Army nurse to tell about her service in Vietnam

The Vietnam exhibit at the S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum pays tribute to all sorts of South Carolinians who served honorable in a variety of ways in Southeast Asia. A lot of them had donned the uniforms because they were drafted.

But many others in the exhibit were volunteers, people who chose to serve. One of them was Capt. Linda Sharp, a former Army Nurse Corps member.

Capt. Sharp, now known as Linda Sharp Caldwell, will tell about her Vietnam experiences in a free lecture at noon on Friday, March 20, at the Cayce-West Columbia Branch of Lexington County Public Library at 1500 Augusta Road in West Columbia.

“An Army Nurse in Vietnam” is part of the Relic Room’s regular Noon Debrief program, and the public is invited.

Linda grew up in a military family, and she joined the Army Student Nurse program at the end of her sophomore year at the University of San Francisco where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing.

After graduation, she underwent six weeks of Army training at the Medical Field Service School at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. Her initial duty station was the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, where she worked on a male neurosurgery unit.

After hearing the stories of her patients who returned from Vietnam, she decided to see for herself what it was like so she volunteered to go to Vietnam. She arrived in Saigon on Thanksgiving Day 1967, and shortly thereafter arrived at 67th Evac Hospital in Qui Nhon, on the coast of the South China Sea.

She was soon promoted to head nurse. She was only 23 years old.

Nurses at the 67th Evac worked 12 hours a day, six days a week. She hadn’t been there long when the job got a lot harder. In February 1968, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive throughout South Vietnam.

“There were some scary times,” she would later tell the alumni publication at her alma mater. “Our hospital was right next to the airfield runway, which was convenient to bring in the wounded by helicopter, but it made us very vulnerable.” For a couple of days, “We admitted patients by candlelight and had to sleep under our beds with helmets on.”

“We sometimes received a significant influx of patients and it was all hands on deck; it was hectic. Our mission was to stabilize patients to leave the country and schedule their departure.”

One of those wounded men would always remember her as the woman who saved his life.

That story – one of many Capt. Sharp brought back from the war – was featured 20 years later in an episode of NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries.” It was the harrowing tale of Jim Baczkowski, a soldier whose company was overwhelmed by a vastly larger force of North Vietnamese regulars on August 29, 1968. He was taken to the 67th with his leg blown off. The wound was infected, he had a fever of 105 degrees, and he had lost six pints of blood.

Upon his arrival at the hospital, “My first conscious memory was looking up and seeing this blonde lady in fatigues helping me,” he said on the TV program.

That was Capt. Linda Sharp. She “was the only good memory I had,” Baczkowski would later say. “She had something about her that made you feel comfortable, warm… want to live and go back home when you were dying.”

Mrs. Caldwell will tell the rest of that story, and others, during her lecture.

She and her husband live today in Aiken, and both are involved in several veteran organizations.

About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum

Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.