In the summer of 1967, I received a letter from the Army Nurse Corps Headquarters, saying I had been nominated to be an Army Nurse Recruiter by my supervisor, which was very flattering. They set me up with an interview in downtown Washington and essentially told me all I needed was a year of foreign duty before I could become a recruiter. I told them I wanted to go to Vietnam.
My mother had a lot of trouble with my decision. She respected my decision, but she was afraid for my safety, a woman going off to a war zone. My dad never talked about it, so I don’t know how he really felt. I just know that they were very proud of me. At one point in time, my dad and I were on active duty together. He was a major and I was a second lieutenant.
I left for Vietnam the day before Thanksgiving in November 1967 from Travis Air Force Base outside of San Francisco. We left at night on World Airways, a commercial contract plane doing business with the military. I think there were one or two others nurses on the flight, but mostly men. We had to make an emergency landing on an island of the coast of Japan to refuel. We flew to Japan, the Tokyo military airport, to refuel and then to Tan Son Nhut AFB near Saigon.
I remember coming into Saigon in the daytime. They had warned us that we would come in at a very steep angle because they didn’t want to give the Viet Cong too much access to the airplane, as in being a target for them. We landed and it was hot and steamy and a lot of different smells. I remember being so thirsty. There must have been a USO that gave us Cokes in glass bottles, which tasted so good.
It was Thanksgiving Day when I arrived and we were all taken by bus to the processing center at Long Binh and had Thanksgiving. I spent a couple of days there. Until I finally got orders for the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon on the coast of the South China Sea, which was south of Da Nang and north of Nha Trang.
There were a couple of us going to Qui Nhon. We flew at night, presumably because it was safer to move us at night. We flew on a C–130 and arrived very early in the morning. We went to the mess hall and had breakfast. Then somebody took me over to the nurse’s quarters, our “hooch.” I fell into bed and slept for eight hours. I was exhausted. I got up and started unpacking. I had a cot and a metal locker for my clothes, plus a metal dresser. When I got there, my roommate turned out to be a nurse who graduated a year ahead of me from USF. Talk about a small world! I arrived toward the end of November and she went home two or three weeks later, so we weren’t together very long.
It was an interesting year. You get to Vietnam and you think, “Oh my goodness, I’ve got to be here for a year.” There were highs and lows. There were days when you just said, “I want to get out of here. I can’t stand this place.” It is very confining. You think about working in a stateside hospital in those days, in the 1960s. You went home and you had friends and you went out and could travel, weekends off and do fun things. In Vietnam, we worked and lived with our coworkers. There was no escaping it. The only time you could get away is when you went on leave or R&R. After a while you bonded with everybody and they became your family.
The first couple of weeks it was tough. It was very different. The Army was very ill-prepared to have women in a combat zone. For instance, there was no place to buy any feminine hygiene supplies. Your family had to send it to you, a real care package if there ever was one. The PX, post-exchange, where we could buy various items—such as candy, gum, electronics, jewelry, etc.—didn’t carry anything related to females such as cosmetics. One time I was down in downtown Qui Nhon and at the outdoor market someone was selling Cutex nail polish and lipstick, along with Sunkist oranges. Go figure!
The Sears catalog became our friend. I was 23 years old when I went there, and like most young women, you want new clothes now and then. I remember culottes were a big thing in the mid–1960s. While I was there, pantyhose came into being. Somebody sent me a pair of pantyhose. I thought these were the best things since sliced bread. We wore fatigues and combat boots every day. They actually were very comfortable and lightweight, which was important since it was so hot and humid in Vietnam.
Everybody had a “mamasan” to do your laundry, shine your boots and to clean your hooches. They came six days a week and we paid the princely sum of ten dollars a month. Every now and then my Mom would send me used children’s clothing that her church had collected. I’d give them to my mamasan for her kids.
We had no hot water in our nurses’ quarters. We had hot water in the hospital and the mess hall, but not in the nurses’ or doctors’ quarters. Each room housed two nurses with a shower, sink and toilet located between the two rooms. I shudder when I think about getting up every morning, taking a cold shower, washing my hair in cold water and shaving my legs in cold water. The mamasans washed our clothes in cold water; so needless to say, our white things didn’t look very white after a while. I thought I had a tan until I went to Hong Kong and took a bath. It came off in the bath water. To this day I can’t get into a shower unless it’s hot.
In the hospitals we had hot water for the GIs and for our use there. In fact, when the patients would come walking in, the walking wounded, as we’d call them, they would go into the showers and they would be in there forever. I used to send corpsmen in to check on them and make sure they didn’t drown. That is the first hot shower they would have had since they were out in the field. The doctors used to come up in their scrubs, wave and say, “Hi Linda, I’m going in to take a shower, just in case anybody needs me.” Of course they didn’t have beepers in those days. It never occurred to us as nurses to say, “One night a week, we are going to close the showers down. Nobody’s going in there except the nurses.” It never even dawned on us. As active and innovative and creative as we were, it just never occurred to us. We just accepted it. We were like, “Okay, we just take a cold shower.” Obviously, women’s lib had not arrived at the 67th.
When I went to nursing school, the nuns taught you to stand when a doctor came into the nurse’s station and to give them your chair. You followed them around and did what they asked, no matter what. Not to belittle them in any way, because they did fabulous things, but that was just the way it was in the mid-sixties. Things were different in Vietnam and while we certainly respected them and their position, it was more of a collegial relationship. We were in the war and the situation together and we learned from each other, while maintaining a healthy degree of mutual self-respect. They relied on us to be their eyes and ears, almost like, and in many cases better than, interns. One of the surgeons I particularly respected was a great teacher and he taught me how to suture small fragment wounds. Obviously, it helped him out a lot because he didn’t have to do it and could concentrate on the bigger cases.
I was head nurse of a 72-bed surgical unit almost from the time I arrived at the 67th. I didn’t know what part of the hospital I would be working in until I went to meet with the chief nurse the day after I arrived. She told me they had an opening on the surgical ward, which was a relief as I didn’t want to spend a year on a medical ward treating malaria and dysentery. The medical wards were never as busy as the surgical ones and I figured busy is better.
The mission of an evacuation hospital was to prepare patients for evacuation out of country, either to Japan or the Philippines, but mostly to Japan. Because our hospital was located alongside the Qui Nhon airfield, we had easy access to aircraft and daily flights out of country. Patients were hospitalized for approximately five days, which was about what it took to get them stabilized and ready to go. We were constantly admitting patients and discharging them, like a revolving door.
There were two hospitals in Qui Nhon. There was ours, the 67th, and the 85th. The 85th was further away from the air field. Their specialty was ears, nose and throat. They had an ENT surgeon. We had the only neurosurgeon in the area, so anyone with a head or spinal-cord injury came to our hospital, including Viet Cong prisoner patients.
Prisoners were admitted to our ward regardless of their condition, whether they were badly injured or had minor frag wounds. We kept the
m at one end of the ward, with a 24-hour armed Military Police (MP) guard. For the most part, the GI patients who were ambulatory would occasionally come to the prisoners’ bedsides and try to talk to them in pigeon Vietnamese and English and would offer them cigarettes. Those were the days when you could smoke anywhere. A lot of the nurses smoked too, including me. For the most part, the GIs befriended these prisoners but we quickly assessed which GI patients to keep away from the prisoners.
Our 72-bed ward was devoid of privacy. There were 36 beds on both sides of the ward, with the showers, latrines, and utility rooms in between. The only privacy we could rig was with portable screens which we put around the beds whenever necessary. I don’t remember the exact number of nurses who worked for/with me but it wasn’t enough that we could work three shifts. Consequently, we worked 12-hour days, six days a week. Everyone was terrific and we all worked so well as a team. On the rare occasion our census was down, it was nice to close down one side of the ward and just operate out of one 36-bed unit. It was then that I could give the nurses an extra day off, which you also had when you worked the 7 P.M. to 7 A.M. shift. When you came off of that rotation, generally a six-night stretch, you got a “sleep day” as well as a day off.
Whichever side was busiest, I would be in charge and then I would assign the most experienced nurse to the other side. The prisoner patients were always just on one side of the unit because we only had one guard to watch them. The sicker patients, the ones who needed more constant watching, were located closer to the nurse’s desk. We also had an intensive care unit (ICU) downstairs from my ward and next to the operating rooms (ORs).
The 67th had been originally been built to use as a barracks for the Air Force. It was really a very sturdy structure made of concrete with steel reinforcements. Located right on the airfield, it made a great hospital because the dust off choppers could land 20 yards from the emergency room or R&E (receiving and emergency). The hospital was a two-story structure with wooden ramps to the upper floors so they could push litter and wheelchair up to the ward. We had no addressograph plates, which were standard in all stateside hospitals in those days. As in any hospital, all the charts had to have the patient’s name, rank, serial number, and date of admission on every single piece of paper. Talk about paper work! We’d often get 20 admissions at once (called a “regurg”) and we didn’t have a ward clerk to handle the paperwork. The nurses had to do it, generally me so that other nurses could assess and help admit the patients. We had great corpsmen and some of them were 91C3s, the military equivalent of a licensed practical nurse (LPN). They could do a lot more than just a regular corpsman, including their own charts, thankfully.
I was a head nurse of this surgical unit for eight months until there was an opening in orthopedics. The head nurse had finished his tour of duty and I asked to transfer to orthopedics. I wanted to do something different with my remaining time in Vietnam, to learn new skills and while I knew squat about orthopedics, I was blessed to work with two terrific doctors, a great team of nurses, and a super physical therapist. In addition to our GI patients, we also had a fair number of civilian casualties, including some children
One day after I’d been in country about six months, the Special Forces (AKA: Green Berets) brought us a pregnant Montagnard woman. That’s a French word meaning “people from the mountains,” who were a gentle group of people, for the most part, and had different physical features than the Vietnamese. The Special Forces really liked them because they were good fighters and they trained the “Yards” to help fight the Viet Cong. This woman was in labor for a long time and presumably the Special Forces soldiers couldn’t deliver her. They brought her down to the hospital because they knew we had a board-certified obstetrician on our staff. He’d been drafted into the Army and needless to say, he didn’t get a lot of OB-GYN practice at our hospital. We teased him that he could put this event on his resume: that he’d delivered a baby in Vietnam. After delivery, they put mom on my ward to recover. I don’t know where, but someone found a doll bed for the baby and we put her next to mom, who was in one of our regular cots with the privacy screen around them. She didn’t speak a word of English, nor did we speak her language. We just communicated by sign language, which worked. This pair was a big hit with both the staff and patients and many photos were taken of them. A few days later, members of her tribe came and took her and the baby to their village. I often wondered how the mom and baby did and what stories the mom told her friends about us.
We had one little girl who was probably about ten years old. She had terrible strabismus. She couldn’t see very well and walked into the path of a train. She must have been deaf, too. She lost contralateral limbs—her right arm and her left leg. We had her with us for many months and she was the sweetest little girl, very patient and very kind. She did well and we eventually transferred her to the local Catholic hospital for further care.
We had a little boy about four years old with a chronic, draining ear infection that was just disgusting. The thing I remember most about him is that he wouldn’t wear clothes. My Mom and her church group had sent us boxes of children’s clothes but he refused to wear them. He ran around naked and we nicknamed him “Pig Pen,” after the Peanuts character. One day I had to take him to the ENT doc at the 85th Evac Hospital for a consultation. We went by ambulance and I held him in my lap. They gave him some sort of antibiotics and we kept him for a while until his parents came for him. I wonder if he ever got over his aversion to clothes.
Our favorite child was an 18-month-old little girl who pulled an oil lantern on herself and was horribly burned. She was initially hospitalized at the Catholic hospital in Qui Nhon, but the staff couldn’t do much for her so they brought her to us. She was admitted with such bad contractures that she couldn’t move her arm. She had lost one of her legs above the knee. Somebody on our ward started calling her Cindy, because she was burned to a cinder, which was awful. But she was really very cute, despite the scars around her face, and she had a very sweet disposition. Her family came to visit every Sunday to play with her and to bring her Vietnamese food. Cindy quickly became very spoiled. One of the corpsmen found a grocery cart (who knew we had such things on Army bases in Vietnam), so we put a pillow in the cart and sat her inside this grocery cart. We would wheel her from bed to bed and the GIs would entertain and play with her. We had a baby crib that she slept in during the night. She was our baby and we taught her how to salute with her remaining arm. We’d say, “Salute Cindy,” and she’d whip out a salute. The orthopedic docs were just wonderful with her. They periodically took her to surgery to recast her arm, which eventually helped decrease the contractures.
While all my patients were special to me, the one from my days on orthopedics who stands out was a young guy, 19 years old, named Jim Baczkowski. “Ski” was out in the field, involved in a fire fight and had a traumatic amputation of his right leg. It was a very high amputation, what’s called a total hip disarticulation. It happened four months to the day he’d been married. When he was admitted to our ward, he was pretty sick with a high fever and frag wounds, really in pretty bad shape. So we put him right next to the nurse’s station. He was a really engaging kind of guy, with a good personality. I had a rule that before the patients left us for evacuation to Japan, they had to write a letter home. He kept saying to me, “I can’t do this. I can’t write a letter.” He was 19 and she was 18 when they got married and he shipped to Vietnam a week later. I had such empathy for her and for him, of course. I thought, “How is she going to cope with this?” I asked Jim if he wanted me to write a letter to his wife. He said yes. I remember it wasn’t easy to write that letter. Polaroid cameras had just come into being around this time and the Swinger model was a popular item at the PX. Someone took a picture of me with one of the corpsmen, which we put in the envelope with our letters and sent to with the letter. Jim was evacuated to Japan in late August 1968. A few months later, he sent us a letter and a picture of himself on pontoon skis, taken on a
beautiful mountain in Colorado. He’d gone from Japan to Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in Denver, which was the Army’s amputee center. It was so rewarding to finally see a patient who made it back home and seemed to be doing well.
One night in March 1990, I was watching Unsolved Mysteries with my husband. It was one of my favorite shows and I always enjoyed the reunion stories. At the end of the program, they showed previews for the next week’s stories. The host, Robert Stack, said, “Next week we’ll show the story of a young Vietnam veteran who for 23 years has been looking for the nurse who saved him both physically and emotionally. Her name is Linda Sharp.” Since Sharp is my maiden name, I was absolutely floored but felt it was probably someone else. However, I found the 800 number and called the show. A producer came on the line and asked if I remembered a patient named Jim Baczkowski, which of course I did. I was the “missing person!” It turned out that was the first time they had ever solved a mystery without showing the program itself.
After that, my phone started ringing with family and friends calling to say, “I think they’re looking for you.” I had started my new job at Schering-Plough, a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, six months before this happened. My coworkers and management were very supportive of me and this amazing story. For several years afterwards, I was asked to speak about my experiences in Vietnam by several nursing organizations and civic groups. In all the years since I’d been back from Vietnam, no one had ever asked me what it was like to be a nurse there. It was as if no one really cared about nurses in Vietnam or what we did there until this publicity focused on the role.
Jim and his family were living Grand Junction, Colorado, with their two children, so the network (NBC) flew me out there and we filmed the update. That was an interesting experience in itself as I’d never done anything like that before. It was wonderful to see Jim again.
Vietnam War Nurses Page 9