DOB/DOD: September 18, 1940 (Riverdale, NJ) – November 30, 1967 (Qui Nhon); 27 years old
MARITAL STATUS: Unmarried
ENLISTMENT: April 5, 1967
MILITARY OCCUPATIONAL SPECIALTY: 3443 – Operating Room Nurse
SERVICE NUMBER: N2331728
ENLISTMENT DATE: April 8, 1967
TOUR START DATE: June 6, 1967
UNIT: 85th Evac Hospital, 55th Medical Group, 44th Medical Brigade
CASUALTY LOCATION: Binh Dinh Province, South Vietnam
THE WALL: Panel 31E, Line 8
DECORATIONS: Awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Merit.
FAMILY: Born to Francis H. Sr. (1907-1962) and Gladys F. Johnson Alexander (1908-1987). One brother, Francis H. Jr. (1943-2021).
CIRCUMSTANCES: On November 30, 1967, a U.S. Air Force C-7B (#62-4175) from the 458th Tactical Airlift Squadron (TAS), 483rd Tactical Airlift Wing (TAW) at Cam Ranh Air Base, hit a mountain about 5 miles south of Qui Nhon after a bad weather missed approach. On the initial approach to Qui Nhon, the pilot was advised that the weather at the airfield had fallen below the safety minimum. He replied that he would proceed to Nha Trang, where the weather conditions were better. Enroute to Nha Trang, the aircraft hit a mountain at 1,850 feet. The presence of low clouds and rain had reduced visibility to about two miles. It took search and rescue teams five days to locate the crash site in the dense jungle. Twenty-six people were killed in the crash. The four lost crewmen included Maj Thomas D. Moore Jr., Maj William J. Clark III, SSgt Arturo Delgado-Marin, and SSgt Stanley J. Yurewicz. Two Air Force passengers and 18 U.S. Army personnel, including two U.S. civilians, were also killed in the accident. Five of the passengers were medical personnel. They had been temporarily assigned to a Pleiku hospital and were returning to Qui Nhon. They included Capt Eleanor G. Alexander, 1st Lt Jerome E. Olmsted, 1st Lt Hedwig D. Orlowski, 1st Lt Kenneth R. Shoemaker, and Specialist 5 Class Phillip A. Ogas. Other lost personnel included SSgt Edward O. Bilsie, Specialist 4th Class Bobby G. Brown, A1C Daryl L. Davis, PFC William R. Godwin, Sgt William E. Groves, Sgt Whyley E. Josh, SFC Bobby D. Likens, 1st Lt Norman F. Loeffler Jr., SSgt Jose L. Miranda-Ortiz, SSgt Clarence L. Palmer, Cpl Jack Rogers, Specialist 4th Class Lawrence D. Snyder, Sgt Teddy Waxman, PFC Libert J. Weldon Jr., and PFC Edward J. Williamson. [Taken from forest-lawn.com, coffeltdatabase.org, and findagrave.com]
D’Youville College of Nursing, Buffalo, New York, Class of 1961
From njvvmf.org
Eleanor Grace Alexander was born on September 18, 1940, in New York, to Mr. and Mrs. Francis H. Alexander. Her home of record is River Vale, NJ. She had one brother, Frank. She attended St. Michael’s High School in Manhattan, graduating in 1957. Eleanor later graduated from D’Youville College School of Nursing in Buffalo, NY, in 1961 with her BS. She worked at Madison Hospital for six years in upstate New York and moved to River Vale, NJ, to be closer to her family.
Eleanor joined the Army Nurse Corps in May 1967 and attained the rank of Captain. After finishing her basic training at the Brooke Army Medical Center in Houston, she was placed at the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, in June 1967. Alexander was killed on November 30, 1967. She was with twenty-six other people in a transport plane that crashed three miles south of their station.
She is the only woman from New Jersey killed in action. The town of River Vale has dedicated a park in her honor.
Since I was a young enlisted truck driver with the 85th Evacuation Hospital during 1967-68, I had no conversational contact with Captain Eleanor Alexander, who was a nurse and officer. However, I do remember her well because of her beauty, and I noticed her because she was a subject of admiring conversation by all of my enlisted buddies. She was a remarkable looking young woman who was always smiling and bright-eyed. If I remember correctly, she had full, red-auburn hair that fell almost to her shoulders. Also, from memory, she was probably about 5’4” or possibly taller, slim, with an excellent figure, which naturally attracted the devoted attention of we lonely young guys.
When word came that we had lost Captain Alexander, everyone was very sad. We had lost other young men from our unit, and I have to say that we had hardened ourselves against such losses and expected them. Captain Alexander, however, was different, and her loss was felt by everyone, and grief cast a cloud over the 85th for a day or two. I think that after we lost her, we all realized that we had idealized and loved her a little, and that she had made our lives in Vietnam a bit more bearable.
The 85th Evacuation Hospital at Qui Nhon, where Captain Eleanor Alexander lived and worked, received seriously wounded Americans, allied, and enemy soldiers. The doctors and nurses attempted to stabilize patients enough for transport home, or, in the case of enemy POWs, to be turned over to the South Vietnamese for internment. This is what Captain Alexander, other nurses, doctors, and medics did. Nurses and doctors had a separate enclosed compound made up of wood and screen-wire buildings, with rooms much like the layout of a motel. This was located near Quonset hut hospital wards, some of which were air-conditioned. This is where patients were treated and recovered. The Quonset huts were connected by a long, tin-roof-covered cement walk that ran beside them. On the east end of this walk is where the wounded were triaged and admitted. On the opposite end, to the right side of this walk, was a helicopter landing pad, where choppers landed day or night, depending on how heavy the fighting in the surrounding countryside was. We could always tell how the war was going by the level of activity at the landing pad, and on rare occasions, everyone had to carry stretchers when helicopters landed one after another. We were located about 1/4 mile from the main airstrip at Qui Nhon. The 85th was located about 1/2 mile from the South China Sea. There was a beach, but it was pretty dirty. You could buy large shrimp from local fishermen and cook them yourself, which we often did. The entire area was quite beautiful and exotic, except for the war going on, and the poverty of the people who had been displaced by the war, who arrived in Qui Nhon with no means of making a living.
The area streets and airport around the old 85th compound still exist today, and can be seen on Internet maps and photos of present-day Qui Nhon.
Researched history and events that contributed to Captain Alexander’s death: The following is according to Troung Nhu Tang, Justice Minister for the Viet Cong, and came from his book Vietcong Memoir:
In late 1967, North Vietnamese General Giap talked the Viet Cong into increasing attacks and planning a unified offensive against the Americans. In his memoirs, Trong Nhu Tang, Justice Minister for the VC, explains how half of the VC were non-communists and nationalists and were a potential threat to the future success of the North Vietnamese unification of Vietnam. General Giap convinced (and goaded) the Viet Cong that the Americans could be beaten with unified attacks. These raids and attacks began to occur around November 1967, about the time Captain Eleanor Alexander flew to Pleiku to help with the wounded there, and they began occurring all over Vietnam. The VC finally did attack in a large, coordinated, unified effort during the Tet Offensive of 1968, a little over a month after Eleanor Alexander was killed. The VC lost around 100,000, and the Americans had around 20,000 killed or wounded. This action effectively destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force, and the North Vietnamese Army took over the war against the Americans after this point. This is what General Giap intended, so he would not be faced with political divisions or civil war after the Americans were driven out of Vietnam.
Written by Harold David Parks, Vietnam Veteran
Sources: Frank Alexander (brother), Harold David Parks (Vietnam Veteran), and NJVVMF.
12/17/2024
From Time Magazine on May 27, 2021
Captain Eleanor Alexander, 27, joined the Army after assurances that they would send her to Vietnam. But once there, she was restless working in the relative calm of a Qui Nhon hospital and sought a temporary transfer to Pleiku to be near the fierce fighting of the Battle of Dak To. Alexander wrote to her family that “for the past three days I’ve been running on about four hours sleep…I love it.”
Her letters, which were later excerpted for a newspaper article in her home state of New Jersey, took on a more serious tone as the days wore on. “Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything from me too often,” she wrote on Nov. 24, 1967. “It’s going to be a trying time up here.”
From The Providence Journal on November 10, 2013
By Leslie Brody
Heartbreak turns into pride during tribute to nurse killed in Vietnam
HACKENSACK, N.J. — For more than a decade, Frank Alexander ignored invitations to come to the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial to honor his sister, the state’s only woman to be killed in action in that brutal war.
Capt. Eleanor Grace Alexander was a nurse who died in late 1967 when her transport plane smashed into a Vietnamese mountain in the fog. She was one of 1,563 New Jersey casualties whose names are inscribed in the memorial’s circle of black granite panels.
“I really wanted to have nothing to do with it; I’d lost enough already,” her brother said. “What a waste the war was.”
His reluctance changed a year ago, however, when he learned that his sister’s sacrifice had made a deep impression on another generation. Tour guides told him that when student groups visited the memorial in Holmdel, New Jersey, girls were so taken by the young nurse’s story that they often made rubbings of her name.
“That was quite moving to me,” Alexander said. “It moved me enough to get involved.”
And so when his sister was honored by a new monument of her own in late September, Alexander was there to unveil it. At 70, he said the plaque made his family “feel proud and humbled.”
Eleanor Alexander was among eight American women — all nurses — who lost their lives in the line of duty in Vietnam. Nicknamed “Rocky,” she was flying back to her hospital base in Qui Nhon when her plane crashed on Nov. 30, 1967. She had just turned 27. A fiancé, a wedding dress, and a cedar hope chest full of Fieldcrest towels were waiting for her at home.
She was buried in River Vale, N.J., where she lived with her mother before enlisting. A park in town bears her name.
The special recognition of Alexander’s sacrifice comes as women are taking on more roles on the battlefield: The Defense Department announced this year that it was gradually lifting the military’s official ban on women in combat. In reality, women frequently found themselves in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan; at the time of the January announcement, defense officials said 152 women in uniform died there in the past decade.
More than 100 guests, including Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno, gathered next to the Vietnam Era Museum & Educational Center for the 15th anniversary of its opening near the memorial. A color guard’s salute started the short ceremony. John Nugent, a center trustee who served in Vietnam, said it was fitting to have the plaque for Alexander in the Women Veterans Meditation Garden.
“May we always pause to think and reflect,” he said, “before we commit the American military to wars in foreign lands.”
Some Vietnam veterans were teary. Nugent said later that some were suffering now from pain they had tried to stifle for decades.
“There’s a lot of post-traumatic stress syndrome among veterans in their 60s and 70s,” he said. “They’re retired and going back over their lives, and that’s surfacing.”
In younger days, he said, “We buried it. We sucked it up. We moved on. But it was a horrible scar.”
Eleanor Alexander was an operating room supervisor for cosmetic surgeries in Manhattan when she volunteered for service in Vietnam.
“She wanted to help,” said her brother, a retired Prudential executive. “She went in with a great deal of enthusiasm, and as her tenure progressed, she became less enchanted. She was spending more time helping the wounded enemy than the U.S. force, and that bothered her a lot.”
Five months after she arrived, she had her chance to treat more Americans when fierce fighting broke out in Pleiku, about 60 miles from her base. When another surgical nurse was summoned for an emergency team heading there couldn’t be located right away, Alexander grabbed the colleague’s gear and jacket and took her place.
“This is going to be a short note because for the first time we are really busy,” she wrote in a letter to her mother that November 13. “The troops around Pleiku are getting hit quite badly. … For the past three days, I’ve been running on about four hours’ sleep. Funny thing is, I love it.”
Two weeks later, Alexander’s plane crashed with 26 people aboard. Pat Julian Vellucci of Paramus was a staff sergeant nearby. Sent to recover the victims, the 20-year-old recited a prayer over her body.
“She was a goddess to us for volunteering for Army nursing,” Vellucci said. “She was our Florence Nightingale.”
From The VVMF “Wall of Faces”
November 6, 2024 — Eleanor worked for years as an operating room nurse at Madison Avenue Hospital in Manhattan. She was an exceptional professional, completely devoted to her task in helping surgeons accomplish their work. We were all sad when she left the hospital to offer her knowledge and skill to help injured warriors in Vietnam, though we understood she was driven by her inner needs to lend aid. That she volunteered was a testament to her bravery.
The main OR in Madison Avenue Hospital bore her name. She was a magnificent human being.
Rest in peace.
Imre Weitzner Jr., MD- Radiologist
January 21, 2014 — I served with Eleanor in Qui Nhon, Vietnam. We were not good friends, just fellow officers who would say hello and occasionally have a drink after work. She was gracious, hard-working, dedicated to her patients, and dare I say, quite pretty. When the accident happened and she and several other members of our unit were killed, the morale at the hospital was low for a long, long time. I will always remember Eleanor for her quiet professionalism. She was an excellent Army officer and nurse, and I am sure that many soldiers benefited greatly from her expert care. Rest in peace, Eleanor. Maybe we will meet again someday.
Fred McLain
Honored with a plaque in the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, 1 Memorial Lane, Holmdel, New Jersey.
Buried in St Andrews Cemetery, 266 Cedar Lane in Westwood, New Jersey; Section 28, Plot 2, Grave 4. Photo from FindAGrave.com and contributor DanaC.
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