakers, President Johnson announced a halt to naval and air attacks in Vietnam. The GIs looked up from the tarmac as the president spoke. Stewardesses stood still.
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