Linda Caldwell: 'Dedicated' and 'motivated' on behalf of fellow veterans

May 22—More than 15,000 military veterans are spread around North Augusta, Graniteville, Jackson, Wagener, Aiken, New Ellenton and the rest of Aiken County, including some vets whose records include just a few months of active duty and others who served Uncle Sam for decades, often with combat experience in the mix.

Linda Caldwell, who saw time in Vietnam as an Army nurse, has heard more than a typical share of war stories over the years and has a few of her own, as one of the state's most active advocates for veterans. Among the major acronyms in her life are DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) and MOAA (Military Officers Association of America), both of which she has served in leadership roles and continues to support.

She is also a founding member of the South Carolina Veterans Coalition, an advocacy group that pushes for legislation to help vets and their families, and is on board with the Vietnam Veterans of America and Veterans of Foreign Wars. Her career as a nurse reached to 2013, with a break in the middle (1974-82) to raise her daughters.

"I would say she's a vital lynchpin in what goes on in Aiken County — very much as far as it's related to veterans, but she's very much involved in a lot of other things, too, just for the betterment of our community," said combat veteran Lowell Koppert, chairman of the Aiken County Veterans Council, a group which Caldwell serves as treasurer.

Her board memberships also include one with the local chapter of Our Community Salutes, a national program that reached the Aiken area in 2020 and aims to support local efforts to "recognize, honor and support high school seniors" who are on track to enlist in the U.S. military after graduation, as well as to "provide parents/guardians of enlistees with community support as their son or daughter transitions into military service."

Local residents — and anyone who pays attention while visiting downtown Aiken around Memorial Day and Veterans Day — may also be familiar with her "Hometown Heroes" efforts, resulting in dozens of large banners being placed around town in coordination with the two patriotic holidays. Caldwell picked up the idea in June 2019, when she saw her father-in-law's banner in New Jersey and brought the concept back to Aiken, where it has flourished.

The banners, in her words, "feature individual photographs of men and women in uniform along with the symbol of their branch of service and the specific war or conflict each veteran experienced while on active duty."

The Cedar Creek resident knows the U.S. from coast to coast, partially by virtue of having grown up in an Air Force family and also through her own military experiences and post-Vietnam career, including almost 16 years in the pharmaceutical industry in New Jersey, working for Schering-Plough Corporation.

Texas, Tennessee and Nevada were major stops along the way, and she and her husband, Brent, have three adult daughters, all now living in California. By virtue of her dad's profession, she has also seen a huge chunk of Europe and learned to communicate in French. Her family moved to France in 1955.

"When I think back on it, I'm just amazed. That was only 10 years after the end of World War II, and I was in the fifth grade.There was an American school on the base, and we had American teachers, and... we used to go into Paris every now and then."

Trips to Normandy (including Omaha Beach) were among the options. "It was incredible," she said, recalling the sight of "rows and rows of crosses, just as straight as an arrow" in a massive cemetery.

Family trips included one when her dad arranged to have a great deal of leave time and the result was exposure to the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. On another occasion, Spain was a destination. "I saw a lot of working or being in the military as an advantage, because it forces you to really make friends ... because you never know when you're going to be transferred."

The family, on another occasion, lived in England, "a little bit northwest of London," and military assignments eventually led to a city in southern Nevada.

"I actually went to high school in Las Vegas ... and in those days, when I went to high school, it was a small town. There were, I think maybe 35,000 or 40,000 people in the whole valley. Now they are well over, I would have to think, 2 million. The favorite phrase for people who grew up there is, 'Oh, that used to be desert,' and ... now, you know, there's a house there, there's a building, or a high-rise or whatever, so it's quite a change."

A few years later, she was about 8,000 miles away. Her Vietnam time ran from 1966 to 1969, with most of her service being in the coastal city of Quy Nhon, as one of thousands of American women on military duty. One misperception about the tumultuous years has to do with the numbers of women who volunteered for duty in Vietnam, as Caldwell did.

"There were a lot of nurses who got orders for Vietnam who did not want to go and were not happy about being there, but in its true wisdom, the Army did not keep any records as to how many women served in Vietnam, so the estimate is something around 10,000."

The 67th Evacuation Hospital had a fast-paced environment, as Caldwell recalled. "They would transfer patients to us once in a while, from I.C.U., but the average length of stay for a patient in our hospital was only five days, but ... the idea was, like they say, 'treat 'em and street 'em,' so you either get them back out into the field or you get them into the evacuation procedure and ... out of country."

More than 50 years later, Caldwell is still looking to manage the clock. "I guess the challenge is trying to manage my time and get everything done. I'm pretty good at that," she said, recalling that her classroom years included earning a bachelor's degree in nursing from the University of San Francisco and (after Vietnam) a master's degree in nursing from Rutgers University, with help from the G.I. Bill.

Along the way, she touched a variety of lives — perhaps most prominently that of her husband, Brent Caldwell, an Air Force veteran whom she met in Las Vegas in 1970, when he returned from Vietnam. They have been married since 1971 and moved to Aiken from New Jersey in 2009.

The man of the house, who was on active duty from 1967 to 1972, joined the effort to describe the retired nurse's personality and priorities. "I don't know where she gets her energy, from one thing to another, I can't keep up with her, and she's always thinking of others," he said. "Whatever she's doing, it's because she wants to help others. No matter what she does, it's a way of thinking of how to help somebody."

In that spirit, one of her career highlights actually made the national airwaves, by way of "Unsolved Mysteries," a popular TV show that began in 1987 and had the late Robert Stack among the hosts over the years. Stack, in the show's 1990 season, presented a segment titled "Thanks, Captain Sharp," focusing on the story of Jim Baczkowski, a Vietnam veteran who had lost a leg in a firefight and, having suffered life-threatening wounds, took substantial encouragement from Capt. Linda Sharp — an Army nurse now known as Linda Caldwell.

The "Unsolved Mysteries" segment, which runs for about 17 minutes, is on YouTube and depicts Baczkowski's time in Vietnam, as Sharp worked to keep him alive, focusing on the task of returning home and not surrendering to despair. Baczkowski, who was living in Colorado at the time of the segment's production, had never stopped thinking of the Army nurse.

The former "Captain Sharp" happened to see a promotional mention of the upcoming program, got in touch with the production company and wound up on the show, going to Colorado to meet Baczkowski, his wife (to whom she had written a letter of encouragement) and the Baczkowskis' son.

Caldwell, in the course of her speaking engagements, has shown the "Thanks" video and come up with a theme. "What I say is, 'The takeaway from is that everybody has a story, and I just happened to be ... on national television with mine ... I'm no different than anybody else. I was doing my job, and I was helping a patient, and there are millions of examples of that.'"

Recalling the TV program, she said, "One of the things I do remember that I said was that nurses don't realize what an impact they have on patients' lives, and I said I absolutely didn't know the impact I had on Jim's life."

Much more recently, Sheila Pate, a local Army spouse, chose the words "dedicated" and "motivated" to start a description of Caldwell. "She's funny. She's the most hard-working woman on every board or organization you could name, probably," Pate added, citing such aspects as Aiken's Memorial Day parade (set for May 28) and the county's veterans council.

Dwight Bradham, director of Aiken County Veterans Affairs, works frequently with Caldwell. "For her age, I don't know what water she's drinking," he said. "I don't know if it's out of Coker Springs or what, but I definitely want a glass of it, because I hope to be at the same level for both her and Brent when I'm their age. They've still got a tremendous passion for serving. It shows every day in what they do to help our veterans, and their commitment and dedication are way above the bar set by most folks."

Koppert made similar comments. "I often forget her age. She's in her mid 70s, and she runs circles around a lot of people half her age ... This lady's rocking and rolling," he said.

"She's got all kinds of tasks on a daily basis that she's dealing with, and I can still call her and be like, 'Hey, can you get this done?' She's like, 'OK, yeah. Let me carve out some time here.'"

Caldwell's husband noted, "Since I've known her, I haven't been able to keep up with her energy or her drive to help others, and no matter what she does, what she's thinking is, 'How does it help someone else?' — not thinking of herself, and that's probably, in a nutshell, her psyche. That's the way she thinks and always has been."

Bradham said, "My daughter asked me, when I came back from Afghanistan, 'Daddy, are you a hero?,' and I said, 'Nope, but I served with a lot of them,' and I'll just say it. I continue to serve with a lot of heroes, with Linda being one of them."