“In My Soul, I Knew I Couldn’t Give Up”: Serving As A Nurse In Vietnam And Honoring Sister Veterans At Home

Diane Carlson Evans was born in November 1946, and was raised on the family farm in Buffalo, Minnesota, with two older brothers, two younger brothers, and a younger sister. Her younger brother, Maynard, still runs the family farm. Her father was a farmer and her mother was a nurse who grew up in North Dakota, but came to Buffalo, a town of 2,500, to work in the six-room hospital. Diane’s mother was her role model. Growing up on a farm, chores were an important part of each day, and the children all had their roles. Diane preferred being outside to being inside. She describes taking care of the animals, doing laundry, and helping her mother in the kitchen, where baking bread and pies were formative duties. Later, in Vietnam, baking her mom’s homemade cinnamon rolls for her medics was her “happy place.” During WWII, Diane’s Aunt Ruth served in the WAC, and after the war, she used the GI Bill to go to college. She eventually earned her PhD, and taught future teachers. Aunt Ruth described her time in the Army as a positive experience. Diane’s two older brothers both served in the Army. Chester, the oldest, served in the 101st, and Ronald was drafted and served in Korea. Diane’s elementary school was in a one-room schoolhouse, and she had one classmate until she got to high school, where she had 93 classmates. She liked hanging out with the other farm girls in school, and she participated in 4-H. Diane admired her mother and often went to work with her. She relates one rainy night when several teens were injured in a car accident. Her mother conducted triage on the patients and maintained an atmosphere of calm that Diane describes as “her mother’s grace.” Her mother was the epitome of a professional nurse and her behavior under duress inspired Diane. Later, while serving in Vietnam, Diane prayed for grace under fire. When Diane was 15, she was hired as a nurse’s aide, and to earn money for nursing school, she also cleaned houses and worked as a telephone operator. At 17, after graduating from high school in 1964, she began a three-year program at St. Barnabas Hospital’s School of Nursing in Minneapolis. It was a wonderful experience, and in three years, she gained more clinical experience than the students in the four-year program. Terrified of failure, Diane felt that she “overstudied,” and maybe had less fun at school than she could have had. After two years in the program, she went to an Army recruiter and on December 30, 1965, she joined the Army as a nurse. She had always wanted to serve, and the fact that the Army would pay for nursing school and provide a stipend certainly was a bonus. She recalls seeing a poster of an Army Nurse that said, “The most beautiful girl in the world, an Army Nurse.” When she told her parents, her stoic dad slammed his fist on the kitchen table and walked out of the room without saying a word, but her mother understood. Diane was well aware of the situation in Vietnam from watching the nightly news, and images of a line of body bags and Vietnamese civilians being bombed were seared into her memory. She describes the news broadcasts as “the agony of war in real time.” In nursing school, she was able to pick two internships, completing one at Hennepin County General Hospital, where she treated a variety of trauma injuries, and another at a VA Hospital, where she treated Veterans from all of the 20th Century Wars back to WWI. When she was getting ready to head to Ft. Sam Houston for training, she was told, “When you get to Vietnam, take good care of the boys.” At the Army Medical Service Officer Basic Course, she lived in a big hotel (with a good pool) off post, and recalls the funniest part was learning how to march and salute. She notes that they were not trained how to use weapons, but she did get to practice some medical techniques on a goat, and they flew in a helicopter. Before deploying to Vietnam, she spent 9 months at Kenner Army Hospital at Ft. Lee, Virginia, working with a variety of orthopedic injuries and Soldiers who had just returned from overseas. She worked in a large bay, which was good for patients’ morale and support because the Soldiers were all together side-by-side and could help each other. She relates two “learning experiences” working with Combat Veterans. First, she describes waking a sleeping Soldier to give him medicine, but when she startled him, he instinctively tried to grab her by the throat. In another instance, she dropped a metal bedpan on the tile floor, startling many of the patients. She recalls meeting an OR nurse, Ann Cunningham, who had just returned from Cu Chi. On the surface Ann was cheerful, but it was a front. On Memorial Day, Diane accompanied Ann to a Memorial Day ceremony at a cemetery, where she honored Gary, her fiancé, who was killed while they were deployed together. Ann warned Diane, “Don’t get close to anyone. They die on you.” By the last day of July 1968, Diane was preparing to deploy to Vietnam, and she recalls saying goodbye to her family. It was a hot, humid summer day, and thunder was booming. Her dad had to finish some work on the farm, so her mother and sister drove her to the airport. She recalls her dad saying, “I have four sons and I send my daughter off to war,” then crying, he embraced her. Diane flew to San Francisco and joined three other nurses for the flight to Vietnam, and they were the only women on the plane. They were delayed a few days in Hawaii, and Diane got to visit the Arizona Memorial. When they landed (bumpy) at Bien Hoa she noted the heat and stench when the door opened, and the four nurses in their Class A summer uniform were the first off the plane, guided by an armed Soldier to a bus with chicken wire over the windows. At the 90th Replacement Detachment at Long Binh, she was initially issued boots that were too large and wool long underwear from the Korean War, which she mailed back to her brothers on the farm. Later, she finally received boots that fit. She hopped a helicopter for Vung Tau and joined the 36th Evac Hospital. When she found the head nurse, she was assigned to the intensive care unit, responsible for surgical pre- and post-op. The 400-bed 36th Evac was in Quonset huts set up in a cantonment style. Her 66-bed ward had no air conditioning, but did have large barracks fans to move the air. She describes treating DPC (Delayed Primary Closure) wounds that were dirty and full of bacteria, requiring frequent debridement from the medics. After serving in Intensive Care for several months, she spent a few months in the Burn Unit, where she cared for many burned Vietnamese children. Once, on Christmas Eve, 50 burned children were brought in after their church was bombed. Treating the children was “hard, because we weren’t trained for this.” She describes other opportunities, like supporting the Civic Action Program medical and dental engagements, and volunteering at an orphanage, noting, “We felt like we were doing good.” She remembers treating children who were suffering from worms, and helping a dentist pull teeth. After six months, she volunteered for service in Pleiku with the 71st Evac Hospital, where she experienced a different side of Vietnam and the War. Vung Tau was a coastal city in the Mekong Delta region where there were many rice paddies, but Pleiku, in the Central Highlands, was mountainous and jungle covered, and close to the Cambodian border. The 71st Evac consisted of wooden frame buildings that were heavily sandbagged. At the 71st Evac, she was the head nurse in her ward, and she enjoyed working the day shift because she was able to interact more with the patients. In Pleiku, they treated Montagnards, the mountain people of Vietnam, and she describes an instance of treating a Montagnard woman who was bitten by a snake and died after a few weeks from the venom. In another instance, a little girl with the Plague was brought in, and Doc Rowe told the nurses to make her comfortable until she passed. Even though there was a Do Not Resuscitate order on her bed, a medic, Huddleston, tried to save her life when she stopped breathing. Doc Rowe even came to assist. He had been a pediatrician before deploying to Vietnam, and the medics knew he would take care of any child who was brought to the hospital. When wounded Soldiers came in, Diane had to note where they were injured, but she was not supposed to indicate that they were wounded in Cambodia. She did anyway, stating, “I will not lie for [the government].” By this point, Diane realized that “our mission is to get each other home alive.” Diane recalls staying with patients who were dying so they would not die alone. She remembers holding a heavily bandaged black Soldier’s hand and talking to him. She told him to squeeze her hand if he could hear her, and she talked to him until his hand went limp, and he was dead. Her method of survival was to feel compassion, but not to feel too deeply. She remembers some of the nurses she lived with, like Edie, Barbie, who escorted her dead brother home before volunteering for another tour, and Joan, who wrote a poem about being a nurse and threw it at Diane (years later, she was surprised to learn that Diane had kept it.) At these hospitals, a lot was left to the nurses’ discretion, and they became very skilled at their jobs. Diane became an adrenaline junky and was energized by the constant rhythm of the hospital. In addition to combat wounds, she also treated a variety of tropical diseases, rabies, and hepatitis. She describes one patient in particular, Eddie Lee Evenson, who she promised to write to. Later, she received a bundle of her letters, tied in string, with a note indicating that Eddie had been killed after rejoining his unit. Years later, she found Eddie’s name on the wall. Once, she had to fly to Dong Tam with a medevac to pick up a patient who had suffered a battlefield amputation. In the midst of all the chaos, she heard her name, and recognized a friend, Charlie, from Buffalo. Diane describes the process of triage, where the wounded are categorized by who is the easiest to patch up versus who is the most supply, time, and labor intensive. Those patients are treated last to allow the Doctors to save those they are sure of first. In Vietnam she prayed, but felt like her prayers were never answered. Later she realized that “God worked through us.” In her free time, Diane listened to rock and roll on a reel to reel tape player, wrote letters home, and once was able to make a MARS (Military Auxiliary Radio System) call home. Once she took a jeep ride to visit a leper colony, and on another occasion, she took a jeep to walk around downtown Pleiku (the MPs brought her back to camp). She took leave to Bangkok with Edie and visited Hong Kong alone. By the end of July 1969, her tour was over, and even though she considered extending, she was feeling worn down and knew she needed to go home. She describes her last patient, who had a trach tube and could only communicate by writing notes, pleading with her to stay, but she had to go. A helicopter took her to Cam Ranh Bay, where she was delayed for a day before flying to Japan. In Japan, she was delayed for an additional 10 days recovering from a fever. There, she met a Navy Officer’s wife who was waiting for her husband’s ship to come in, and chatting with her was a high point of her return from Vietnam. Diane felt that her year in Vietnam was one big hallucination because she could not distinguish what was real and what was a bad dream. After returning to Minnesota, she got a job in a civilian trauma hospital, but felt that her skills were not appreciated and she was getting in trouble for performing procedures that were routine in Vietnam. After two weeks, she quit, and joined Edie on a cross-country trip to Tacoma, Washington, to take a job at Madigan Army Hospital. At Madigan, she felt like she was back with her people. She understood the military patients and her skills were valued, so she decided to rejoin the Army in 1970. Assigned to BAMC (Brooke Army Medical Center) as the head nurse in a surgical intensive care unit, she was also promoted to Captain. This was a teaching hospital, but it was also treating returning combat wounded veterans from Vietnam. At this time in her life, Diane’s self-therapy was going for long drives or hikes in the countryside alone. She also worked with a young doctor in residency, Mike Evans, and she was impressed by his demeanor, noting that he was kind and calm. He had joined the Army as a Doctor intending to go to Vietnam, which Diane admired, but he had not finished his residency by the time the war ended. When he asked her out to dinner on August 30, 1970, to her surprise she said yes. As they began to date, Mike started joining her on drives in the countryside, and on her birthday, November 10, 1970, Mike proposed. When Diane said, “I don’t even know if I love you,” Mike replied, “I love you,” and Diane said “Yes.” Their engagement was a surprise to their coworkers, who had not realized that they were dating. They were married in April 1971. When Diane became pregnant, she left the Army and was discharged in 1973. She remembers when the last Americans pulled out of South Vietnam, and when the war finally ended on April 30, 1975. She describes watching POWs come home on TV while she and Mike were at a party. She was shaking and sweating while watching the news and became angry that no one else seemed to care. She volunteered through Lutheran Social Services to help Vietnamese refugee families when they resettled in America. Post Traumatic Stress was affecting her, and she describes having a flashback when she was called out of her ward at a civilian hospital to assist in the OR on a child. The trauma and the smell of blood, mixed with the visual of someone so young, caused her to freeze, and she resigned from the hospital. Later, in 1982, when she went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she was able to grieve at the wall with fellow veterans. Before heading to Washington D.C., a conversation with her neighbor revealed that they had both served in the Pleiku area at the same time, and he had been treated at her hospital. He invited her to join him and a group of veterans on a road trip to D.C., and she accepted. At the Wall, an unknown veteran hugged her and said, “I always wanted to thank a nurse.” She notes that nurses do suffer from survivor’s guilt, and that is when her nightmares began. In her dreams, she could see her patients. Diane does not believe in closure because she does not want an ending, but instead wants to remember those she cared for. Through it all, Mike was at her side, supporting her. When a class action lawsuit was initiated for veterans suffering from Agent Orange, Diane joined the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) as a founding member of the Wisconsin VVA Chapter, an organization dedicated to helping Vietnam Veterans with their issues, noting “it helped me to get involved.” She remembers constantly having to prove she had Post Traumatic Stress and was exposed to Agent Orange. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was a step in the right direction, but the process of developing the wall was controversial. After the dedication, cities around the country began holding “Welcome Home” parades for veterans in 1983. Interestingly, the controversy over the creation of Maya Lin’s design for the memorial sparked the idea for developing a Women’s Memorial in Diane’s mind. Opponents of the Wall pointed out that it only honored the dead from the war, not the survivors. To assuage the opponents, a statue was authorized, resulting in Frederick Hart’s Three Servicemen (or Three Soldiers). When that statue was unveiled, Diane thought, “What about the women who served in Vietnam? Where are we represented?” That idea sparked a decade-long crusade to emplace the Vietnam Women’s Memorial on the National Mall, facing the wall and the Three Servicemen. She started with a vision and reached out to sculptor Rodger Brodin, who said “Tell me about your experience in Vietnam” and “Tell me your story” as a means of getting Diane to describe what the nurses experienced in Vietnam. By February 1984, Rodger created a statue of a single nurse, and Diane noted that she looked tired, sad, and strong. With a two-page manifesto, Diane began a grassroots campaign to make her vision a reality. She started with a speaking engagement at the River Falls American Legion Post 121, and her mission grew from there. Judge Daniel Foley gave her advice about how to take her idea to the national level, and Diane started a non-profit and created a board. The Vietnam Nurses Memorial Project, which quickly became the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project to include all women who served in Vietnam, grew rapidly, and she eventually needed office space in Washington, D.C., to be close to the organizations she had to work through. She was able to get the American Legion on board quickly, but the Veterans of Foreign Wars proved more difficult until VFW President Billy Ray Cameron helped get that organization to support the project. The rest of the Veterans Service Organizations fell in line, and soon Diane had to bring her idea to the Government. Through it all, Diane built an army of volunteers. Thousands of people joined the cause and helped, through making donations, calling, writing letters, manning phones, and in countless other ways. Along the way, she met some fierce opposition ranging from lawmakers to journalists, architects, and art critics. Some of the opposition came from surprising areas like other veterans and even World War II women veterans. The Commission of Fine Arts provided especially stiff resistance, with Chair J. Carter Brown stating if the women get their monument, they will have to allow the K-9 Corps to have one as well. When Brown made his dog comment, Morley Safer from CBS News heard about it and invited Diane and four other nurses to tell their story on 60 Minutes in February 1989. The segment generated significant interest and garnered instant support for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project. Diane hired Diana Hellinger as her executive director as the project was increasing momentum. Diane notes, “It is important who you have on your board,” and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe’s wife Shirley joined the board. During the process, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project had to comply with the 1986 Commemorative Works Act, have two hearings with the Commission of Fine Arts, and secure passage of Senate Bill SJ 2042 and Public Law 100-660 to guarantee the land at the National Mall. During a meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission, Diane noted that the women’s memorial would have “pre-eminent historical and lasting significance to the nation.” Although the location for the monument was identified, its design was called into question. The Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project was forced to switch from Rodger Brodin’s prototype to something else, and a design competition was initiated. In an effort at creating fairness, Diane had invited several civilians to be on the judging panel, and the split between veterans and non-veterans was noticeable. The non-veterans gravitated to an abstract misting fountain, while the veterans all preferred Glenna Goodacre’s submission, which was a rendering of a statue. Fortunately, the board had the final say, and even though Goodacre’s proposal had received honorable mention, it was the design selected: three women and a wounded serviceman. On July 29, 1993, the groundbreaking ceremony on the National Mall paved the way for the arrival of the monument. Once the statue was complete, it had to be transported from Goodacre’s Santa Fe studio to Washington D.C., and Vietnam veteran Fred Smith of FedEx built a special trailer to haul the statue cross-country, stopping in several cities along the way. Vietnam veteran and FedEx employee David Chung drove the statue the entire way, and Native American Veterans walked for three months from Santa Fe to D.C. for the ceremony. The dedication ceremony in November 1993 was a “Celebration of Patriotism and Courage,” and was fabulous. After a decade of work, the Women Vietnam Veterans had a proper Welcome Home. Diane’s work has also resulted in a database of 13,000 names of women who served in Vietnam, the ”Sister Search.” In 1998, Diane returned to Vietnam on a trip of reconciliation involving a two-week bike tour of the country, where the returning veterans were able to engage with their former enemy. She has also worked with the Veterans Administration and the Readjustment Counseling Service. Through it all, Mike and their four children, Guy, Luke, Carrie, and Jon-Erik, were crucial in their support of Diane. When the statue was finally emplaced and dedicated, Diane felt grateful knowing that “my sister veterans have been honored.” Reflecting on her service, she states that serving in Vietnam was the “greatest privilege of my life,” adding that when she returned home they “weren’t allowed to show our pride,” but that has been rectified.