SC’s military museum still telling stories of Vietnam War 3 years after opening of popular exhibit

COLUMBIA — An ongoing exhibit telling the story of what it was like for South Carolina soldiers in the Vietnam War has renewed interest in the state’s oldest military history museum.

It also has offered visitors as well as museum staff an opportunity to hear directly from veterans who fought in the war. That’s not a possibility for other exhibits at the museum, which has artifacts from every war South Carolinians have fought in, starting with the American Revolution.

Veterans Day marks three years since the exhibit, titled “A War with No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973,” opened inside the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum.

The exhibit includes the uniform once worn by retired Capt. Linda Sharp in 1967 and 1968, when she was a nurse at the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon. That’s been available for all visitors to see.

But she’s also talked in person about her experiences — not just about the soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians who came to her for treatment or the horrors of war but also day-to-day life for her and her fellow medics.

“She didn’t only talk about how hard it was and what they did, but what it was like: going to the (post exchange) for drinks, playing music, sometimes going out by helicopter to certain sites,” said Allen Roberson, the museum’s director.

Also on display is the pistol C.W. Bowman carried as a “tunnel rat” with the 9th Infantry, climbing into the dark narrow tunnels dug by the Vietcong.

People who heard him speak got a deeper glimpse of what he encountered in those tunnels, including booby traps full of venomous snakes and the time he fell through a trap door not knowing if he would make it back out.

He also talked about the darker mental health troubles he developed and had to overcome when he came home.

And then there’s the unofficial tiger-striped uniform worn by Lt. Andy Rice, who was part of a small unit dropped by helicopter behind enemy lines.

According to Roberson, Rice talked about spending the night neck deep in the swamp to avoid enemy patrols as well as happening across a castle-like building in the middle of the jungle inhabited by French Catholic nuns.

”You meet a fellow of a certain age inColumbia, you absolutely do not know what he might have been doing in the 1960s and what he might have had to endure,” said Joe Long, one of the museum’s tour guides.

Many of the veterans’ stories have been captured on tape by Fritz Hamer, a museum historian and archivist who interviewed some 70 veterans for the exhibit.

Hamer, who officially retired several years ago, said he heard over and over again from veterans about the stifling humidity and the distinct musty, oily smell that hit them as soon as they stepped off the transport plane. They’d talk about walking through the jungle with 80 pounds of equipment and ammunition on their backs. And they’d share pictures of the rice fields during the rainy season or the South Vietnamese and how they lived.

Hamer said he considers this the golden age of the Vietnam war veteran as many grow older and are more willing to talk about what it was like.

“We’ve really gotten into a part of military history that had largely been ignored until the last decade,” he said.

“It also helps people understand we are a museum that looks at all aspects of South Carolina’s military history,” Hamer added. “I see it as helping to change the minds of people about the direction this place is going.”

Founded in 1896, the Confederate Relic Room — initially housed inside the Statehouse — has been inside the State Museum building, through a separate entrance, since 2002.

The museum faced controversy it never asked for in 2015, when legislators sent the museum the last Confederate flag flown by the state on Statehouse grounds. The flag was removed — pole and all — in the wake of the June 2015 massacre at a historic Black church in Charleston by an avowed white supremacist who gunned down nine people.

Amid the debate, the number of visitors in 2015 dropped below 20,000 for the first time in a decade.

The museum worked to recover but it suffered more issues from a burst pipe in 2019 that flooded the exhibit room. Then in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to close.

But when the Vietnam exhibit finally did open, it was seen as a major success.

Over the exhibit’s first two years, annual attendance at the museum tucked away inside the historic Mills Building, originally a textile mill that opened in 1893, has grown to more than 41,000 annual visits.

That’s a more than 50% increase over the 27,000 visitors the museum saw between July 2022 and June 2023.

And despite being closed for six months for renovations to the building, the Relic Room still logged about 31,000 visitors between July 2024 and June 2025.

“This really brought us out,” Roberson said, reminding people that the Relic Room is not limited to its namesake war.

“All I used to hear is ‘The confederate museum? I’ve never been there. I don’t really care about the Civil War,’” said Roberson.

With the Vietnam exhibit, he added, “All of a sudden, you know us for something else.”

The exhibit was supposed to be temporary, but the end date kept getting pushed back. Now there is no timeline for replacing it.

Visiting the museum

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