2001 – A US Navy EP-3 surveillance plane with 24 aboard collided with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea and was forced to land on China’s Hainan island. The fighter jet crashed. Chinese pilot Wang Wei parachuted out of his F-8 jet but had not been found. Zhao Yu, a 2nd pilot, later blamed the US plane banked and hit Wei’s plane.
2002 – A SF Court of Appeals ordered the US government to pay out millions of dollars in retroactive disability benefits to Vietnam veterans with prostate cancer, who were exposed to Agent Orange.
2002 – Eight Army soldiers and two Air Force pararescuers are killed when an Army MH-47 Special Forces Chinook helicopter crashes in the southern Philippines, in the ocean waters just off the coast of the south-central city of Dumaguete.
2003 – In the 14th day of Operation Iraqi Freedom American soldiers on the road to Baghdad fought bloody street-to-street battles with militants loyal to Saddam Hussein. The US opened the assault on Karbala.
2003 – Pfc. Jessica Lynch (19), part of the 507th Maintenance Company captured on Mar 23, was rescued in a U.S. commando raid on an Iraqi hospital in Nasiriyah. 11 bodies were also recovered and 8 were identified as US personnel. It was later reported that Iraqi troops had already left the hospital. Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, a former Iraqi lawyer, disclosed Lynch’s location to US forces and provided detailed information prior to her rescue.
2003 – In Jordan authorities said they had foiled two recent Iraqi terror plots, including one by Iraqi diplomats allegedly planning to contaminate water supplies to Jordanian and US troops on Jordan’s desert border with Iraq.
2004 – Afghanistan and its neighbors agreed to cooperate in stemming the country’s drug exports after donors pledged $8.2 billion in new reconstruction aid.
2009 – Croatia and Albania join NATO.
2009 – A Computer virus called Conficker was spread through millions of computers, getting onto their computers and destroying files, and sharing information. This was supposed to be an April Fools’ Day Joke.
2009 – The United States’ World War II motor ship City of Rayville is located near Australia. The SS City of Rayville was the first American vessel sunk during World War II, and was sunk by a German mine just off Cape Otway, Australia. This field of approximately 100 mines had already claimed the British steamer SS Cambridge, less than 24 hours previously off Wilsons Promontory.
2011 – After protests against the burning of the Quran turn violent, a mob attacks a United Nations compound in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of thirteen people, including eight foreign workers.
https://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/april-1/
