Editor’s Note: MOAA is celebrating National Nurses Week with stories of service from members of the MOAA Uniformed Services Nurse Advocates Virtual Chapter. Learn more about the chapter here.

Linda Schwartz had already been accepted into nursing school when Life magazine photographs of troops in Vietnam caught her eye.

Called to serve, she worked with a recruiter to enter the Air Force, which limited the number of female servicemembers at the time. She moved from a contract nurse to earn her commission – and challenged herself further by serving aboard aircraft as a flight nurse.

From the belly of C-141 aircraft traveling airspace thousands of feet above battlefields, Schwartz treated patients experiencing seizures, controlled bleeding from gunshot wounds, and dispensed medicine for illnesses.

“This was really the challenge,” said Schwartz, pictured, who was medically retired from the Air Force as a major after she was injured during training in 1983. “Some flight nurses called themselves the ‘commandos of medics’ and, back then, that’s who we were. I wanted to see if I was the kind of person I hoped I was.”

Schwartz, who worked as a flight nurse for seven years, was stationed near Tokyo during the Vietnam War. She coordinated bringing wounded troops from the battlefield onto the aircraft and caring for them as they traveled to a destination with a higher echelon of care.

On her first day at Tachikawa Airfield, Schwartz was charged with caring for a wounded Army soldier — maybe 19 years old, she guessed.

The soldier had been shot accidentally at close range when a fellow troop’s weapon malfunctioned. His midsection was blown out, she remembered.

“I had never seen anything like this in my life,” Schwartz said.

She stayed calm, offering to pray with the soldier.

“You realize that war is a dangerous business,” she said. “I worked really hard to do what I could to make him comfortable. We were trying to keep him from realizing the pain. I went on in my Air Force career and prayed that no one else would have that experience.”

The soldier died, but Schwartz never forgot his face. A few years ago, she used a database and service records to track down the soldier’s name: Alfred Quiroz.

In 2017, Schwartz and several nurses traveled to Washington, D.C. to mark the 35^th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Schwartz read Quiroz’s name to honor the patient she wasn’t able to save, but always remembered.

“I think every nurse who works with a patient … their patients are special,” she said. “Military nurses sometimes went above and beyond. They were not just the nurse. They were the mom, the girl back home. The only thing you can do is hold their hand and pray.”

Amanda Dolasinski is MOAA’s staff writer. She can be reached at amandad@moaa.org. Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMOAA.