56. Pan Am in Vietnam

Crystal Cox/Business Insider

During the Vietnam War, Pan Am flew troops in and out of an active war zone on rest and recuperation trips. The flight attendants on those planes didn’t get any special training or preparation to deal with some of the horrors they would witness, and when the war was over, they didn’t receive recognition from the U.S. government. But their role left a lasting impact, even if their contributions were largely forgotten.

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Reported and produced by Julia Press, with Charlie Herman and Sarah Wyman.

Read more:

• Pan Am Historical Foundation, “Pan Am & Vietnam”
• Sarah Rose, “Flight Status”

More episodes

Transcript

Note: This transcript may contain errors.

CHARLIE HERMAN: During the Vietnam War, Pan American, the largest international airline in the United States, was flying planes in and out of an active combat zone. And those planes were staffed with ordinary flight attendants.

KAREN WALKER RYAN: Flying into Saigon, there was nothing glamorous about it. We were in a 707 and we always dove for the runway and, you know, we were flying into a war zone. 

CH: Karen Walker Ryan started as a flight attendant for Pan Am in 1969, right in the middle of the Vietnam War. It was as dangerous as it sounds. 

KWR: You know, youth is, (laughs) we think we’re invincible. There were times though, especially once when the cockpit asked me, ‘Karen, would you go aft and see if we’re taking any fire?’ And that really got my attention.

CH: The pilot thought the plane may have been hit by sniper fire. He sent Karen to the back, to look out the window and check for holes.

KWR: Oh, I was moving fast. It was really, really moving as fast as I could through the plane, to the tail. The plane was full of our soldiers. And of course some people have their hands up, they want something and I’ll go, and you have to say, ‘we’ll be right with you, be right with you.’ You know, you don’t look panicked while you’re on a mission like that because everyone’s looking at your face when you’re a flight attendant. And yeah, my heart was beating fast. I mean, there was a lot of adrenaline that went with that job. There was always a sniper problem, but uh, I didn’t see any fire, I didn’t see any holes in the fuselage. So I went up and told him, he says, ‘Okay, good, it looked like we were taking fire.’

CH: From Business Insider, this is Brought to you by… Brands you know, stories you don’t. I’m Charlie Herman.

Pan Am ushered in the jet age. It offered round-the-world trips and was the airline of choice for celebrities and U.S. presidents. It was so good at its job that the U.S. government contracted with the airline to transport supplies and soldiers during the Vietnam War. That meant Pan Am’s flight attendants were flying into a war zone and catering to troops aboard their planes.

The women of Pan Am aren’t combat veterans. They are civilian airline workers who took a job right in the middle of the biggest war of their generation. They put themselves in danger, and their experiences had a lasting impact, even if what they did has not been remembered.

Producer Julia Press has their story. Stay with us.

ACT I

PAN AM AD: Who ever heard of an airline that goes around the world twice a day, every day?

JULIA PRESS: If you’ve heard of Pan Am, you probably have this image of “the golden age of flying.” And that’s really what it was like! At least that’s what some former flight attendants told me. Back in the ’60s, they were called stewardesses.

JILL SAVINO NIEGLOS: We were the image of America.

HELEN DAVEY: People used to look forward to a Pan Am flight as one of the best parts of their trip.

GAYLE LARSON: Everybody dressed up to go on flights then.

ANNE SWEENEY: Men are in coats and ties, women are dresses.

PAN AM AD: …who ever heard of an airline with 87 first class entrees?

HD: Our meals were catered by Maxime’s of Paris. 

GL: We usually had a prime rib.

JOY MILLER: Chateaubriand. 

KWR: If it was roast beef, we carved it from the cart, at their seat.

JP: And at the heart of all the glitz and glamor, the real face of the airline?

PAN AM AD: …stewardesses from over 50 different countries?

JP: That’s right, the stewardesses. You’re hearing from Helen, Esther, Jane, Gayle, Anne, Jill, Karen, Bonnie, Joy, and Marjorie.

HD: We were living like wealthy people.

GL: Whenever we ran out of black leather gloves, we’d bid a flight to Rome.

ANNE SWEENEY: We got a lot of attention.

BONNIE JONES-MOON: People in the city would come out and watch us get off the airplanes. 

MARJORIE PERRY: To go out with a stewardess was like going out with a movie star. 

PAN AM AD: The airline that’s going places like you’ve never gone before…

JP: Not just anyone could become a Pan Am stewardess. In 1968, only one out of every hundred applicants got accepted to the company’s training school. Marjorie Perry got hired in 1966, but she’d tried, and failed, to work at Pan Am before.

MP: It was hard to get the job. It was, they were very selective.

JP: There were a ton of requirements to work at any airline in these years, but Pan Am had particularly high standards. You needed 2-4 years of college, fluency in a foreign language, 20/20 vision, you couldn’t be married or pregnant. And you had to have a certain…look.

MP: We had to maintain a weight which for me was, my height was five feet five, and my maximum weight fully dressed was 125 pounds. Our hair had to be no longer than your jawbone. Your makeup had to be tastefully done. They had specific colors that we could wear.

JP: It’s also worth mentioning that up until the late 1960s, the vast majority of Pan Am’s stewardesses were white—either American or European. For context, the airline had only started hiring Asian stewardesses in the ’50s and African Americans in the late ’60s.

MP: I look at my graduation class and any other graduation class that’s posted. And I can’t find me. I mean, I can, but I look and I think, ‘is that me?’ Because we all were so cloned, we were so alike. You really followed rules of appearance and didn’t dare digress from them.

JP: Because if you did digress?

MP: God help you if you were not looking the way you should look. (laughs)

JP: Marjorie showed me this “flight attendant appearance advisory” form—it’s basically a list of all the things you could do wrong that your supervisor would fill out if you broke any of the rules.

MP: Okay. So you had three ways that your hair could be wrong. One: non regulation style or length. Two: overall hair appearance unacceptable. Three: they could write it in themselves. Then they have cosmetics. Appear extreme…

JP: Within a year of training, Marjorie had transferred from a base close to home in New York to try something new in Los Angeles. And there, she became one of the flight attendants now eligible to fly trips into and out of Vietnam. They’d be taking troops on rest and recuperation trips, or R&Rs.

AFVN RADIO: Gooooooood…

JP: You’re listening to the Armed Forces Radio…

AFVN RADIO: …morning Vietnam!

JP: And imagine being a troop stationed in Saigon in the late ’60s. You turn on your radio and you hear this chipper announcer inviting you to Hawaii.

AFVN RADIO: …the surf and sun capital of the world. A great place for a five day vacation and a great place to meet your own Honolulu Lulu. So say aloha to the islanders and hello to your R&R officer. He’ll arrange for you to: Go to Hawaii! Hawaii…

JP: Pan Am had struck a deal with the Department of Defense. In 1966, for the cost of just a dollar a month to the U.S. military, Pan Am offered to swoop in and scoop up tired soldiers off the front lines and shuttle them on a little mid-tour break…

HD: Hong Kong, Manila, Guam, Taipei, Sydney…

JP: …to one of a handful of exotic destinations…

JM: Bangkok, Honolulu, Tokyo…

JP: Where they could spend five to seven days of rest and recuperation.

AS: Kuala Lumpur, Taiwan, Singapore…

AFVN RADIO: Straight to Hawaii. For two weeks. Come along with me. Do you wanna come along with me?

JP: Pan Am had flown into war zones before. Some have credited the airline with helping the Allies win World War II. It saw itself as the “chosen instrument” of the U.S. government, the “second line of defense.” 

A 1941 Time magazine article said the airline functioned as a branch of the defense effort, “so effectively that it has sometimes seemed that the rest of the defense effort, still largely composed of creaks and groans in Washington, should become an arm of Pan American.”

SAM SCOTT: Pan Am during this period had always wanted to be the flag carrier for the United States the way that British Airways is for England and Air France is for France.

JP: That is Samuel Scott. He’s a curator of aviation with the SFO Museum at the airport in San Francisco. And he curated an exhibition there called “Flying the Freedom Birds: Airlines and the Vietnam War.” 

SS: Whether or not Pan Am had that official designation, they definitely considered themselves to be representing the sort of goals and ambitions of the United States in the postwar world.

JP: Pan Am was one of several airlines helping to transport troops and cargo into and out of Vietnam. But it was the only one offering these R&R flights. And essentially setting up a mini-airline, sending civilian pilots and flight attendants into a war zone for the sole purpose of giving the troops some R&R time?

SS: That was really unprecedented.

JP: Were you scared to be flying into a war zone?

GL: Not really.

HD: (laughs) You know, when you’re in your twenties and you’re kind of bulletproof.

MP: I think I thought I was invincible.

JP: Pan Am stewardesses based on the West Coast had the option to “bid” for these flights. They were volunteers, and the R&Rs were mixed in with their usual trips to places like Paris and Rome.

JP: You’re flying these commercial flights to places all over the world and then all of a sudden you start flying into Vietnam. Is there any sort of crash course, no pun intended, or training?

HD: (laughs) No. No. I mean, we, we carried in our purses, these pieces of paper that said in case of capture, uh, we’re second lieutenants, under the Geneva Convention.

GL: But I don’t know how protective that would be. I thought it was a little silly as though if the plane were shot down and we were on the ground we would have our handbags with the card in it around.

JP: Wasn’t much of a comfort.

GL: No, I mean, we didn’t have anything like bulletproof vests.

JP: While the R&R flights were getting underway, the U.S. government was plucking men right out of high school and sending them halfway across the world to fight. The goal was to prevent the spread of communism from North to South Vietnam, but many saw it as a losing battle, and others thought America just shouldn’t be involved at all.

By the end of the war, more than one million Vietnamese civilians would be killed. And the U.S. government would draft 2.2 million men between the ages of 18 and 26.

JP: What were your impressions of the soldiers?

HD: Young. They were so young. A lot of them were reading comic books. They were like 18 and probably had never left home.

JANE NOE: A lot of them never flew in an airplane before.

ESTHER NELSON: I can remember thinking that some of them looked like they were in high school. And they looked scared to death.

JP: The situation in Vietnam was tense, but the Pan Am stewardesses knew their mission: to bring a little taste of home to the soldiers in the middle of their Vietnam tour.

JSN: It was a ‘be here now’ thing. You are not in a fox hole. You’re in America because it was a Pan Am plane. And we’re going to have fun.

JP: So they knew what they were supposed to do, but no one told them how to do it. They had to figure it out as they went.

JP: So can you tell me more about what the flights were like?

JSN: Big smile comes on my face. It was a challenge, and our challenge was to make it happy.

JM: We pretended little fashion shows. You know, walking down like you’re on a walkway, ‘and here comes, you know, wearing the latest style…’

JSN: In place of their real chicken, I would serve this plucked rubber chicken. Well, everybody just cracked up.

JP: So you brought a rubber chicken onto the plane for this reason?

JSN: Oh I carried it for five years. 

JP: Just in your hand bag?

JSN: Out, no it was in my tote bag, and I would walk the terminals with it. 

JP: They told jokes, sang Christmas carols, fed the guys steak and ice cream — foods they couldn’t get in Vietnam. 

GL : My friend Susan and I decided we would make chocolate chip cookies, which we did and take them over to Vietnam and then bake them on the plane, figuring the aroma of something from home would make them happy or feel good.

JP: Those frozen dough rolls flew from Sausalito to Tokyo before the smell of fresh-baked cookies could waft through the aisles of a flight out of Saigon.

Some R&R trips brought soldiers even closer to home. Most of the guys who were married or in relationships went to Hawaii, because Pan Am offered reduced price tickets for their wives and girlfriends to meet up with them there.

JSN: Let’s say we were landing at 6:30. They started getting in line to the restroom at five o’clock.

KWR: And they have their toilet kit, want to go in there and brush their teeth and wash their face and comb their hair, maybe shave.

JSN: And then they’d be there 10 minutes or whatever. And I swear to God, Old Spice was the thing at the time. The whole airplane smelled like Old Spice.

GL: When we would get to a destination, like say Hong Kong, some of the guys would say, ‘would you go help me buy a gift for my girlfriend or my wife?’ I remember one guy wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner for his wife. And we talked him into something a little more romantic, like perfume or having clothes made.

JP: But the stewardesses did more than advise on gifts for special someones.

MP: I think everybody was their own little, you know had their own little psychology practice going, trying to reassure them everything was going to be fine.

GL: We heard a lot of stories and confessions and heard about heartaches and girlfriends disappearing.

JP: Pan Am kept custom stationery on board for the troops to write home. Some planned for their hopeful return, others shared what would be their final thoughts.

KWR: These kids were like the cannon fodder of that war. Oh gosh. And then when we’d take them back, they’d get on the airplane and they just didn’t say a word. They were so quiet all the way back to Saigon. They were just kind of staring straight ahead cause they were going back to war and they knew their odds weren’t good. And so it was really very traumatic for me to see them, the difference going outbound and then inbound back to Saigon.

CH: After the break, the stewardesses fly back to the war and the war hits close to home.

ACT II

CH: We’re back. Here again is producer Julia Press.

JP: When Helen Davey started flying R&Rs at age 25, she had a habit of connecting with some of the guys on her flights.

HD: I’d go talk to the most shy, youngest people who seemed very vulnerable and talk to them, because I felt like that would really bolster their confidence, you know? So on my first flight, I got a pen pal because I knew that being able to have a pen pal with a Pan Am stewardess would kind of make him a rock star. And so we started writing.

JP: Helen kept a handful of pen pals during her years flying R&Rs. She talked to the troops about everything but the war. She also called some of their parents back home and gave them updates on how their sons were doing. She was straddling war and peace, which she realized on her first flight into Saigon.

HD: I had seen all this on television, but it’s different when it’s live. It’s just this vision of hell right underneath you.

[VIETNAM SHOOTING CLIP]

JP: And it didn’t always stay underneath you — most of the stewardesses I spoke to had their own dangerous war stories from aboard the planes.

JM: I’ve been in aircraft that have been hit by fire. 

JSN: The tracer bullets were red. You can hear them hitting the airplane like pings.

HD: When we would be going in for the landing, it had to be extremely steep. And they would just dive into the runway because there was shooting all around.

JM: The moment those soldiers deplaned, the next soldiers were racing onto the aircraft. They didn’t even get their luggage removed and the new ones put on because we had to take off, because we were being fired upon.

JP: While the stewardesses were literally dodging bullets, back home, the anti-war movement was gaining momentum on college campuses. In October 1967, just a year after the R&Rs started…

UNIVERSAL NEWSREEL: Thousands of demonstrators, opposed to the Vietnam War, assembled in the nation’s capital for a mass protest…

JP: President Johnson was trying to calm people down. He assured Americans that the U.S. was winning, and the war was close to an end. 

JOHNSON 1967 SPEECH: We are making progress. We are pleased with the results that we’re getting…

JP: But just a few months later…

NBC NEWS: 232 GIs killed and 900 wounded makes one of the heaviest weeks of the Vietnam War. And it is not a week. It is just over two days. The past two days…

JP: The North Vietnamese launched a coordinated attack known as the Tet Offensive. In the middle of the night, an estimated 80,000 fighters attacked and seized dozens of provincial capitals. It was obvious the war was nowhere close to being over.

HD: You started to really feel a completely different attitude on the part of the soldiers.

AS: People started to realize that militarily we weren’t doing well. And the Tet Offensive really brought that home.

JP: The Tet Offensive started in January 1968. From early February to early March, 500 U.S. soldiers were dying each week. Two months after the initial attack, Helen Davey, the stewardess who kept pen pals, remembers it became even clearer that this was not a war the U.S. could win.

HD: I was on the ground in Danang and President Johnson was just making his announcement. 

JOHNSON 1968 SPEECH: With America’s sons in the fields far away…

HD: I will not seek, nor will I accept—

JOHNSON 1968 SPEECH: The nomination of my party for another term as your president.

HD: It was the most shocking thing. 

JP: It felt like proof of how unpopular the war was back home.

HD: So to watch the soldiers boarding after that announcement, they were just confused. I think it was almost as if they thought the country was not backing them in what they had been wanting them to do, that now they were, they were pulling back. And why is this? And what have we been told? I think, for the soldiers, I think it was a huge turning point.

JP: It was a turning point for some of the stewardesses, too. Even at 35,000 feet, it was hard to ignore what was happening on the ground. Helen experienced it through her pen pals.

HD: Every single one of them got killed. Their buddies wrote to me. And so I stopped doing it. I felt like a jinx. Not only that, it just hurt, a lot. I didn’t want to put a face to all those people being killed. That just became too hard for me.

JP: But Helen kept talking to the soldiers aboard her planes. She saw herself as an in-flight therapist, listening to the troops talk about their experiences and share their feelings.

HD: I really, for the first time in my life saw major trauma, absolutely right in front of my eyes in, in the soldiers. You had to be really careful if you woke them up on the airplane because they would startle and they’d reach for their imaginary gun. 

They would be exiting our airplane and you’d wonder how many of them were going to live. Were we the last American girls they were going to see? You could feel it in their eyes. They would just look at you like they were memorizing you.

JP: Helen and many of her fellow stewardesses visited injured troops on the ground in places like Saigon and Guam.

HD: I remember walking into the hospital and there was a bed that was just shaking. And there was this young guy in there. He had no arms, no legs. He was obviously dying. He just kept staring. So the only thing I knew that I could do was get as close to him as I could, and just kind of return his stare. And I don’t know how long we did that. I think it was probably at least an hour. And he kept saying, ‘You have the face of an angel. I’ll never forget your face.’ Well, the truth is, it was me that never forgot his face. I’m sure he died that day.

AFVN 1969: Who’s sorry now… the number one female singer as voted by the men in Vietnam…

AFVN: So here’s some good news. A second R&R has now been authorized for people extending from 90 to 180 days here in Vietnam. Eligibility…

JP: The war continued. Some of the stewardesses recall soldiers doing drugs, or going through withdrawal aboard their flights. The return to the war zone got more and more painful.

JSN: That was a really fricking somber, somber flight. Nobody wanted to go back. Nobody.

KWR: I saw people sitting quietly in their seats sobbing.

GL: One of them in particular was so afraid that he threw up.

JP: What do you think was going through their heads when they’re on a flight back to Vietnam?

JSN: ‘I could be dead tomorrow or the next day. And what is the reason for this war? No good reason.’

JP: In 1969, Pan Am was flying up to 16 R&Rs a day. That same year, Richard Nixon became president. He’d campaigned on a big promise…

NIXON RNC: …bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam…

JP: After he took office, he began a policy of “Vietnamization” — a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. But the war would not be over for another six years. Thousands more U.S. soldiers would die before a ceasefire. And as the stewardesses watched the troops deplane, they knew many of them would not come home alive.

JN: I still see their faces and they all said they’re coming back. ‘We’ll see you later.’ It was so hard, you know, to hear that.

KWR: This one flight, we came into Saigon and I hugged them each as they got off. And I said, I whispered, ‘Don’t be a hero. Come home.’ And this lieutenant (laughs) was really upset at me for doing that. And he, he told me I had to go stay in the cockpit, till everyone disembarked.

CH: After the break, as the war came to an end and American troops withdrew, where did it leave these women who’d helped them?

ACT III: 

CH: We’re back. Here’s Julia.

JP: When Samuel Scott — he’s the curator at the SFO Museum — when he was preparing for his exhibit on airlines in the Vietnam War, he came across some artifacts of the R&R flights.

SS: There’s a very, very poignant series of letters, notes of appreciation, that were written by soldiers to flight attendants on their flights. Some were written on whatever scrap of paper might be on hand. Sometimes it’s the tray liner from their meal tray. Sometimes it’s the barf bag.

JP: Pan Am’s annual report from 1967 included clippings of letters servicemen had written about their R&Rs. One letter, signed by “an extremely happy group of GIs,” said:

LETTER READERS: You, the stewardesses aboard, are not required to give of yourselves by working in a war zone — you are performing a task of your own volition and perhaps that is why your services, your smiles, your quick-to-please attitudes are so meaningful to us.

JP: But there’s another thing that struck Scott in the research he did for his exhibit.

SS: As I started to reach out to other aviation history institutions and, you know, military history archives and other kinds of museums and stuff like that, I realized how little of this material had been collected.

JP: The Pan Am stewardesses weren’t quite military, but weren’t quite civilians. They technically didn’t serve, but they definitely DID serve.

In 1973, the last American combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. Pan Am had been gradually phasing out its R&R flights. But in the last year of the war, the airline was called in to help out one more time.

Thousands of South Vietnamese children had been orphaned by the war, and the U.S. government had launched “Operation Babylift,” a mission to transport some of them to the U.S., where they would wait for adoption.

CBS NEWS: A huge C5 Air Force cargo plane…

JP: The first flight that left was a military plane, with almost 250 kids on board.

CBS NEWS: … first in a government-ordered airlift, crashed in a rice paddy near Saigon just minutes after takeoff.

JP: There had been an issue with the cargo door, but for all anyone knew at the time, the plane had been shot down. Almost half the passengers died, many of them children. 

That day, a Pan Am crew was told: ‘You’re flying in tomorrow.’ One of the people aboard was Karen Walker Ryan, the stewardess who was asked to check her plane for sniper fire.

KWR: We had seen the day before, on the news in the hotel, the picture of that smoking big airplane. And there it was on the runway. We taxied right by it.

JP: Again, Karen had no special training. No fancy equipment.

KWR: So we got all these bottles ready. Just hundreds of bottles of milk. And we had all these cardboard bassinets that were covered in Pan Am blue. 

JP: Over 400 babies and children were loaded onto Karen’s plane. Squeezed into bassinets under each seat, strapped two or three to a seatbelt.

KWR: I’m being handed off all these babies one after another, gotta go down the aisle and find a place to put them. Everyone’s screaming, it’s hot. All these babies are crying. Once we got the engines going and got that plane cooled down, I think out of just sheer exhaustion so many of these babies fell asleep. Then it was kind of frantic going around and finding the babies that needed to go up to the doctors in first class. Everyone was on the hunt, looking for babies. How’s he look, is he breathing, you know, really put your face down real close, make sure you get a breath.

JP: Karen didn’t get any advanced preparation or special payment for her work on the Babylift. She didn’t get a medal for her service that day, or for any of the R&R flights she flew. In fact, as far as anyone knows, none of the Pan Am stewardesses got any formal recognition for the danger they put themselves in. And that danger didn’t just end when the R&R flights did.

KWR: A lot of those guys did come straight out of the field and they were dusted with all kinds of toxins. And there was some issues that I know Pan Am flight attendants addressed later saying ‘We were exposed to Agent Orange. We should be getting the same VA benefits that our GIs got.’ But we never got that.

JP: I spoke to one Pan Am stewardess named Gayle Larson. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease seven years ago, and she believes Agent Orange exposure on the R&Rs could’ve contributed. She wrote a letter to her senators about it, saying that the military acknowledges Agent Orange can cause Parkinson’s.

GL: I’ve read it on their websites, particularly for the VA administration. And I just wanted to call that to their attention that maybe some of the flight attendants as well had uh, contracted some of these health issues because of their work flying in and out of Vietnam.

JP: The letter ends, “If there is help available in the form of medical or financial assistance for former Pan Am flight attendants who were a part of the Vietnam War experience, I would appreciate information on how to go about getting it. I am a single woman with no children, have a limited income and will need more care in the not so distant future than I cannot afford.” She says she never got a reply.

Some of the pilots on these flights received combat pay for flying into a war zone. Some got certificates of recognition and appreciation from the U.S. military. The flight attendants did not.

And it’s not just formal recognition that’s missing. In fact, most people don’t know them for anything beyond the gourmet meals and swanky uniforms. Here’s Helen Davey.

HD: We used to feel quite insulted at the way people would think of us because, they just wanted to hear juicy little stories about what happens between the stewardesses and men and, oh my goodness. It was so much more than that. (laughs)

JP: Aboard those Pan Am planes, Helen learned that she had a knack for connecting to people, for listening to them. Seeing soldiers on hospital beds, watching them jolt up when she woke them from a nap, she was face-to-face with raw, human emotion.

HD: It was like nothing I had ever seen. These were the faces of trauma. And I, I could just feel it, it was thick in the air. I just wanted to help them all.

JP: Helen Davey became Dr. Davey. She studied psychoanalysis and started a career as a therapist with a focus on suffering, grief, and loss.

HD: I learned more about people on airplanes than I have ever learned in school. It was the best education in the world.

JP: In the years after Vietnam, many of the stewardesses kept flying for Pan Am. But the world was changing. At Pan Am and other airlines, stewardesses challenged pregnancy and marriage bans, and weight limits. Black stewardesses pushed for more inclusive hairstyles, so they could wear afros and braids. Male stewards fought to be hired. Even the name of the job itself, “stewardess,” was changed to “flight attendant.”

And life moved on. While all these other hugely important changes were being made, the R&R flights faded into history. The women who flew them didn’t get credit. And for the most part, the ones I spoke to told me, they were okay with that.

JSN: To me, a piece of paper, “rewarding your service for blah, blah, blah,” it doesn’t make any difference. I know what I did. And I know I did a good job when I did that.

JM: Everybody wants to be recognized, but I don’t live my life in the past. I’m grateful for the memories.

GL: I still view it as something I did for the war effort, something positive.

MP: We got great pleasure and satisfaction knowing that we were doing our job and we were helping put a smile on the soldiers’ faces that we were taking back and forth.

JP: But even if they say they don’t need the credit, these women deserve it. We should know who they are.

MARJORIE PERRY: My name is Marjorie Perry.

JOY MILLER: I’m Joy Miller.

ESTHER NELSON: I’m Esther Nelson.

JILL NIEGLOS SAVINO: My name is Jill and it was Savino at the time and my last name is Nieglos now.

GAYLE LARSON: My name is Gayle Larson.

ANNE SWEENEY: I’m Anne Sweeney.

JANE NOE: My name is Jane Fujioka Noe.

HELEN DAVEY: My name is Dr. Helen Davey.

BONNIE JONES-MOON: My name is Bonnie Jones-Moon.

KAREN WALKER-RYAN: I’m Karen Walker Ryan. I was a stewardess with Pan American.

GAYLE LARSON: And was one of the gals who flew R&R flights in and out of Vietnam in the late 1960s.

CREDITS

CH: Those are the women of Pan Am. Julia Press reported and produced this episode. With me, Charlie Herman, and Sarah Wyman.

This is the first episode of our new season, and we’re really excited to be back! We heard from a lot of you between seasons, so thank you so much for your emails. Like Chris, who called us on a long drive to point out that green M&Ms also have um, a very specific connotation. Chris, you should totally check out the election posters we mentioned in our M&Ms episode. There’s a lot there. We’ll put a picture in our next newsletter.

And thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts about the Tampax episode in our Facebook group. As someone born in Oakland and a longtime fan of the Oakland A’s, one of my favorites was from Howard, who said at his school, the boys watched a movie about the A’s winning the 1973 World Series while the girls watched their sex ed video. And he was in Pittsburgh! He wasn’t even an A’s fan!

Keep those messages coming. You can email us at btyb@insider.com, join the Facebook group, and be sure to leave a good old review wherever you’re listening. We love hearing from you, and it really helps get the word out about the show.

Special thanks to Jeff Kriendler, Doug Miller at the Pan Am Historical Foundation, Nancy McAllister at World Wings International, John Luetich and Linda Freire at the Pan Am Museum Foundation, Bob Ruseckas, Al Topping, Don Cooper, and John and Carla Marshall. Thanks also to Sarah Rose, who wrote a really great article about the Pan Am stewardesses and the Vietnam War for the Washington Post. Her article is called “Flight Status.” Also, thanks to our soldier letter-readers John Dietrich, Ethan Geismar, and our very own Bill Moss.

The news reports you heard came from a Universal Newsreel, NBC, and CBS News. Armed Forces Vietnam Network radio clips from the Pan Am Historical Foundation, OldRadioPrograms.us, and the Internet Archive.

Thanks also to Claire Banderas and Tyler Murphy at Insider. Bill Moss is our sound designer. Music is from Audio Network. John DeLore and Casey Holford composed our theme.

Micaela Blei is our editor. Dan Bobkoff is the podfather. Sarah Wyman is our executive producer.

Brought to you by… is a production of Insider Audio.

This information was first published on https://www.businessinsider.com/brought-to-you-by-podcast-btyb-pan-american-vietnam