MAGGIE FAZELI FARD

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Keeping a loved one’s memory alive

by Maggie Fazeli Fard

Published in Community Life

The details of Eleanor Grace Alexander’s six-month service in the U.S. Army are well known, and not particularly
unique. The lost more than 58,000 servicemen and women in Vietnam, and scrolling through Internet pages
littered with bios, the dates of birth, service and death start to bleed together, becoming nearly indistinguishable.

The body of 27-year-old Alexander was recovered in Binh Dinh, South Vietnam, days after the River Vale
resident’s plane crashed into the side of a mountain on Thursday, Nov. 30, 1967. Alexander, a captain in the
U.S. Army and an operating room nurse, was one of five medical personnel who died in the crash. She is one of
just eight female operating room nurses who died in the Vietnam War. She is the only woman from New Jersey
killed in action. She was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star…

Alexander, like so many, is lost in a gruesome torrent of facts. Except to the people who knew her.

In life

Walter Haan and Alexander were both 4 years old when they met in September 1940. They lived across the
street from each other in Ozone Park, Queens, where Haan lived with his parents and little sister, Susan, and
Alexander lived with her parents and little brother, Francis. They attended kindergarten and first grade together at
PS 100. The pair played a lot.

“I remember once we got the idea to grow some apple trees,” wrote Haan in 2006. His is one of a handful of
“remembrances” posted about Alexander on Internet sites such as Virtual Wall, New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’
Memorial and the Library of Congress.

“We extracted the seeds from apples and planted them in the bed of shrubs that surrounded her house. Every
day for a while, Eleanor and I would crouch next to where the seeds had been planted, waiting for them to pop
up. The seeds never had a chance
because they never saw the sun.”

Haan and Alexander also got into

trouble. Actually, it was Alexander who
got Haan into trouble.

“The bathroom for kindergarten was one

room for both sexes,” continued Haan,
“two stalls with openings at the bottom
and top. One day Eleanor and I were in
the two adjoining stalls and I took it
upon myself to peek under the stall wall
to see what she was doing. She turned
me in to the teacher.”

Haan and Alexander remained friends

through thick and thin. After Haan’s
family moved to Nassau County on
Long Island in 1947, their families Photos courtesy of Walter Haan Seventeen-year-old Eleanor Grace Alexander of
would visit each other for dinners and River Vale is pictured lounging merrily in a hammock in September 1957 at the

summer vacations at the Haan’s King’s summer cabin of her childhood friend Walter Haan and his family. In the background
are Alexander’s mother, Gladys, left, and Walter Haan, Sr. playing a game of croquet
Park cabin in Suffolk County , where
on a field of sand and grass clumps. Ten years later, w hile serving as a nurse at a
the families would duke it out over hospital in South Vietnam, Alexander w ould be killed in a plane crash.
“some wild croquet games on the top of
a sandy hill with no grass. Our favorite thing to do was shoot each other’s balls into the woods. Eleanor was an
attractive brunette and a lot of fun.”

After Alexander and Haan went off to college – both attended schools in Upstate New York – they made time to
meet at rest stops on the New York Thruway when heading home for Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations.
After college, the childhood friends drifted apart. Haan served in the Peace Corps for two years before being
drafted into the Army, serving mostly in for an additional two years. Alexander, who had graduated from nursing
school, began her career as an operating room nurse, but longed to enlist in the military and ship out to
Vietnam.

“The last time I saw Eleanor was in 1967,” wrote Haan. “We were both still single. She was at my parents’ house
with her mother and I expressed concern about what she was doing. I told her if she wanted to give back, it was
safer to join the Peace Corps than volunteer to go to Vietnam. She replied that she knew that but wanted to
make good money while serving her country.”

Alexander joined the Army Nurse Corps in May 1967, attained the rank of captain, and began her tour in on June
6, 1967 as a nurse at the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, about a half-mile from the South China
Sea.
Harold David Parks was an enlisted truck driver with the 85th from
1967 to 1968.

“I had no conversational contact with Captain Eleanor Alexander,

who was a nurse and officer,” posted Parks to the New Jersey
Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Web site. “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.”

Parks remembers a woman who was “always smiling and bright-

eyed” with “full, red-auburn hair that fell almost to her shoulders.”

“Also, from memory,” he wrote, “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.”

In death

Rhona Marie Knox Prescott met Alexander in 1967, in Qui Nhon.

Both were nurses, receiving and stabilizing American, Allied and
enemy soldiers for transport home, or to be handed over to the
South Vietnamese. But as Alexander outranked her by a few
months, Prescott came to think of her as “supernurse.”
In 1968, Prescott began to writing a letter to Alexander’s mother,
but never completed it. More than 20 years later, in 1989, she Eleanor Alexander is pictured w ith childhood friend

finally managed a letter to Francis, Alexander’s little brother. But it Walter Haan in January 1957.

wasn’t enough. In 1991, she wrote to Alexander herself.

“It is you to whom I must speak,” Prescott wrote, her words posted on the Library of Congress Web site. “You
told me many times,” she wrote, “that you wished you had the chance to do what I did before Qui Nhon – work
under tents, get the casualties right off the choppers, be in the middle of the heat. When they assigned me to
the emergency surgical team, you wanted my spot… When they called but couldn’t find me, you grabbed my
gear and jacket, and went in my place to Pleiku, near the intense fighting and lots of casualties. When I found
out, I was secretly glad for you.”

The mission ended six weeks later. On the return trip to Qui Nhon, the aircraft was met by low clouds, rain and
limited visibility. The pilot accepted a divert, but crashed into a mountainside. Everyone on board – four
aircrewmen and 22 passengers, including two civilians and Captain Eleanor Grace Alexander – were killed. Their
bodies were recovered several days later after the rains subsided. Bullet holes were found in the fuselage of the
plane.

“Did you die instantly? Were you in pain? What did you think?” asks Prescott , who was in a plane behind
Alexander’s, on the same flight path. “Why did I survive and you die? Eleanor, I cry when I go to the [Vietnam
Veteran’s Memorial] Wall. I cry about your death. I think about it a lot, twenty-three years later…
“As I marveled at your organization and inner peace, you envied my experience in that Clearing Company, doing
surgery, I.V.’s, debridement, everything. You told me you wish you had the chance to do something like I did –
really significant. I always thought that you did your job at the 85th better than I did at the 616th.

“Well, however it really was, Eleanor, you got your chance before you died. It was because of me… both of those
things, you getting your chance and you dying, not really, I tell myself, but yet, really.”

Epilogue

This year, on May 27, the day after Memorial Day, Westwood Administrator Robert Hoffmann made a strange
discovery. Amidst the pile of borough mail, there was a postcard. It had come from Belgium.

“I am very interested in the Vietnam War,” wrote the author, Kenneth Heselwood of Brussels, Belgium, in
squared-off cursive. “Via the Net, I discovered that: Captain Eleanor Grace Alexander, stationed at the 85th Evac
and died November 30, 1967 at the age of 27 when her plane crashed in Nam. She was from Westwood, NJ.

“I am writing to pay tribute to Captain Alexander who died at only 27 for the freedom in South East Asia. I
respect her eternal memory. I hope you shall accept this humble letter of respect from Belgium?”

Nearly a month later, Hoffmann replied to Heselwood, sending him not only a letter of thanks but also a packet of
additional research compiled by Westwood Library Director Martha Urbiel and Special Assistant Jennifer Moretti.
Hoffmann also forwarded Heselwood’s postcard and the librarians’ research to the Township of River Vale.
According to River Vale Administrator Robert Gallione, the township will plan a special Veterans Day service in
Alexander’s honor.

It is 64 years since Walter Haan met Alexander; he hasn’t forgotten her, and he is happy to know that his fallen
friend will not soon be forgotten by the world.

“Thank you again for reminding everyone about Eleanor’s service,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It is my pleasure to
assist in keeping Eleanor’s memory alive.”

Tagged: Community Life, feature, history, new jersey, pascack valley, river vale

Published:
July 16, 2008 – 10:38 PM

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