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Earlier this year, while shopping in the produce department of a grocery store, I ran into a longtime friend I met years ago during the Weigh Down Workshop. I’m glad I wasn’t shopping in the cookies or candy section.
Although we didn’t often see each other, I cherished Sharon Margaret Nordquist and her remarkable story. I was saddened to see she passed away on Dec. 8 at her Winlock home. A graveside service is planned at 1 p.m. Dec. 19 at St. Urban Cemetery.
When we chatted in the store, I told her I led a book club discussion about Kristin Hannah’s bestselling book, “The Women,” and thought often of Sharon while reading about nurses in Vietnam and their transitioning back to civilian life afterward. The popular 2024 novel by the Bainbridge Island author has 4.7 stars out of 5 with 308,439 reviews.
Sharon shook her head, saying she wasn’t in a frontline Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, but I knew she served as a nurse in Vietnam during wartime, and I found her amazing. In fact, when I served on a Vietnam War Era Veterans Remembrance Day Committee, I suggested she share her story at the Veterans Memorial Museum in Chehalis. It took a bit of arm twisting, but in August 2010, she spoke about her time as a U.S. Air Force nurse both in the Philippines and in Vietnam. And thank goodness Centralia’s Pat Swanson videotaped the speakers’ presentations at those events and shared them with me.
At the beginning of her speech, Sharon described herself as “very nervous.” At the end, after thanking the crowd of 350 for listening, she said, “I’m not quite as nervous now, but I don’t know if I’ll ever do this again.”
Sharon, a Seattle native who graduated from Seattle University’s School of Nursing, worked six years at different places before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force.
“I’d always kind of had an inkling to go into the military,” she said. “I wanted to travel, and I didn’t want it to cost anything.”
She spent 20 months stationed in Oklahoma before she was transferred in late 1968 to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines for an 18-month tour. She worked nights on the surgical ward of a 1,000-bed hospital until 1971, treating young men severely injured in hostile action in Vietnam who weren’t stable enough yet to be shipped back to the States.
“It was my first time ever experiencing taking care of gunshot wounds,” she said. “I’d taken care of burns before, shrapnel and amputees.”
She spoke of a young man who lost his right hand. “His whole concern was that he would not be able to salute again,” she said.
Another young man injured in his face didn’t want to return home so disfigured, but in the early morning, they loaded patients ready to return Stateside. It took two corpsmen to help strap him to a stretcher as he refused to leave his bed, saying, “I cannot go home when I look like this.”
“I’m not proud of the fact that the three of us literally lifted him up and put him on the stretcher because it was time to go home,” Sharon said. “I felt so bad.”
But, she added, “The last thing he said to me was, ‘Thank you. I needed to go.’”
The hospital also cared for many wounded Korean soldiers. She described them as “very fierce fighters.”
One injured Korean soldier couldn’t leave his wheelchair, that is, until an earthquake hit.
“We were on the fifth floor,” Sharon said. “The whole building shook. He jumped out of that wheelchair, ran down five flights of stairs, and poured out into the open. When the earthquake was over and we could go back up, he walked back up the five flights of stairs and got in the wheelchair.”
He was sent back to the fighting the next week.
She later was stationed in California and volunteered to serve in Vietnam.
“I wanted to see why we were there,” she said. “What was the purpose?”
Three months later, she was assigned to Cam Ranh Bay in Khánh Hòa province, Vietnam. But by then she had started dating a young Air Force officer, a hospital administrator.
“Well, I really didn’t want to go to Vietnam, but, you know, you can’t say to the Air Force, ‘I’m not going because I got a boyfriend finally,’” she said with a chuckle.
When she arrived at Cam Ranh Bay, just as depicted in “The Women,” a hospital nurse gave her a helmet, flak jacket, fatigues, and combat boots.
“What am I going to do with all this and my five suitcases?” Sharon said she wondered. “Because no woman can go somewhere for a full year without at least five suitcases, even if it’s in a war zone.”
Two days later, she was transferred to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon, which needed a nurse experienced in medical staging to triage patients and send them where they needed to go.
“Well, they said, ‘All right. Get yourself an aircraft.’ I thought, Holy crap, get myself an aircraft? I mean, isn’t someone going to show me what to do? Well, I got myself an aircraft, and I got to Saigon and to the airport at Tan Son Nhut, and there was no one to meet me.” Sharon sighed. “Here I am with my five suitcases, my flak jacket, my helmet, my fatigues, and my combat boots, and there’s no one there to meet me. Thank God for sergeants. I’m telling you, they’ll save you every time.”
He found her a ride to the hospital.
The next day, in a Quonset hut, she looked down to see a snake going after a rat. “And I thought, ‘Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into?’”
She worked at the small hospital as the war was winding down.
“I felt that guilt, too, because I wasn’t in a MASH unit,” she said. “I was in a relatively safe hospital. It took me a long time to deal with that guilt because I wasn’t up front.”
But she served in a country at war, saving and healing wounded soldiers, doing more than her part to help our nation and our military.
“I'm here to say that you’re never going to get rid of the guilt,” Sharon said. “It’s always going to be there if you went there, and your guilt may be different than mine. I’m still having some problems, but I can live with them better than I could 30 years ago. I have to push it to the back of my head and leave it there and tucked away, and sometimes it’s going to pop up once in a while.”
She experienced guilt over the young men she couldn’t save and those sent home missing limbs while she returned with all her arms and legs and ears.
Sharon left the Air Force after seven years and married Frederick Nordquist, who retired from the military after 20 years, and raised a family. She later worked at Providence Centralia Hospital.
Today, any and all guilt is gone, and God likely welcomed Sharon with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
We never know how many heroes we meet in our everyday lives, which is why it’s important to cherish people and listen to their stories.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
