Former Army nurse to share her Vietnam experiences

Since opening its extensive Vietnam War exhibit on Veterans Day 2022, the S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum has presented many Noon Debrief programs featuring Vietnam veterans from South Carolina – infantrymen, sailors, Marines, pilots, intelligence officers and others.

But the live lecture series has never featured any of the women who treated these men under harsh conditions when they were wounded.

That omission will be addressed at noon on Friday, Sept. 26, in the Theater of the Richland Library main location on Assembly Street in Columbia. That’s when Linda Sharp Caldwell, who was known as Capt. Linda Sharp during her service as an Army nurse in the war zone, will present a free lecture, “An Army Nurse in Vietnam.” The program is part of the regular Noon Debrief program, and the public is invited.

Capt. Linda Sharp was a nurse at the 67th Evac Hospital in Qui Nhon from 1967-68. In that extreme environment, she acquired skills a civilian nurse seldom would. And she has fascinating stories to tell.

One of them was featured 20 years later in an episode of NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries.” It was the story 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,” said Baczkowski. “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.

She told part of her story last year as a member of a panel on medical care in the war at the Relic Room. She appeared together with a former Army surgeon and a former soldier who was wounded during the war. This will be her first appearance speaking alone at a Noon Debrief.

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/.