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Womens Army Corps Personnel Arrive in Vietnam

January 15, 1965

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MACV military advisers Major Kathleen I. Wilkes and Sergeant First Class Betty L. Adams issue clothing to the newly-formed South Vietnamese Women’s Army Corps. (National Archives)

Major Kathleen I. Wilkes and Sergeant Betty L. Adams of the U.S. Women’s Army Corps (WAC) arrive in Saigon to train South Vietnam’s Women’s Armed Forces Corps. They are the first WAC representatives to serve in Vietnam since 1963. Many more WAC women later deploy to Vietnam. They serve in clerical, administrative, finance, intelligence, logistics, training, and legal and civil affairs assignments in various U.S. military headquarters.1

1Bettie J. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1990), 241–44, 242n68. Major Kathleen Wilkes and Sergeant Betty Adams arrived in January 1965, but Major Ann Marie Doering had been the first, having served as a MACV headquarters plans officer in 1962-1963. Regarding a corroborating source on Major Ann Doering, see http://www.armywomen.org/wacHistory.shtml (link is external). The Women’s Armed Forces Corps formed in South Vietnam in 1964; Spencer C. Tucker, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, (2nd edition; Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 1346–47.