[00:00:02] (HOST) For the vast majority of Vietnam War veterans. The fight ended when they came home. They quietly returned to their lives, built careers and families, and made significant contributions to their communities and to society. But for others, the end of the war marked the beginning of a new fight. Some fought a civilian world that misunderstood and even discriminated against them. Some fought the devastating effects of exposure to dangerous chemicals like Agent Orange. Others fought inner demons like PTSD. In episode 25, we shared the story of Jan Scruggs three year battle to build a memorial for the 58,281 men and women who lost their lives in Vietnam. Today, we introduce you to the story of a similar battle, only more bitter, more contentious, one that lasted more than ten years.

[00:00:54] (CARLSON EVANS) People said it’s forget it. You know why even fight for it? The they will never allow this. And there were reasons they said that.

[00:01:04] (HOST) That’s Diane Carlson Evans. After serving a tour as a nurse in Vietnam, she came home in 1969 to a country she hardly recognized. For decades, she kept her Vietnam experiences to herself, pushed way down deep the way so many Vietnam vets did. And then in 1982, she attended the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. That visit started an avalanche that surged inside her for more than a decade, culminating with the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial 30 years ago this month. The bronze sculpture, by Glenna Goodacre depicts three women attending to a fallen soldier expressing compassion, courage and unity in the face of war.

[00:01:49] (CARLSON EVANS) This memorial was the first in the history of the United States honoring military women on the National Mall. There were no memorials on the National Mall honoring military women. Ours was a first and ours was Vietnam.

[00:02:09] (HOST) More than 250,000 women served in the armed forces during the Vietnam era, and nearly 10,000 of those served in Vietnam during the conflict. Most of them were nurses, but women also served as air traffic controllers, communications specialists, and other vital roles. And since they could not be drafted, every one of those 10,000 women made a choice to serve. They made a difference. Some gave their lives. When we published episode 12 about nurses in Vietnam, we received several emails from combat veterans, men who remember vividly the compassion, the courage and the competence of these women. Some said they owed their lives to military nurses. But when she decided to fight for a memorial on the National Mall to recognize the essential contributions of women during the Vietnam War. Diane Carlson Evans, a farmer’s daughter and an officer in the United States Army, picked the fight of her life. Her adversaries included powerful politicians, a labyrinthine process, openly sexist and sometimes hostile men, women veterans of World War II and the Korean War, and, of course, her own mental trauma.

[00:03:24] (CARLSON EVANS) I would talk to God at night, pray, and I said, God, why me? I can’t do this anymore. Pick somebody else. I’ve got kids at home.

[00:03:32] (HOST) Stick around. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, founders of the wall. This is Echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host, Michael Croan bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict. More than 50 years later. This is episode 62. On November 11th, 1993, a few thousand Vietnam veterans, many of them women but not all, gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall for the unveiling of the newest addition to the memorial, Glenna Goodacre’s statue, that would memorialize the contributions of women who served during the Vietnam War. For Diane Carlson Evans, that moment marked the end of a decade long ordeal. Given all that she’d faced, all that she overcame, she should have been beside herself, triumphant. And maybe she felt a little of that deep down under all of the exhaustion. But as she looked out from behind the podium at the sea of women’s faces in the audience, it wasn’t triumph that she saw.

[00:05:01] (CARLSON EVANS) Everybody looked like they were in shock. They had these looks on their faces of just almost fear. Uh, many were crying. They looked stoic. They weren’t laughing. They weren’t joyful. They weren’t. They were just, like, anxious. There was just this silence. Like, this can’t be real.

[00:05:24] (HOST) At the apex of The Wall is an inscription that reads. In honor of the men and women of the armed forces of the United States who served in the Vietnam War, the names of those who gave their lives, and of those who remain missing, are inscribed in the order they were taken from us. There are eight women memorialized on The Wall, and the inscription clearly recognizes both the men and the women who made the ultimate sacrifice.

[00:05:52] (CARLSON EVANS) The Wall is perfect in every way. It’s something tangible that says, we honor you, we remember you, we remember those who died. And, um, of course, The Wall does that in spades.

[00:06:09] (HOST) Perfect. That’s how Diane describes Maya Lin’s design. It was powerful, healing and inclusive. If the wall had been the only thing on the grounds of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Diane probably would have left well enough alone.

[00:06:26] (CARLSON EVANS) And then the statue of the three men went up.

[00:06:30] (HOST) Some other people, it seems, weren’t satisfied with Maya Lin’s visionary design, and they were quite vocal about it. In fact, they made so much noise that a more traditional statue was added to the site to satisfy them. The Three Servicemen statue is a slightly larger than life depiction of three infantrymen cast in bronze, While the statue offers something of a nod to the ethnic diversity of Vietnam servicemen, it clearly is meant to represent men and only men. To Diane, the statue upset the perfect balance that Maya Lin had achieved with her design. And more than that, it seemed like an overt statement on the National Mall, no less, that the contributions of women who serve in war zones isn’t worthy of acknowledgment. She couldn’t let a statement like that go unanswered, could she? Diane Carlson grew up in Buffalo, Minnesota. Her mother was a nurse at the local hospital, and Diane idolized her.

[00:07:38] (CARLSON EVANS) She was my North Star. She was. I worked with her when I was 15. I begged her to let me work at the hospital. Well, she could pull any strings she wanted. She worked at that hospital for 45 years and was the head nurse, and I also worked as a telephone operator with, you know, back in the day when it was a switchboard. As that job paid me a dollar and a quarter an hour, a nurse’s aide at the hospital paid me $0.50 and I was saving my money so I could go to nursing school. So, yeah, my mom was a huge influence, in many ways. My dad was a dairy farmer. I grew up on a dairy farm. Hard working with five siblings, all of us working on. Not only did I work in town at two jobs, but I also had my chores on the farm. So it was going from one workplace to another. It was probably called child labor, but we didn’t know it at the time. All we knew was we all had to pitch in and pitching meant hay and manure. This was a rural hospital and the nurses there did everything except go in to the operating room. They went to the ER, they went to deliver babies, they admitted new patients. They um they worked on the wards. There was no ICU at the time, but there were critically ill patients. I would follow my mom. My mom would say, okay, Diane, we’re going down. We’re going to deliver this baby. The doctor’s not getting here in time. And I watched her delivered babies because the doctors didn’t get there in time. Then there was the emergency room and Buffalo, Minnesota, where I grew up, had the train tracks that went right past the hospital and back in the day, train intersections on farmland everywhere. Didn’t have the gates that come down. They didn’t have lights. You just had to look. You had to listen and look. Well, we had a lot of train accidents, a lot of deaths. We had farm accidents. We had drownings because Buffalo, Minnesota was surrounded by four lakes. Kids would come in, drown, you know, having drowned. Some of them died. Some of them we saved. Car accidents, alcohol related because back then, no seatbelts, people drove drunk because they could. So I saw it all. I saw a lot of trauma. I didn’t see gunshot wounds and stabbings until I went to Minneapolis, to nursing school. And then I saw a lot of that because I worked in the, um, city hospital in that E.R.. And then every night was gunshot wounds and stabbings and trauma and violence. So I saw a lot before I went to Vietnam. My mom was always calm. I never saw her flustered. She knew exactly what she was doing. And she brought calm to chaos. And there would be chaos in the ER. And she brought a sense of calm. And when I went to Vietnam, I, you know, the first week is like I would pray for. Oh, please, can I be like my mother, can I be calm? I’m praying for grace And it worked. It did. It really did work. I was usually pretty darn calm when the mass casualties came in, because that’s you just quit thinking about yourself and your fear. The majority of nurses in Vietnam were under the age of 25, so some of us volunteered to join the Army knowing we wanted to volunteer for Vietnam. That was me. I went to an Army Nurse Corps recruiter, and I was a junior in college. And I said, I want to go to Vietnam as an Army nurse. And the recruiter basically said, well, here, sign on the dotted line. But I still was not old enough and I had to get permission, I think, of my parents. So I went home and told them what I had done. So I was accepted into the Army Student Nurse Corps program. If student nurses would sign up to join the Army Nurse Corps, the government would pay us our tuition, our books, and a stipend. Well, that helped me for my senior year, especially because I had only saved enough money to get through my junior year, so I. And that was news to me. I didn’t really know about that. So after I’m in the service and I’ve. I’ve been to boot camp for six weeks at Camp Bullis in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Um, they asked where I wanted to go, and I said, well, I’m joined so I can go to Vietnam. Send me to Vietnam. But they sent me to Fort Lee, Virginia for a few months first, and then I went to Vietnam. Women nurses were assigned a specialty. Mine was surgical, post-op and pre-op care of the wounded. Somebody has to take care of them pre-op, somebody has to take care of them post-op. That was my job because we were so young, and we were asked to do things that we had no experience with. We had to overcome our fears, and we had plenty of them. Um, but what would we do when some soldier’s life came in and depended on me and there? No. Nobody else there. We were it. The only person that soldier had was us nurses. The doctors weren’t there. They were all in the operating room. Um, we had our medics, our amazing, wonderful medics, who I loved every one of them. But I like to say it depended on how smart we were, how brave we were, how quick we were. And, just having this enormous energy because we’re young. The most important people in that unit were the patients. And we forgot about ourselves and took care of them no matter what. And that, no matter what, included being rocketed and mortared and getting patients under their beds. And, you know, when their bloodlines got pulled out and their IVs got pulled out and they were on chest tubes. We couldn’t get them under there. My patients were on respirators. We couldn’t get them under the bed. So the mattresses that are now empty because that other soldier has dived for the floor to get under the bed. We took that mattress and threw it on the man who couldn’t get under the bed. Did we go for cover? No, we were on duty. We didn’t run to some bunker unless we were off duty and there were enough people on duty. But I never went to a bunker. I stayed in my unit and never left my unit. I stayed with my patients. And, this whole notion about, well, women can’t be in combat because they’re shrinking violets they’ll just, you know, the men will all be there to protect. To protect the woman. That’s laughable. The men weren’t protecting me one little bit. I was protecting them. That was my job. That was the nurses job to protect our patients. So I saw heroism. I saw heroism every single day. And I saw a lot of women who should have gotten the Bronze Star for heroism, but they did not. Women don’t deserve medals. They were just nurses. They’re just doing their job. That was told to me. Nurses are just doing their job. And I said, well, those operating room nurses, they all deserved the Bronze Star for Valor, during those moments where they had mass casualties and they were on their feet for, you know, sometimes 30 hours bathroom breaks was about it, Um, and they were true heroines. Vũng Tàu the 36th Evac was on the South China Sea. It was beautiful. It doesn’t mean that that hospital was not attacked because it was, but oftentimes the choppers that came in were bringing wounded from other hospitals and the whole concept of evacuation was stabilize them, move them to the next area staging area. Either the flight home, the million dollar wound that the air evac chain and the Air Force flew them off and to Guam or Hawaii or home. And then then there was the in-country evacuations. And when I was at the 36th Evac, a lot of our patients came to us in blue pajamas. They’d already been somewhere else, but they needed further care. They needed surgery, so they needed a pre-op and post-op care. And some of these guys were going to go back to the field because their injuries were not that significant, that, okay, we’re going to take out their stitches and send them back to the field. And the 36th Evac was a 400 bed evacuation hospital to do just that. When I requested a transfer, I told the chief nurse I wanted to go north. I said, I want to go to where the fighting is.

I’m ready. This was after six months. She said, well, be careful what you ask for. Then I’ll send you to Pleiku, rocket city, near the Cambodian border, and the 4th Infantry Division was getting hit really, really hard. And we had mass casualties frequently. And the enemy, the VC, the NVA, targeted our hospital many times to take out the hospital, take out the radar, which was right next to the hospital. So our emergency room was like a conveyor belt of patients coming in by Dustoff helicopter. And, I was assigned to a pre-op and post-op surgical unit, and my, in my case, it was two female nurses and then my four medics, and that was it for the 44 beds. I would go to the ER to help out and I’m telling you those ER nurses.I would just I was I would help out so I’d be I was one of them and I was doing what I could because I had enough skills by this time to do everything that needed to be done in the air. And let’s get the IVs started, get their clothes off, check their bodies for wounds, make assessments, decide where they’re going to go next. Are they going to go to the OR are they going to go to the unit, an appropriate unit where they, would be transferred for whatever skill based needs, nursing needs they needed, orthopedics, what have you. So the just the stamina and the compassion and the care and the concern and no matter what that body looked like, because they’d come in with battlefield amputations. Of course they did. And they came in missing arms and legs. They came in missing parts of their face, parts of their face, plus, injuries to their torso. Bullet holes everywhere. Burns. I mean, it was everything. I mean, everything that you can imagine that war inflicts on the human body. And every single one of those patients was treated so tenderly and spoken to. And you’re going to be all right now. You’re safe. Of course they weren’t. Nothing was safe in Vietnam. And our hospitals were attacked. And the emergency room was too. And it just, you know, I never thought about it at the time because yeah, we were just doing our job. That’s the nurses job and the docs and the medics and the teamwork. I loved Vietnam for the teamwork. I never saw that stateside afterwards. Not like that. It was lifesaving work, no matter what. And it was heartbreaking work to see all these young men so broken. And what were they going to live for, you know, without both limbs and both legs gone and, you know, just the tragedy and the sadness and we felt that and we’d go back to our hooches. and most of the time we didn’t talk about what we had done that day. But there were times that the agony in our faces and the sadness in our faces, but still we didn’t debrief. We really didn’t express our emotions. We just sucked it up and accepted it and got up in the morning and did the same thing over and over and over again. But also when, you know, we did triage and the ER and determined who needed to go to the surgeon who would go to surgery next. And there’s a whole set of protocols for triage on a war zone that are different than triage in the United States. And if a patient was going to require a long time in the OR and there were mass casualties, you didn’t start with that patient because you’d be working ten hours on that patient while all these other casualties are waiting. So if that patient had the shortest amount of time possibly to survive, he would be put probably behind a screen or somewhere. And the nurses, all of them was like they didn’t want anyone to die alone. So someone would be there with that person. And that happened to me one night at the 36th Evac. My unit was quiet that night, so I got a tap on the shoulder and the head nurse in ICU had called me to come and sit with the patient who was going to die. They didn’t want him to be alone because he was still lucid. He was still talking, and he was he definitely wasn’t going to survive more than eight hours. And I don’t know if it was six hours that I sat with him, and I just held his hand and I couldn’t see him because his face was wrapped with dressings. He had head injuries and parts of his body were also wrapped with dressings. He was just from head to toe. It’s amazing that he survived at all. But the cut downs, you know, to get in albumin and intravenous fluids and then blood if necessary. And so I just went up to him and started talking to him and he, I could I knew he could hear me. And he squeezed my hand and I just said, I’m not going anywhere. I just want to sit with you tonight. And then I just I decided I wasn’t just going to sit there and hold his hand, so I talked to him the whole time and I just, I, you know, I just found things to talk about and I said, okay, well, I don’t know where you’re from. I wish you could tell me, but I’ll tell you where I’m from. And then I told him about growing up on a farm and having horses. How nice that was. And I just I just kept talking just to so that he would be comforted. And, his hands started getting colder and colder, and I would feel his pulse, and it was weaker and weaker, and his blood pressure had dropped dramatically, and I knew I was going to lose him. He was going to be mine that night, and I was all he had, Michael. I was it. It should have been his mother or his wife or his girlfriend, or a brother or a sister with him. And but it was me. And that haunted me for years. And I was really angry about it, that, you know, that this young man, he should have had someone who loved him deeply there, to comfort him. And then I thought, well, he had me and I loved him in those moments. We were family. We were there. We were their family. I knew he died before his mother did and his family. And I felt sad about that. That this young man’s gone. His family’s going to now get the telegram or the visit. We do need to talk about the exposure of women in the military then and now. And I’ve talked to World War Two women who are mostly gone now who also experienced sexual assault, sexual harassment and rape. Wherever there’s women in a war zone and wherever there’s men at, wherever there are, there are predators. And it’s no different than in a civilian life and civilian world. What happens in the civilian world happens in the military. Thank God the predators are few and far between, but there’s enough of them to damage and hurt huge numbers of women serving then and now. I know women in Vietnam personally who were raped. I know some who were assaulted and some who were harassed. It’s often by senior officers who take advantage of a lower ranking woman in the military. It’s a crime and nothing was done about it. And I’ll tell you why. Back then, in the 60s and 70s, they didn’t have the protocols or the you know, what do we do about this? A nurse would come to the chief nurse and say, I was raped. Well. Oh, are you pregnant? Well, we’ll send you away. Or the nurse herself would choose to have an abortion wherever she could get one. Sometimes in country and sometimes going to Japan and sometimes just going home. And that was devastating to the woman because her career could be over, ruined, damaged. Sometimes she was blamed. Well, you shouldn’t have been there. Oh, were you drunk? So the blame was put on her. And so, the psychological damage and, um, that went along with all of this and, and ending your career like that. And sometimes the way of dealing with this was, well, we’ll transfer the, we’ll transfer you out. So they transferred the woman out to a different location instead of actually dealing with it and putting it in a court, a neutral court that could, you know, deal with this. But no, it would be under the commander’s decision. The commander would decide what to do with the guy who was the rapist. Well, we’ll send him to a different place, too. So oftentimes the rapist was never caught and was never convicted. So yes, we dealt with that. We dealt with some sexual harassment. And I think most of us and we talk about this still now, most of us women, we just, stayed silent. We talked to each other about it. We had our secrets. We watched our back, and we just dealt with it in our own way to protect ourselves and to protect our jobs.. And then those predators, they just, you know, they ruined it for us. They did, you know, attacked us and, we had to live with the guilt and feeling like maybe it was our fault. Like we should not have been at that party. Personally, I avoided alcohol in Vietnam and I avoided doing any kind of drugs, I wasn’t judgmental. It’s each to their own. Everybody had their own way of dealing with the war and the trauma of it. I liked going to the parties, but I didn’t like being around alcohol. You know, I didn’t want to be around intoxicated people. I didn’t want to be impaired. So some used drugs and alcohol and some did not. We cannot be painted with the same brush. There are women, many Vietnam veteran women that suffer PTSD from the trauma of the predators.

[00:33:27] (CARLSON EVANS) I came home in 69. The whole country. It’s demoralizing. The war protests and the burning of buildings and the burning of the flag and the just, the denigration of our service. And like it was our fault. And what did we go there in the first place? And the awful things that were said to us if they found out we were a Vietnam vet. So, I didn’t want anybody to know I was there because it just set myself up for humiliation. But on my application to work at North Memorial Hospital in Minneapolis, where I wanted to work because it was the trauma center, and it had been on my application that I served in Vietnam. But that didn’t matter. And when I there was an order to start an IV, I started it. So the other nurses tattled on me. She started an IV and she’s just started. She’s just brand new. And so the chief, the head nurse found out and she comes up to me and she said, Miss Carlson, you have to be observed three times before you can start an IV on any patient in this unit. Well, what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t, was that man, I’ve started more IVs in one year than you will start in a lifetime. I started 28 IVs in the dark while our hospital is being attacked with a flashlight with one medic, and they’re all going to die if they don’t get this IV because they are hypoxic. I wanted to just tell her off. I said yes, ma’am. So I was observed three times so I could start IVs. The next thing I did that I got in trouble for was it said the doctor’s order, said this patient needed an NG tube. Well, that’s a nasogastric tube. And you put it down through the nostril and you hook it up to a pump and it sucks out the gastric. So I did it. I went and put down the NG tube. Oh my God, that was even worse. The head nurse comes at Miss Carlson. Don’t you know the nurses do not do those? And I was like, yes, ma’am. Okay. The one. So now I’m there two weeks and I know this is not going to. I can’t work like this. There was a was a patient who had her varicose veins stripped. Varicose veins. Okay. Right. This is not major invasive surgery. It’s. It was 10:30 at night and her bell was ringing. She wanted help, but I couldn’t get there because I was about to give report. And so I finally did get there, and she wanted hot chocolate and and it’s like, well, you want hot chocolate now it’s the kitchen is. Yes, you can get it from you. You’ve got some hot chocolate. Just go get some of that hot water and bring me. Well, she reported me to the head nurse that next day and said that I was incompetent. I hadn’t answered her light, that I refused to bring her hot chocolate when she wanted it, and the head nurse said, this patient is very litigious we happen to know that she has been in other hospitals and she has sued. And I thought, she’s got legs. What is she going to sue about? I had patients in Vietnam that didn’t have legs and didn’t even complain. The next day I went to HR and said I was resigning. Edie and I had stayed in touch with each other, and Edie had been my hooch mate in Vietnam. Edie had called and said, Diane, I haven’t finished my tour. I have to I have to do another year and I’m going to Madigan Army Hospital and I said, I’m going with you. We followed each other out to Madigan Army Hospital, and I got a job there as a civilian nurse immediately and did all the things that I ever did in Vietnam. It’s the best thing I ever did. It’s really saved me from my I’m sure I would have been in a real depression. I know I would. I was mildly depressed already, but work was my saving grace. Work saved me. Then they assigned me to a post-op surgical unit. I started the IVs. I did the NG tubes. I did everything at Madigan Army Hospital because the Army Nurse Corps or the military hospitals respect our skills. And then I thought, what am I doing working here as a civilian? I’m going to go back. So I rejoined the Army Nurse Corps. I was out by now. I’d done my two years and I thought, what am I doing working as a civilian in an Army hospital? So I went back in and then I went to Brooke Army Medical Center. I went down to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and immediately the chief nurse looked at my she said, hello, captain. Welcome back into the Army. And I said, I’m still a first lieutenant. She said, no, I just promoted you. You’re a captain now. And she said, where do you want to work? And I said, do I have a choice? And she said, well, where do you want to work? I said, well, I want to work in ICU. That’s what I do. And she said, good, because you’re going to be head nurse in the ICU report up to 13 A. So I was not only head nurse in ICU, but also the recovery room and also the post-op ward. It was a big job, but I loved it. And Edie, my housemate, was from Minnesota and I was from Minnesota, so we bonded like in 2 minutes or 2 seconds we bonded. She was assigned to Pleiku about the same time I was, and they we happened to be door to door with each other in our hooch. And where are you from? Minnesota. Minnesota. It’s like, oh, I have something in common with her. And she’s hysterically funny. I told you about the first night we were rocketed and I was crawling around on my wooden floor with broken glass because the mirror they were there were no windows in our hooch, for obvious reasons. There were boards and screens for the mosquitoes, but the mirror over this makeshift dresser blew off the wall and crashed on the floor. So I’m on. I’m crawling over glass now because it broke. The mirror broke into a million pieces, and I unlocked my door and banged on Edie’s door, and Edie opened it up and I said, well, Edie, if we’re going to die, let’s die together. I really said that. She was under the bed, and she had her helmet on over pink curlers because she had curly. She curled her hair at night and rollers in her hair. You know, back in the day, those big rollers and I laughed. We were laughing. We were being rocketed. It’s horrible. We could have died. The hooch next to us was blown off the face of the map right next to us, that hooch which was empty. And I laughed. I said, Edie, you should just see yourself and she said, well, thank God I can’t. And she was eating peanut butter and crackers. I said, Edie, how can you eat at a time like this? Well, if I die, I’m not going to die hungry. And then we laugh again. So we’re. We are laughing and we’re being rocketed. We’re being attacked. And it’s terrifying. We were terrified, but we had each other. And again, I keep going back to that. In Vietnam, we had each other and us women had each other just like the men had each other. We had each other’s backs. We may not have talked a lot to each other and debriefed and cried. I never saw a nurse cry in Vietnam. If they cried, they did it alone in their hooch. But we didn’t, like, sob on each other’s shoulders. We just didn’t. I didn’t see any crying. I saw sadness and maybe a few tears, but not any, like sobbing. Like, we can’t do this or we’re scared or, we just, but we’re so young too, maybe we think we’re immortal. Whenever we come home from war, we’ve been experiencing something extraordinary and out of the norm. War is not normal, although we seem to be getting into a lot of them. So it feels like normal one after the other. Um, but, you know, shifting gears from being thrown into a situation where your life is in danger every day and you are together with other soldiers or people, you know, whether airmen, Marines, what have you. And that’s our life day in and day out, and it’s intense. And then we go home. And I got on that helicopter in Pleiku with a bunch of Montagnards who were terrified and trying to get out, and the crew on the on my helicopter was chasing away the Montagnards, who were, bringing their baskets of chickens with them. So there was chickens cackling in that basket, and they had it in their hand, and they had their children and their babies on their in their arms. And they were desperate to get on that chopper because their village had been attacked. And, so that was my last memory getting out of Pleiku. The only American woman on the plane that those chopper pilots, they were focused on getting us safely to where we needed to be. Then I ended up, probably at Cam Ranh Bay, I think, and then got a plane to Japan, and when I got to Japan, I was sick. So I got off the plane and I found a Navy BOQ and stayed in my room for about ten days with a fever and coughing. Later I found out I had tuberculosis. My souvenir from Vietnam. And so that was pretty intense. And then I get on a plane out of Japan, which is full of, it’s a Pan American, I think. And it’s all GIs and all men. I remember just being the only female soldier on the plane and then arriving at, Fort McChord Air Base and then being sent to Madigan Army Hospital to have my exit health exam. And he told me I had a spot on my lung and that I should have it checked every six months. He never mentioned TB. So now I’m incredulous because then I go back to the air base. Now I’m at Madigan Army Hospital, and I go back to the air base to get my ticket home to Minnesota. And the young man behind the counter said, ma’am, there is no ticket home. You’re on your you’re out. You got you’re done. You’re out of the Army and I’m in my uniform. You’re out of the Army now. And I said, wait a minute, I have to buy my own ticket home. Said, yes, ma’am, you are out of the Army now. You are. You’re on your own. So I had to find my way to probably Seattle Airport, SeaTac, and walked up to the counter and paid cash to get home, my own money. The Army wasn’t going to pay my way home. Okay, well, that’s my first unwelcome event. And then I get to the Minneapolis airport, and Minnesota is known for being nice, Minnesota nice. Maybe you’ve never heard of that, but people in Minnesota are nice. But I arrive at the airport and there are several soldiers with me in uniform. Me in uniform, and there were hecklers there waiting for us as our bags were coming down the chute. I could not believe it. And they were chanting something and they had T-shirts and they had long hair and, an anti-war t shirt said something or other, probably make love, not war, I don’t know, but it was very uncomfortable. And, my duffel bag was coming down the conveyor belt, and this young enlisted man said those duffel bags were heavy. It had everything in it from a year’s work worth of living in Vietnam. And this young, enlisted man said, I’ll get it for you, ma’am. And he grabs my duffel bag and this heckler says, let her carry her own damn bag. She’s in a man’s Army. Well, that was not good, because this young enlisted man went over and knocked him on the ground and on the floor and bloodied his nose and was hitting him like, this is what we expected. We had heard about this, but this young enlisted man wasn’t taken how he had treated me, because he could see that I’d been a nurse and I always had my caduceus on. I mean, it was obvious. And then his buddy who was with him started pulling him off of this guy. Well, he’s badgering his face into the floor and said, we got to get the hell out of here. We’re in trouble. And they just ran off. And I went over to those hecklers and I said, don’t take it out on us. We didn’t cause that war. We were over there saving lives and they just went off in a huff. Thank goodness my parents were late. They’re always late because it’s a farm and things have to be done on the farm before they’ll get in the car and go anywhere. If my especially my dad, if he had seen that, he well, I don’t know what he would have done. He’s not a violent man, but I think he would have taken matters into his own hands. But, I didn’t tell him that happened for years and years. Maybe, I don’t know, many, many years later of how I was treated at the airport. I didn’t want them to know. So now I’m home on the farm and it’s day and night because the farm is peaceful. The cows are moving, mowing, the chickens are clucking, the ducks are quacking. We had geese. The geese, we had geese. My mom had geese, the fire and we had horses. And they were making their, you know, the birds were chirping. It was so peaceful. So I went from Vietnam to the farm. I felt very I never felt so alone in my life. I felt like I was distanced from everyone and outside of my own family. I felt like nobody cared what. That what I had done or where I had been. I think people, especially my family and our wonderful farm neighbors who knew me and cared about me, I think they felt like they were walking on eggshells. Well, should I ask her what she did in Vietnam, or does she want to talk about it or and so I take blame too, for how they reacted when I was in the room, because I was the elephant in the room. I was, you know, different. I came home and I was not the same person anymore. And what do we say to her? And my mom wanted to have this big welcome home party for me and invite all the farm women and neighbors and friends and. And I wrote a letter back to mom. She sent it to Pleiku. And I wrote back quickly, and I said, mom, no parties. If you have a party, I will not be there. Do not have a party. And already I was feeling this sense of if I had a party, what would happen? Would I be humiliated? Would they throw things at me? I was I was feeling this anxiety that what was going to happen to me when I came home, because I knew how the soldiers, the male soldiers were being treated spit at. Um. So I went silent. That was my way of dealing with Vietnam after Vietnam. I didn’t use my voice. I didn’t stick up for myself. I couldn’t defend myself yet. I don’t know why. I was quick to defend the soldiers, though. I was always sticking up for the men. How dare you do that? These men. I had just seen how they suffered. And I had just seen how they died. And how dare you say anything that they are glassy eyed, drug addicted, baby killers. And I was furious at how they were treating the men, but I never really thought about how they were treating us and how it was impacting me as a woman, because I think, I didn’t feel I went to Vietnam to save lives. I didn’t go to Vietnam to force, to be taken to taking our soldiers. Our men in uniform were given orders by the government to take lives for some of them, not all, depending on what your role was in Vietnam was an M-16 and weapons and artillery. And this was your job. Kill the Vietnamese. Kill the enemy, but that wasn’t my job. So I think I was feeling like they, were they were blamed for something that was blame the government. I think we were blaming the wrong people. And were we blameless? No. Because, you know, we yes, we did what our orders told us to do. But we have morals too, and we have morality. And that’s why so many young men who were forced to take lives came home with such serious PTSD.

[00:51:09] (CARLSON EVANS) That’s not normal, to be told to shoot people and kill people. So getting back to how I was feeling it, I was feeling like this for years until 1982. And when I went to The Wall for the dedication, and when I heard that there was going to be a memorial to Vietnam, those who died, I was I was incredulous. I was in shock, like, really? Finally? We’re going to have something that shows how these young men and I didn’t know about the eight women I only knew about Sharon Lane. Sharon Lane is the only woman I knew of that died in Vietnam, because she was killed when I was there. I’ll never forget it. A medic tapped on my shoulder. I was hanging an IV, and a medic tapped on my shoulder and took me aside and said, Lieutenant, we lost an army nurse last night in Chu Lai. She was killed when the 3/12 the hospital was overrun, she was killed while she was on duty. And I remember how I felt at that moment where it’s interesting. My anger wasn’t at the Viet Cong or the NVA, whichever it was, the enemy. My anger was at our government that was now going to go to her parents home and give her the telegram, or walk in and knock on the door and say, your daughter was killed in Vietnam. And how sad that was for her. And we were in Vietnam because of the United States government. Remember, it’s 1969 at this time. It was June 69’ when Sharon was killed, and I knew about all the anti-war protests, which I was glad for the anti-war protests, I thought, good, maybe it’ll end the war. I didn’t know it was anti.so anti-soldier and anti-us you know. Support. Support the veterans. You don’t have to support the war, but at least support us. So I guess part of why I was afraid to come home and what would happen to all of us. Uh, but so in 1982, when I heard about this wall that was going to have the names, I knew I had to go. And I told my husband, I went to Vietnam alone. I came home alone. And I have to do this alone. And I did not invite him to be with me. I should have, but I just had to do it on my own. I think, truly, I was afraid of breaking down in front of him, and I was not going to cry in front of anybody. My biggest fear is that I would just break down and cry and never stop crying and that did happen. My biggest fear came true, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. I wasn’t ready to feel to feel anything because I had submerged everything about Vietnam so deeply in my psyche. I wasn’t feeling anything but being numb. I think I just stayed in shock, and I had to find Sharon’s name because I heard that. That all the names would be on the wall. And then I had to find one of my patients from the 36th evac who I had cared for, and I only remembered his name because he was from Minnesota, and he had asked Eddie Lee Evanson, and he had he had asked me, when I was taking care of him. And his wounds were minor. So as soon as I had removed his stitches, he had to go back to the field, which he did. And he said, hey, Lieutenant, would you write me letters while I’m back in the field? Well, I hadn’t learned that. That’s not a good idea because you don’t know what you’re going to find out and you don’t want to know. Um, so I wrote Eddie a few letters, and I got a couple back from him. But then I went to Pleiku and mail call. There was this eight by ten yellow manila envelope that the military uses with the little thing that winds it, little, little string that winds around it. I just I’m so visual. I still see that. And it had commanding officer something in the left hand corner. And I thought nothing of it until I opened it up. And then I waited till I got back to my hotel. I was sitting on my bed and I opened it up, and the letters that I had written to, um, Eddie were unopened. And then my heart sank and the letter from the Co said, we are sorry to tell you that Eddie was killed. Eddie died and he actually died in a different hospital. He didn’t die on the field, so at least he wasn’t alone. But I found his name and I went to his name first. And then I went to Sharon’s. And then exactly what I feared would happen, happened. I broke down and I cried. I cried for all the names on The Wall. You know, Michael, we never had a funeral. We never had a wake. We never had a funeral for any of these people. There was nothing. There was nothing but all this animosity towards us for all those years. And I had lost my voice. I couldn’t even stand up for myself, let alone my brother and sister veterans. It was my safe place. I had to be safe, or I was suicidal, like so many vets. And I wouldn’t admit that for years, but I was. And my husband knew it, and he worried about me. And I think there were times my kids were worried about me, but they didn’t know much about what I had done. But I knew exactly how I was going to do it and where I was going to do it. And I had lots of little kids, under the age of ten, four kids under the age of ten at the time. And I, they saved me because I couldn’t leave them. I worried more about them than anything. So, then I came home and my mother came to help out with the kids because I was pretty depressed, and didn’t get out of bed for a few days. And then I heard about this new addition, the statue of the Three Servicemen, because there was a handful of people, for a vocal, who didn’t like The Wall, they didn’t like that it was black. They didn’t like that it was underground. They didn’t like that the artist was Asian. They used, pejorative words about her, because she was Asian. I’m not going to say those words because I won’t repeat them. And, they didn’t like that it was underground because it made it like, well, then it’s invisible. They didn’t like anything about it. Maybe they liked the names, so they wanted something more heroic. So, they commissioned Frederick Hart to design a statue, a statue portraying men, and they would be looking at the names on The Wall. And the Secretary of the Interior, Secretary, Watt, had said he wouldn’t give a construction permit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund until these this vocal group of veterans got what they wanted. So that was all a part and parcel of this. And I knew about this because I was reading it. And then when I looked at the statue, I thought, well, it’s a nice statue and if that’s what the men want, but they were missing someone, and that was the women. And I went to the dedication in 1984 of the Frederick Hart statue, and Ronald Reagan was the speaker and never once, you can trust me on this, you can look it up. You can read his speech. Never once did he say men and women. Now we have finally honored all the men who served in Vietnam. He never said women. He never said it. I don’t think Ronald Reagan knew we were there like everybody else in this country. Right. And so I came home from that dedication experience, which I went alone, by the way, again. And I, I still remember saying to my husband, he came home from work and I said, honey, this if they have a statute of man, there has to be one to women because they don’t know we were there and they will never know we were there, because how are they going to find the eight women’s names on the wall? And I said, there has to be a statute of women. And my husband said, well, who’s going to do that? And I said, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know even know how to start, but I’m going to do something.

Full Interview with Diane Carlson Evans (Part 1 & 2)