Section 1: Linda Caldwell grew up in a military family. Born in Arizona, she also lived in Texas, Tennessee, and France before attending high school in Las Vegas, Nevada. Linda’s family included her father, a career Air Force officer; her mother, a homemaker; and a younger sister. Linda’s father served in World War II, as did her uncle; she also had a grandfather who served in France during World War I. Linda studied nursing at the University of San Francisco from 1962 to 1966. During that time, she had friends in ROTC who regularly discussed the possibility of deploying to Vietnam.

Section 2: Linda describes her enlistment as a nurse in the Army. After hearing from two recruiters representing the Army and Navy Nurse Corps, Linda chose the Army due to its similarity to the Air Force and its hierarchy. In addition, the Army would pay for two full years of college in exchange for three years of active-duty service; around a quarter of the 45 nursing students in Linda’s class enlisted alongside her. While at the University of San Francisco, she spent time in Haight-Ashbury before it became the “epicenter” of the hippie movement. Linda viewed her training at Medical Field Service School (MFSS) at Fort Sam Houston as “six weeks of fun and meeting new people,” and remembers her peers adapting equally well. She did not expect to go to Vietnam but knew it was a possibility. Linda did not know much about Vietnam or the war before arriving in country but understood that Vietnam had been a French colony and that the war was unpopular back home.  

Section 3: Linda arrived in Vietnam on Thanksgiving Day in 1967. She remembers the heat and humidity, as well as the fact that the bus to Long Binh had wire over the windows. Linda discusses nursing uniforms during her tour and her relief at being exempted from all-white uniforms that were ill-suited to the warzone. In terms of her work, Linda notes that nurses didn’t have enough supplies, nor did they have the same equipment that was used stateside at hospitals like Walter Reed. Even though Linda didn’t feel like she was a “sitting duck,” during the Tet Offensive, she slept wearing a steel pot helmet and admitted patients by candlelight. She was stationed at the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Quy Nhon, assigned to a 72-bed surgical unit. Shifts were twelve hours, six days a week. Linda remembers the American men she cared for being appreciative and commenting, “you’re the first round-eyed woman I’ve seen in months.” She tried to lift their spirits, for instance by wearing perfume, while observing Army regulations on hair and earrings. The hospital served Americans as well as a small proportion of Vietnamese, including civilians and prisoners. Linda notes that Vietnamese prisoners were amicable and that some American patients would try to converse with them and offer them cigarettes. She communicated with Vietnamese patients using a few Vietnamese words as well as improvised sign language. Linda also remembers civilian patients, including children who suffered terrible burns. Initially a staff nurse, Linda was promoted to head nurse for eight months before transferring to orthopedics. She served alongside a diverse group of Americans, including a Conscientious Objector who didn’t carry a gun. The vast majority of nurses were women, but she remembers two men; all the nurses during her time in country were white. Linda describes positive interactions with doctors and notes that physicians’ assistant programs came out of Vietnam. She explains that one of the functions of her hospital was to get Americans recovered to the point that they could be evacuated out of country to the Philippines or Japan for full recovery. 

Section 4: Linda discusses her interactions with Vietnamese people and culture. Her encounters with Vietnamese hardships changed her outlook on life. She remembers joking about the worst outcome if she got in trouble—“what are they going to do to me, send me to Vietnam?” She recalls Vietnamese children swarming Americans, asking for candy and money. Linda describes Vietnamese women as beautiful and specifically notes that they wore the traditional ao dai over black pants. Linda experienced culture shock in connection with Vietnamese poverty, citing sandals made from old tires and repurposed American beer cans. In terms of comforts in the warzone, Linda’s mess hall lacked salad, real milk, and ice cream, but she notes that the nearby Navy base had these items and that naval officers invited nurses to join them there for Sunday dinners.

Section 5: Linda does not remember seeing Agent Orange being sprayed but worked in an area that had previously been sprayed. She notes that patients came into the hospital with Agent Orange on their clothes and were required to immediately shower and deposit their clothes in a plastic bag. 

Section 6 : Linda discusses daily life in Vietnam. She and fellow nurses enjoyed reprieves from the war by attending barbecues that featured warzone delicacies like steaks. In terms of challenges for American women, Linda emphasizes that the PX did not stock sanitary products; as a result, Linda and other women on base had to get supplies shipped from their families back home. She also remembers ordering clothes to wear while off-duty from the Sears catalogue. Her most memorable connection in Vietnam was with a patient, Jim Bakowski. She explains that, years after the war, Jim reached out to the show Unsolved Mysteries, looking for the nurse who cared for him at the 67th Evac Hospital. In 1990, Linda was sitting at home watching TV and saw a teaser for an upcoming episode in which a Vietnam veteran was looking for Linda Sharp—Linda’s maiden name. She and Jim reunited through the show; the episode (Season 2, Episode 17) is available here. Linda’s memories from her year in country include the most beautiful thing she saw—a crowd of two thousand servicemen and women singing “White Christmas” at a Bob Hope Christmas show—and the worst thing she witnessed, a horrifically burned man in her hospital’s ICU. 

Section 7 : Linda reflects on American influences in the warzone as well as R&R. She remembers “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” (1965) and music by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Linda was permitted both a five-day leave, which she took in Hong Kong, and R&R, for which she went to Bangkok. She remembers after months of cold showers, taking a hot shower in Hong Kong and watching her “tan” disappear. Linda adds that cold showers didn’t remove dirt but her first hot shower did. (Doctors, she notes, took hot showers in the latrines but nurses didn’t think to do this.) Linda’s journey home from Vietnam was especially somber. She left from Cam Ranh Bay on a large military plane (a C-141) filled top to bottom with caskets. She notes that it was strikingly similar to a scene in the show China Beach (1988–1991) and characterizes the memory as “bullets in and bodies out.”  

Section 8: Linda’s post-service career was informed by her time in Vietnam in two major ways. On the one hand, back in the United States, nurses were not permitted to do things (including assessments, ordering lab tests and X-rays, and suturing) that they routinely did in Vietnam. On the other hand, Linda benefitted from her service; she describes herself as a more confident nurse after returning home, serving as the head nurse of a neurosurgery unit at Letterman Army Hospital and then in the ICU at Walter Reed. Linda attended the 1993 dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial at the Wall in DC. There, she met up with people from the 67th Evac Hospital and numerous veterans thanked her for her service. Linda’s views on the war have changed since 1969. Today, she thinks that American intervention was unnecessary. She cites Neil Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie (1988) and asserts that Vietnam was better off becoming communist and touts the country’s current level of industrialization and its progress in terms of poverty rates and medicine. 

Section 9: Linda has been to the Wall in DC and describes it as “awe inspiring.” She remembers people hating the design before it was unveiled, calling it a “scar on the landscape.” She did not feel that way about the design at the time and insists today that it is a “fitting” memorial while characterizing the architect as a “genius.” Linda also reiterates that the women’s memorial (discussed in Section 8) is “beautifully done” and that she couldn’t be prouder of it. Linda highlights Diane Carlson Evans, who served as a nurse in Vietnam, and her work in getting the women’s memorial built.

Section 10: Linda has not been back to Vietnam but would like to go back to see the changes in the country and the people of Vietnam. Her favorite movie about Vietnam is Platoon (1986). Linda closes by noting that she is not a fan of the famous Vietnam nurse memoir Home Before Morning (1983) and adds that when she read it, she thought “I really should write something.”