Tay Ninh Battle

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32011, 11 June 1969, Page 15

Tay Ninh Battle

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) SAIGON, June 10.

At least 101 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese have been killed in fresh fighting in the province of Tay Ninh, which borders on Cambodia. An American military spokesman said that United States infantry units supported by helicopter gunships and heavy artillery attacked a Viet Cong force 11 miles east .of Tay Ninh city yesterday and killed 51 of them. He said that three Americans died and 18 were wounded in the six-hour fight, which ended only two hours before President Nguyen Van Thieu returned to Saigon from his Pacific meeting with President Nixon.

At the same time South Vietnamese paratroopers 11 miles south-west of Tay Ninh city killed 50 Viet Cong in a sweep operation through thick jungles, but lost six dead and 14 wounded themselves, a Government military spokesman reported. United Press International reported that a Communist rocket attack on a military complex at Chu Lai had claimed the life of an American Army nurse, the first woman member of the United States Armed Forces killed in action in the Vietnam war, military spokesmen said today. First Lieutenant Sharon Lane, aged 25, died on Sunday when a Russian-made 122 mm. rocket exploded near a ward of the United States 312th evacuation hospital at Chu Lai, 335 miles north-east of Saigon. Military spokesmen said several other female members of the Armed Forces have been killed in Vietnam but had died in plane accidents.