Captain Linda Sharp Caldwell
Army Nurse Corps
Walter Reed Medical Center
67th EVAC Hospital, Qui Nhon, Republic of Vietnam
Letterman Army Medical Center
1966-1969
Army Nurse Corps
Walter Reed Medical Center
67th EVAC Hospital, Qui Nhon, Republic of Vietnam
Letterman Army Medical Center
1966-1969
“They were just so grateful for all of the care you gave them. The attention. Just listening to them and their stores of what it was like.”
Linda Sharp was born in May of 1944 in Yuma, Arizona. Linda came from a military family. “My grandfather was in World War I in the trenches in France. My dad was a career Air Force officer, and he was in World War II.” Her dad started his military career as an enlisted soldier but went on to earn his bachelor’s degree and became an officer, eventually retiring as a major. Being a military family, Linda and her sister moved frequently following their dad’s career. The family spent time in Texas, Tennessee, France and England.
Linda graduated from Rancho High School in Las Vegas on her birthday, May 31, 1962. She headed off to the University of San Francisco to study nursing. “School was expensive even then and I looked around for what I could do” to help defray the cost. One day recruiters from the Army and the Navy spoke to her nursing class about enlisting in exchange for tuition. “I listened to the recruiters, and I was intrigued because they would pay for my last two years of college: tuition, books, lab fees, everything. In exchange I would give them three years of active duty.” Linda liked what she heard and raised her right hand and joined the Army. “Being on a ship…that didn’t appeal to me.”
In December of her senior year, Linda was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and that gave her a bump in her monthly stipend. “I was in ‘high cotton’ here. I could buy a dress every now and then.” After graduation, Linda took the state nursing board exams and passed. In August, she was sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. There she spent six weeks going through bootcamp and learned the basics of military life, including how to shoot a rifle. The Army showed them how to be gentlemen and gentlewomen and how to wear the uniform. “We went to Camp Bullis on the outskirts of San Antonio and spent two nights in a tent and learned how to use a field telephone and how to shoot a 45.” Linda also recalled attending the goat lab where a goat was anesthetized and the students learned to perform a tracheotomy… “Just in case you ever had to do it, which I fortunately never had to.”
While at Fort Sam Houston the enlistees were given a form to list their top choices for their first duty station. Linda had never lived on the East Coast and wanted to see what it was like. She chose the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC as her first duty station. “I got my first choice…and was assigned to a female medicine unit” that provided care primarily for the military wives. “While I loved it, I really came into the Army to take care of soldiers.” She mentioned this to her supervisor and was ultimately transferred to male neurosurgery. “Ninety-nine percent of the patients were paraplegics, quadriplegics, or head injuries from Vietnam. The patients would tell me their stories about Vietnam and it was intriguing.”
Linda was promoted to 1st Lieutenant during her time at Water Reed. She was also contacted by the Department of Army Nurses Corps and was told to report to their headquarters for an interview. During the interview she learned they wanted her to become a nurse recruiter. She found the idea appealing but to qualify she would need a year at a foreign duty station. She was told her options were Germany, Japan, Hawaii or anywhere she’d like to go. Linda volunteered for Vietnam. There were not many nurses volunteering for duty in Vietnam and she recalled when she reached Vietnam many nurses didn’t want to be there.
“My dad I think was very proud. My mother was horrified but both were very supportive of my decision. My mother would send care packages and my grandmother wrote letters.” There were no cell phones but the latest technology at the time was miniature reel to reel tape recorders. Families would record messages and mail the tapes to the loved one, who would anxiously await hearing a voice from home.
Linda boarded a World Airways commercial flight at Travis Air Force Base in California and headed for Vietnam. “I arrived in Vietnam on Thanksgiving Day. We landed in Saigon and they told us before we landed that the descent was gonna be pretty steep” to avoid enemy fire. When the door opened and she walked off the plane she was assaulted by the heat and humidity and the smell. “Like food and strange odors” she couldn’t recognize. “Then they took us to Long Binh for processing for a couple of days and it was hot!” They spent three or four days there to get acclimated and overcome their jet lag from the 17-hour flight that included crossing the International Date Line and an emergency landing in Japan because they were low on fuel.
In Vietnam, the nurses had no choice where they would be stationed; they went where the need was greatest. When Linda arrived at her assigned unit (the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon), she found out that four nurses from that hospital had just been killed when their plane hit the side of a mountain on the way back from a temporary assignment at another hospital close by, the 71st Evac. She took her seat on a C-130 for the three-hour ride. “I think we landed about six o’clock in the morning. Somebody met me at the plane” and they took Linda to eat at the mess hall and then showed her to her hooch, which was a Jack and Jill arrangement of two bedrooms with two nurses in each bedroom with a common bathroom between the two rooms. “We had no hot water. Picture getting up every morning and taking a cold shower. And I mean cold water.” Linda’s room was 50 or 60 feet away from the taxiway at the airfield and at first, she wondered how she would ever be able to sleep. “I went to sleep and never heard those planes the entire year. You were so tired you didn’t care what you heard. Of course, there were all kinds of inconveniences to contend with. For example, the military thought enough to send women into combat zones but had not considered their need for personal sanitary supplies. SNAFU!”
Many hospitals in Vietnam were not permanent buildings; they were Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals or MASH units similar to the television series of the 70’s. The hospital at Qui Nhon was a permanent structure. It was originally built as a barracks for the Air Force who decided they didn’t need it and gave it to the Army. There were 60 to 70 nurses on the base and “suffice it to say there weren’t enough of us to have three shifts. We worked 12 hours a day, six days a week.” By the end of December, Linda was promoted to Head Nurse, which entitled her to Sundays off. In March, she was promoted to Captain.
There were operating rooms and an intensive care unit on the first floor and four surgical wards on the second floor, along with two medical wards in the hospital compound. Linda managed one of the surgical units, 36 beds on one side with a connector hallway and 36 beds on the other side. The latrines/showers and utility rooms were located within the connector hallway. Depending on the available number of nurses, there were usually two nurses assigned to each side, plus two or more corpsmen. “Just because I was the head nurse it didn’t mean I sat behind a desk all day.” Some of the soldiers were seriously injured and needed surgery and “a lot of them were the ‘walking wounded,’” suffering from frag (gunshot fragment) wounds.
“In Vietnam, all wounds were considered contaminated and they had to drain for five days before they could be closed.” They were bandaged but not sutured closed. This allowed the wounds to drain and hopefully prevent infection. “If something was still bleeding, you had to put pressure dressing on it.” The surgeons taught Linda how to stitch a wound closed. he kept a log of each solider admitted, when they received their wound, and when the wound was scheduled to be sutured closed. Linda worked with a corpman, Tony Aguilar, who loved to help suture the wounds. “He called me Hefe (Spanish for boss) and he would say, ‘Hefe, it’s time to go.’” The pair would slip into sterile gloves, clean the wound, apply a local anesthetic and stich the wound closed. “He’d take the scissors…and cut the sutures as I finished each one.” The theory behind the draining process was to substantially decrease the likelihood of infection and Linda recalled the infection rate being very low, despite the conditions under which the wounds were received.
“Every day was a learning experience…and one of the surgeons taught me how to use wire, which in the old days, if you had a really gaping belly wound that had to be pulled tight,” that was how it was done. Linda utilized her experience from Walter Reed Army Medical Center when treating her patients. “We developed a good rapport with the surgeons and vice versa. They all knew us and we were like their interns, a very collegial relationship.”
One time, Linda was caring for a young GI and his only visible injuries were frag wounds. She took his vital signs and “His blood pressure was a little low and his pulse was a little high and he just didn’t look quite right. I sent him down for an x-ray of his abdomen because he was complaining of pain.” Linda called one of the surgeons and said, “Herb, can you go down to x-ray and take a look at this kid’s film? I had a flat plate of his abdomen done. He called me right back and said prep him for surgery. He had a ruptured spleen.” He had probably been exposed to the blunt force trauma from an explosion that, while it left no visible injuries, resulted in a serious internal injury. Because his nurse went the extra step, relied on her training and used her instincts to question what she was seeing, a GI was saved.
‘The most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe.’ Florence Nightingale
The 85th Evac was the other hospital in Qui Nhon. The 85th had the only ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) doctor and the 67th had the only neurosurgeon. “All head injuries and spinal cord injuries came to us, including North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prisoners.” All prisoner patients, except those who needed intensive care, were admitted to her ward and were guarded by an MP (Military Police) 24 hours a day. “They were never aggressive and tried to talk to you in Pidgeon English. (We did have Vietnamese language lessons…but it’s a very difficult language to learn.”) There was little concern they would try to escape because they had significant head injuries. Linda recalled the GIs offering the prisoners cigarettes and attempting to talk with them. “I thought, here’s this guy offering you something and trying to communicate with you and they could have shot each other. It was a very interesting situation.”
When GIs were admitted to the ward, they were issued pajamas and their uniforms were bagged and saved. Linda recalled one young soldier (average age of soldiers in Vietnam was 19) who was very gregarious and asked if he could go say hello to his buddy ‘Sargeant So and So’ before he got dressed in his pajamas. Against her better judgement, Linda agreed and said yes. “He went AWOL to the local whorehouse. There was no ‘Sargeant So and So’ and the MP’s brought him back to the ward. “I was livid and hit the Officers Club after my shift ended for a stiff drink!”
The Officer’s Club was an empty Quonset hut that the officers opportunistically took control over. They built a bar and hired “one of the enlisted guys to be our bartender.” They used exposed x-ray films to create a dropped ceiling to give the room more atmosphere. “We would play bridge or cards of some sort and just talk and relax” after a shift. “The booze was cheap. They were practically giving it away.”
Bob Hope was a welcomed source of entertainment for the U.S. troops. His trips to Vietnam around Christmas each year meant the world to GIs halfway around the world just wishing for a taste of home. Linda and her friend Gerry heard through the grapevine that Bob Hope was coming to perform at the Phu Cat Air Base near Qui Nhon. There were no front lines in Vietnam which meant there was no way to tell if you were traveling through friendly territory. A colonel they knew offered his driver and jeep to take them to the show. Linda and Gerry braved the ride through hostile territory and arrived at Phu Cat. They jumped out of the jeep and found themselves about a quarter of a mile from the stage. As they walked through the crowd of battle-hardened GIs, the GI’s encouraged them to get as close as they could to the stage. “We ended up in the front row…they filmed it and my mom and dad saw me on TV.” Bob Hope performed with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, Raquel Welch, Miss Universe, and Phillip Crosby, one of Bing Crosby’s sons. “The neatest part was at the end when they played White Christmas.”
Bob Hope was born in 1903 and started out as a Vaudeville comedian and later had a successful movie career and television variety show. Bob Hope is probably best known for the USO shows he performed for U.S. military troops deployed overseas. For 50 years he entertained troops from World War II to the Gulf War, often traveling to hot combat zones. He traveled with Les Brown and His Band of Renown and celebrity entertainers of the time. Swinging his signature golf club, he would tell jokes and introduce his celebrity guests. Bob Hope provided that link with Main Street USA and was always a treat for the servicemen and women. Parents frantically scanned their TV screens hoping to find their son or daughter alive and laughing, if only briefly. Bob Hope died in 2003 but his 50 years of selfless caring for the U.S. troops during a time when there was no internet, no cable TV and no cell phones, should never be forgotten.
What did Linda do on her day off? She took advantage of the ‘in-country R&R’ (Rest & Relaxation) beach near the hospital. Qui Nhon was a coastal city in central Vietnam and “we would go down to the beach and hang out.” How was the food? “To this day, I’m not really fond of meatloaf. No fresh milk, no ice cream, no salad.” Linda recalled taking a trip to Hong Kong on leave after she was in country for six month and finally taking a hot shower. “I realized I wasn’t tan. I was dirty.” She went to Bangkok on R&R, toured Buddhist temples, rode an elephant, and shopped for jewelry. “I was there for hours trying on rings for myself and my family.”
The teams at the 67th Evac Hospital were a tight -knit group that included the pilots who flew the Dust-Off missions, which were medevac helicopters (Hueys) that carried the wounded to medical facilities. Linda formed a friendship with Dick Zigler, one of the Army fixed wing pilots stationed with a unit across the airfield from the 67th and a former Arthur Murry Dance instructor before he became a pilot. During their flights to other parts of Vietnam, pilots would often barter with supply sergeants for cases of steaks and bring them back to the hospital for barbeques. The nurses loved to dance and someone was always able to find music, so Linda and Dick became friends and dance partners. One morning at breakfast Linda noticed Dick hadn’t been around for a while and she asked his buddy where he was. He told her Dick had been shot down and presumed to be taken prisoner. Fortunately, the story had a happy ending. In 1973 when Linda and her husband lived in Denver, she opened the morning newspaper to read about the U.S. POWs returning home. There on the front page was a picture of a little boy running to meet his father, Dick Zigler, for the first time. Linda was able to get in touch with the medical facility where the POWs were taken and she received permission to meet with Dick. Linda and her husband spent three hours speaking with him. He told her, “You’ll never know how many times we talked about you and all of the other nurses at the 67th. We did that to keep our minds going and to keep our memories going just to remember good times.” Linda found out during that visit with Dick that while he was a prisoner at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” in North Vietnam, his wife committed suicide. He sadly told her, “Now I have to find a mother for my son.”
In August of 1968, 19-year-old Jim Baczkowski, a GI from Colorado was badly wounded in a firefight. Jim would receive the Silver Star for his actions in that battle, but he was in rough shape when the fighting stopped. Jim was medevac’d to the 67th with a fever of 105, badly infected wounds and significant blood loss. The doctors were unable to save his leg and when he woke up after the amputation, his first vision was a young nurse trying to make him comfortable and telling him he was going to be fine. In addition to providing medical treatment, the nurses were also there to listen and be a friendly American face. Linda encouraged her patients to write home and let their families know they were ok. Jim had only been married for four months when he was wounded and he was having a hard time writing his wife to tell her what had happened. Linda sat down and helped Jim write the letter and she included a letter of her own to his wife, Dolores, along with a Polaroid photo of herself and another nurse. Jim went home and recovered to the point where he was able to participate in adaptive skiing and worked as an air traffic controller. Jim always remembered Linda and often wondered what had happened to her.
In 1990, Linda was living in New Jersey and watching a television series, “Unsolved Mysteries.” Episodes usually focused on solving unsolved crimes, but this episode was focused on finding a missing person. Jim recounted his story of being wounded in Vietnam and the emotional support and care his nurse gave him. He wanted to locate her and told the viewing audience her name was Linda Sharp. Linda could not believe what she was hearing and called the program producers and told them she was the person they were looking for. The program arranged for the two to meet, 20 years after their first encounter, to film the update for “Unsolved Mysteries.” It was a poignant reunion and a chance for Linda to meet Jim’s wife and two sons. They kept in touch with each other but unfortunately Jim died in March 1999. (The episode is still airing on You Tube TV: “Thanks Captain Sharp.”)
Linda’s tour of duty ended in December of 1968 but she still had nine months to left to complete her three-year commitment. She was assigned to Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. On the flight home from Vietnam, Linda recalled walking onto the tarmac to board a C-141 headed for Japan and seeing the plane loaded from top to bottom with caskets. The pilot had a saying, “Bullets in, bodies out.”
Linda spent the next nine months at Letterman and in retrospect, she saw it as a very important part of her return from combat. She was able to draw on the emotional support of others who had been to Vietnam and had nine months to decompress and reacclimate to the “real world.” Many of the Gis from Vietnam who suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), including her patient Jim, didn’t have this extended adjustment period and support network.
When Linda’s enlistment came to an end she decided to return to civilian life. “There are times I wish I had stayed in, but when you grow up in the military and you’ve been in the military, you kind of say, I just wanna be a civilian again.” Linda returned to Las Vegas and moved in with her parents and took a job working in the ICU at Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital. She quickly realized that she would not have the same autonomy in a civilian hospital that she had in Vietnam. For instance, Linda couldn’t hang a unit of blood without a doctor’s order and a second nurse to verify the unit of blood. In Vietnam she not only hung the blood, but she ordered it. She also found the work ethic of some of the civilian nurses not nearly as strong as the nurses in the 67th Evac.
Although there were frustrations in her new nursing role, she had some good luck in other areas. Living back where she went to high school had some benefits. Some of her high school friends were still in the area. In April of 1971 she got a phone call from a friend who invited her to a party he was having and told her he wanted to introduce her to someone. That someone was Brent Caldwell. They hit it off and quickly became an item. By October of 1971 they were married. Brent was in the Air Force and had served a year in Vietnam just after Linda had left. When they were married, he had four months remaining on his enlistment.
After leaving the service they moved to Denver and then San Francisco. In 1974 Brent’s father died . Brent’s mother asked him to move to New Jersey to take over the business; the couple and their first daughter (Elizabeth) moved to South Plainfield, New Jersey in 1976. The family business was a full-service gas station and tire sales center. Brent had worked in the business during college and he knew the nuances of running the business.
Brent ran the business for 32 years before selling it in 2005. Linda was also busy during this time. She was the mother of three young daughters and had earned her master’s degree in nursing from Rutgers University in 1980. Linda landed a position as a Oncology Clinical Specialist and joined the Central New Jersey Chapter of the Oncology Nursing Society. While at one of the meetings a fellow nurse asked Linda if she knew of a nurse who would like a job in Professional Services at Schering-Plough, a multinational pharmaceutical company. She explained to Linda that the group was responsible for interacting with medical professionals, doctors, nurses and pharmacists. That nurse was leaving her job and Linda stepped into her position in 1989. During her 15-year tenure at Schering-Plough, Linda was involved with creating a new and novel approach for pharmaceutical sales. The idea was to have nurses working closely with the sales force to provide side effect management strategies using the company’s products/medications for patients with melanoma and hepatitis C.
In 2013, Linda retired and now spends time with her family, including four grandchildren, and actively serve the veteran community in Aiken, South Carolina where she and Brent live.
Linda, you were a 23-year-old nurse who volunteered to travel halfway around the world to live in a combat zone with no front lines, even though there was an easier path. Back at home it was an unpopular war, but your concerns were the wounded GI’s that came by medevac helicopter for your care. You were a friendly, familiar face with a compassionate touch and you took care of their life altering wounds. You told them everything would be ok and they believed you because you provided them hope of a better tomorrow. For those of us that weren’t there, we can’t appreciate all that you did and saw. We can only take off our hat and say, ‘thank you’ and hope that if we ever need a nurse, she will be just like you.
“I never hear a helicopter that I don’t think of Vietnam. That’s the one thing that just brings everything back is when you hear those helicopter blades. That meant patients were coming in.”
Linda Sharp was born in May of 1944 in Yuma, Arizona. Linda came from a military family. “My grandfather was in World War I in the trenches in France. My dad was a career Air Force officer, and he was in World War II.” Her dad started his military career as an enlisted soldier but went on to earn his bachelor’s degree and became an officer, eventually retiring as a major. Being a military family, Linda and her sister moved frequently following their dad’s career. The family spent time in Texas, Tennessee, France and England.
Linda graduated from Rancho High School in Las Vegas on her birthday, May 31, 1962. She headed off to the University of San Francisco to study nursing. “School was expensive even then and I looked around for what I could do” to help defray the cost. One day recruiters from the Army and the Navy spoke to her nursing class about enlisting in exchange for tuition. “I listened to the recruiters, and I was intrigued because they would pay for my last two years of college: tuition, books, lab fees, everything. In exchange I would give them three years of active duty.” Linda liked what she heard and raised her right hand and joined the Army. “Being on a ship…that didn’t appeal to me.”
In December of her senior year, Linda was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and that gave her a bump in her monthly stipend. “I was in ‘high cotton’ here. I could buy a dress every now and then.” After graduation, Linda took the state nursing board exams and passed. In August, she was sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. There she spent six weeks going through bootcamp and learned the basics of military life, including how to shoot a rifle. The Army showed them how to be gentlemen and gentlewomen and how to wear the uniform. “We went to Camp Bullis on the outskirts of San Antonio and spent two nights in a tent and learned how to use a field telephone and how to shoot a 45.” Linda also recalled attending the goat lab where a goat was anesthetized and the students learned to perform a tracheotomy… “Just in case you ever had to do it, which I fortunately never had to.”
While at Fort Sam Houston the enlistees were given a form to list their top choices for their first duty station. Linda had never lived on the East Coast and wanted to see what it was like. She chose the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC as her first duty station. “I got my first choice…and was assigned to a female medicine unit” that provided care primarily for the military wives. “While I loved it, I really came into the Army to take care of soldiers.” She mentioned this to her supervisor and was ultimately transferred to male neurosurgery. “Ninety-nine percent of the patients were paraplegics, quadriplegics, or head injuries from Vietnam. The patients would tell me their stories about Vietnam and it was intriguing.”
Linda was promoted to 1st Lieutenant during her time at Water Reed. She was also contacted by the Department of Army Nurses Corps and was told to report to their headquarters for an interview. During the interview she learned they wanted her to become a nurse recruiter. She found the idea appealing but to qualify she would need a year at a foreign duty station. She was told her options were Germany, Japan, Hawaii or anywhere she’d like to go. Linda volunteered for Vietnam. There were not many nurses volunteering for duty in Vietnam and she recalled when she reached Vietnam many nurses didn’t want to be there.
“My dad I think was very proud. My mother was horrified but both were very supportive of my decision. My mother would send care packages and my grandmother wrote letters.” There were no cell phones but the latest technology at the time was miniature reel to reel tape recorders. Families would record messages and mail the tapes to the loved one, who would anxiously await hearing a voice from home.
Linda boarded a World Airways commercial flight at Travis Air Force Base in California and headed for Vietnam. “I arrived in Vietnam on Thanksgiving Day. We landed in Saigon and they told us before we landed that the descent was gonna be pretty steep” to avoid enemy fire. When the door opened and she walked off the plane she was assaulted by the heat and humidity and the smell. “Like food and strange odors” she couldn’t recognize. “Then they took us to Long Binh for processing for a couple of days and it was hot!” They spent three or four days there to get acclimated and overcome their jet lag from the 17-hour flight that included crossing the International Date Line and an emergency landing in Japan because they were low on fuel.
In Vietnam, the nurses had no choice where they would be stationed; they went where the need was greatest. When Linda arrived at her assigned unit (the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon), she found out that four nurses from that hospital had just been killed when their plane hit the side of a mountain on the way back from a temporary assignment at another hospital close by, the 71st Evac. She took her seat on a C-130 for the three-hour ride. “I think we landed about six o’clock in the morning. Somebody met me at the plane” and they took Linda to eat at the mess hall and then showed her to her hooch, which was a Jack and Jill arrangement of two bedrooms with two nurses in each bedroom with a common bathroom between the two rooms. “We had no hot water. Picture getting up every morning and taking a cold shower. And I mean cold water.” Linda’s room was 50 or 60 feet away from the taxiway at the airfield and at first, she wondered how she would ever be able to sleep. “I went to sleep and never heard those planes the entire year. You were so tired you didn’t care what you heard. Of course, there were all kinds of inconveniences to contend with. For example, the military thought enough to send women into combat zones but had not considered their need for personal sanitary supplies. SNAFU!”
Many hospitals in Vietnam were not permanent buildings; they were Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals or MASH units similar to the television series of the 70’s. The hospital at Qui Nhon was a permanent structure. It was originally built as a barracks for the Air Force who decided they didn’t need it and gave it to the Army. There were 60 to 70 nurses on the base and “suffice it to say there weren’t enough of us to have three shifts. We worked 12 hours a day, six days a week.” By the end of December, Linda was promoted to Head Nurse, which entitled her to Sundays off. In March, she was promoted to Captain.
There were operating rooms and an intensive care unit on the first floor and four surgical wards on the second floor, along with two medical wards in the hospital compound. Linda managed one of the surgical units, 36 beds on one side with a connector hallway and 36 beds on the other side. The latrines/showers and utility rooms were located within the connector hallway. Depending on the available number of nurses, there were usually two nurses assigned to each side, plus two or more corpsmen. “Just because I was the head nurse it didn’t mean I sat behind a desk all day.” Some of the soldiers were seriously injured and needed surgery and “a lot of them were the ‘walking wounded,’” suffering from frag (gunshot fragment) wounds.
“In Vietnam, all wounds were considered contaminated and they had to drain for five days before they could be closed.” They were bandaged but not sutured closed. This allowed the wounds to drain and hopefully prevent infection. “If something was still bleeding, you had to put pressure dressing on it.” The surgeons taught Linda how to stitch a wound closed. he kept a log of each solider admitted, when they received their wound, and when the wound was scheduled to be sutured closed. Linda worked with a corpman, Tony Aguilar, who loved to help suture the wounds. “He called me Hefe (Spanish for boss) and he would say, ‘Hefe, it’s time to go.’” The pair would slip into sterile gloves, clean the wound, apply a local anesthetic and stich the wound closed. “He’d take the scissors…and cut the sutures as I finished each one.” The theory behind the draining process was to substantially decrease the likelihood of infection and Linda recalled the infection rate being very low, despite the conditions under which the wounds were received.
“Every day was a learning experience…and one of the surgeons taught me how to use wire, which in the old days, if you had a really gaping belly wound that had to be pulled tight,” that was how it was done. Linda utilized her experience from Walter Reed Army Medical Center when treating her patients. “We developed a good rapport with the surgeons and vice versa. They all knew us and we were like their interns, a very collegial relationship.”
One time, Linda was caring for a young GI and his only visible injuries were frag wounds. She took his vital signs and “His blood pressure was a little low and his pulse was a little high and he just didn’t look quite right. I sent him down for an x-ray of his abdomen because he was complaining of pain.” Linda called one of the surgeons and said, “Herb, can you go down to x-ray and take a look at this kid’s film? I had a flat plate of his abdomen done. He called me right back and said prep him for surgery. He had a ruptured spleen.” He had probably been exposed to the blunt force trauma from an explosion that, while it left no visible injuries, resulted in a serious internal injury. Because his nurse went the extra step, relied on her training and used her instincts to question what she was seeing, a GI was saved.
‘The most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe.’ Florence Nightingale
The 85th Evac was the other hospital in Qui Nhon. The 85th had the only ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) doctor and the 67th had the only neurosurgeon. “All head injuries and spinal cord injuries came to us, including North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prisoners.” All prisoner patients, except those who needed intensive care, were admitted to her ward and were guarded by an MP (Military Police) 24 hours a day. “They were never aggressive and tried to talk to you in Pidgeon English. (We did have Vietnamese language lessons…but it’s a very difficult language to learn.”) There was little concern they would try to escape because they had significant head injuries. Linda recalled the GIs offering the prisoners cigarettes and attempting to talk with them. “I thought, here’s this guy offering you something and trying to communicate with you and they could have shot each other. It was a very interesting situation.”
When GIs were admitted to the ward, they were issued pajamas and their uniforms were bagged and saved. Linda recalled one young soldier (average age of soldiers in Vietnam was 19) who was very gregarious and asked if he could go say hello to his buddy ‘Sargeant So and So’ before he got dressed in his pajamas. Against her better judgement, Linda agreed and said yes. “He went AWOL to the local whorehouse. There was no ‘Sargeant So and So’ and the MP’s brought him back to the ward. “I was livid and hit the Officers Club after my shift ended for a stiff drink!”
The Officer’s Club was an empty Quonset hut that the officers opportunistically took control over. They built a bar and hired “one of the enlisted guys to be our bartender.” They used exposed x-ray films to create a dropped ceiling to give the room more atmosphere. “We would play bridge or cards of some sort and just talk and relax” after a shift. “The booze was cheap. They were practically giving it away.”
Bob Hope was a welcomed source of entertainment for the U.S. troops. His trips to Vietnam around Christmas each year meant the world to GIs halfway around the world just wishing for a taste of home. Linda and her friend Gerry heard through the grapevine that Bob Hope was coming to perform at the Phu Cat Air Base near Qui Nhon. There were no front lines in Vietnam which meant there was no way to tell if you were traveling through friendly territory. A colonel they knew offered his driver and jeep to take them to the show. Linda and Gerry braved the ride through hostile territory and arrived at Phu Cat. They jumped out of the jeep and found themselves about a quarter of a mile from the stage. As they walked through the crowd of battle-hardened GIs, the GI’s encouraged them to get as close as they could to the stage. “We ended up in the front row…they filmed it and my mom and dad saw me on TV.” Bob Hope performed with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, Raquel Welch, Miss Universe, and Phillip Crosby, one of Bing Crosby’s sons. “The neatest part was at the end when they played White Christmas.”
Bob Hope was born in 1903 and started out as a Vaudeville comedian and later had a successful movie career and television variety show. Bob Hope is probably best known for the USO shows he performed for U.S. military troops deployed overseas. For 50 years he entertained troops from World War II to the Gulf War, often traveling to hot combat zones. He traveled with Les Brown and His Band of Renown and celebrity entertainers of the time. Swinging his signature golf club, he would tell jokes and introduce his celebrity guests. Bob Hope provided that link with Main Street USA and was always a treat for the servicemen and women. Parents frantically scanned their TV screens hoping to find their son or daughter alive and laughing, if only briefly. Bob Hope died in 2003 but his 50 years of selfless caring for the U.S. troops during a time when there was no internet, no cable TV and no cell phones, should never be forgotten.
What did Linda do on her day off? She took advantage of the ‘in-country R&R’ (Rest & Relaxation) beach near the hospital. Qui Nhon was a coastal city in central Vietnam and “we would go down to the beach and hang out.” How was the food? “To this day, I’m not really fond of meatloaf. No fresh milk, no ice cream, no salad.” Linda recalled taking a trip to Hong Kong on leave after she was in country for six month and finally taking a hot shower. “I realized I wasn’t tan. I was dirty.” She went to Bangkok on R&R, toured Buddhist temples, rode an elephant, and shopped for jewelry. “I was there for hours trying on rings for myself and my family.”
The teams at the 67th Evac Hospital were a tight -knit group that included the pilots who flew the Dust-Off missions, which were medevac helicopters (Hueys) that carried the wounded to medical facilities. Linda formed a friendship with Dick Zigler, one of the Army fixed wing pilots stationed with a unit across the airfield from the 67th and a former Arthur Murry Dance instructor before he became a pilot. During their flights to other parts of Vietnam, pilots would often barter with supply sergeants for cases of steaks and bring them back to the hospital for barbeques. The nurses loved to dance and someone was always able to find music, so Linda and Dick became friends and dance partners. One morning at breakfast Linda noticed Dick hadn’t been around for a while and she asked his buddy where he was. He told her Dick had been shot down and presumed to be taken prisoner. Fortunately, the story had a happy ending. In 1973 when Linda and her husband lived in Denver, she opened the morning newspaper to read about the U.S. POWs returning home. There on the front page was a picture of a little boy running to meet his father, Dick Zigler, for the first time. Linda was able to get in touch with the medical facility where the POWs were taken and she received permission to meet with Dick. Linda and her husband spent three hours speaking with him. He told her, “You’ll never know how many times we talked about you and all of the other nurses at the 67th. We did that to keep our minds going and to keep our memories going just to remember good times.” Linda found out during that visit with Dick that while he was a prisoner at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” in North Vietnam, his wife committed suicide. He sadly told her, “Now I have to find a mother for my son.”
In August of 1968, 19-year-old Jim Baczkowski, a GI from Colorado was badly wounded in a firefight. Jim would receive the Silver Star for his actions in that battle, but he was in rough shape when the fighting stopped. Jim was medevac’d to the 67th with a fever of 105, badly infected wounds and significant blood loss. The doctors were unable to save his leg and when he woke up after the amputation, his first vision was a young nurse trying to make him comfortable and telling him he was going to be fine. In addition to providing medical treatment, the nurses were also there to listen and be a friendly American face. Linda encouraged her patients to write home and let their families know they were ok. Jim had only been married for four months when he was wounded and he was having a hard time writing his wife to tell her what had happened. Linda sat down and helped Jim write the letter and she included a letter of her own to his wife, Dolores, along with a Polaroid photo of herself and another nurse. Jim went home and recovered to the point where he was able to participate in adaptive skiing and worked as an air traffic controller. Jim always remembered Linda and often wondered what had happened to her.
In 1990, Linda was living in New Jersey and watching a television series, “Unsolved Mysteries.” Episodes usually focused on solving unsolved crimes, but this episode was focused on finding a missing person. Jim recounted his story of being wounded in Vietnam and the emotional support and care his nurse gave him. He wanted to locate her and told the viewing audience her name was Linda Sharp. Linda could not believe what she was hearing and called the program producers and told them she was the person they were looking for. The program arranged for the two to meet, 20 years after their first encounter, to film the update for “Unsolved Mysteries.” It was a poignant reunion and a chance for Linda to meet Jim’s wife and two sons. They kept in touch with each other but unfortunately Jim died in March 1999. (The episode is still airing on You Tube TV: “Thanks Captain Sharp.”)
Linda’s tour of duty ended in December of 1968 but she still had nine months to left to complete her three-year commitment. She was assigned to Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. On the flight home from Vietnam, Linda recalled walking onto the tarmac to board a C-141 headed for Japan and seeing the plane loaded from top to bottom with caskets. The pilot had a saying, “Bullets in, bodies out.”
Linda spent the next nine months at Letterman and in retrospect, she saw it as a very important part of her return from combat. She was able to draw on the emotional support of others who had been to Vietnam and had nine months to decompress and reacclimate to the “real world.” Many of the Gis from Vietnam who suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), including her patient Jim, didn’t have this extended adjustment period and support network.
When Linda’s enlistment came to an end she decided to return to civilian life. “There are times I wish I had stayed in, but when you grow up in the military and you’ve been in the military, you kind of say, I just wanna be a civilian again.” Linda returned to Las Vegas and moved in with her parents and took a job working in the ICU at Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital. She quickly realized that she would not have the same autonomy in a civilian hospital that she had in Vietnam. For instance, Linda couldn’t hang a unit of blood without a doctor’s order and a second nurse to verify the unit of blood. In Vietnam she not only hung the blood, but she ordered it. She also found the work ethic of some of the civilian nurses not nearly as strong as the nurses in the 67th Evac.
Although there were frustrations in her new nursing role, she had some good luck in other areas. Living back where she went to high school had some benefits. Some of her high school friends were still in the area. In April of 1971 she got a phone call from a friend who invited her to a party he was having and told her he wanted to introduce her to someone. That someone was Brent Caldwell. They hit it off and quickly became an item. By October of 1971 they were married. Brent was in the Air Force and had served a year in Vietnam just after Linda had left. When they were married, he had four months remaining on his enlistment.
After leaving the service they moved to Denver and then San Francisco. In 1974 Brent’s father died . Brent’s mother asked him to move to New Jersey to take over the business; the couple and their first daughter (Elizabeth) moved to South Plainfield, New Jersey in 1976. The family business was a full-service gas station and tire sales center. Brent had worked in the business during college and he knew the nuances of running the business.
Brent ran the business for 32 years before selling it in 2005. Linda was also busy during this time. She was the mother of three young daughters and had earned her master’s degree in nursing from Rutgers University in 1980. Linda landed a position as a Oncology Clinical Specialist and joined the Central New Jersey Chapter of the Oncology Nursing Society. While at one of the meetings a fellow nurse asked Linda if she knew of a nurse who would like a job in Professional Services at Schering-Plough, a multinational pharmaceutical company. She explained to Linda that the group was responsible for interacting with medical professionals, doctors, nurses and pharmacists. That nurse was leaving her job and Linda stepped into her position in 1989. During her 15-year tenure at Schering-Plough, Linda was involved with creating a new and novel approach for pharmaceutical sales. The idea was to have nurses working closely with the sales force to provide side effect management strategies using the company’s products/medications for patients with melanoma and hepatitis C.
In 2013, Linda retired and now spends time with her family, including four grandchildren, and actively serve the veteran community in Aiken, South Carolina where she and Brent live.
Linda, you were a 23-year-old nurse who volunteered to travel halfway around the world to live in a combat zone with no front lines, even though there was an easier path. Back at home it was an unpopular war, but your concerns were the wounded GI’s that came by medevac helicopter for your care. You were a friendly, familiar face with a compassionate touch and you took care of their life altering wounds. You told them everything would be ok and they believed you because you provided them hope of a better tomorrow. For those of us that weren’t there, we can’t appreciate all that you did and saw. We can only take off our hat and say, ‘thank you’ and hope that if we ever need a nurse, she will be just like you.
“I never hear a helicopter that I don’t think of Vietnam. That’s the one thing that just brings everything back is when you hear those helicopter blades. That meant patients were coming in.”