Waldo County was designed under project SCB 9A and laid down as USS LST-1163 on 4 August 1952 at Pascagoula, Mississippi, by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation.

On 14 June 1954, LST-1163 departed Little Creek for Morehead City, North Carolina, to embark United States Marines for amphibious exercises.

She left the shipyard on 6 August 1954 and returned to Little Creek to resume duty with the Amphibious Force, United States Atlantic Fleet.

After stops at Bordeaux in France, Port Lyautey in Morocco, and at Gibraltar, she joined the United States Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean late in September 1955.

For the next four months, she ranged the length and breadth of the Mediterranean Sea conducting Sixth Fleet amphibious exercises and making port visits.

She alternated five Mediterranean deployments with periods of duty out of Little Creek conducting amphibious training at such places as Vieques Island, Onslow Beach in North Carolina, and at various locations in the Canadian Maritime Provinces.

Between her third and fourth deployments to the Sixth Fleet, she earned the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal in November and December 1961 when she cruised Cuban waters as a part of another contingency force established in response to a wave of what the United States considered to be terrorist actions by the Cuban government following the abortive April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba.

Otherwise, the periods between deployments consisted entirely of routine Second Fleet operations, primarily amphibious training missions at the previously named locations.

In January 1970, she steamed to the Panama Canal and transited it for a brief series of landing exercises on the Pacific Ocean side of the Panamanian Isthmus.

Waldo County name was stricken from the Navy List on 1 November 1973, and she was transferred to the Maritime Administration for layup in the National Defense Reserve Fleet at Suisun Bay at Benicia, California.