Born and raised on a dairy farm in rural Buffalo, Minnesota, Carlson graduated as a registered nurse in 1967 and joined the U.S. Army. She was trained and deployed to Vietnam, serving in the surgical and burn wards at the 36th Evacuation Hospital at Vung Tau. “My first day in the 60-bed unit was 105 degrees with no air conditioning,” she remembered years later. “Not even on the burn ward. Only the [Operating Room], ICU, and Recovery Room had this luxury.” The wards only had fans. “For me it didn’t matter but it did for wounded GIs whose suffering was greatly compounded by the heat. They deserved better.” She was later promoted to head nurse in a surgical unit with the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku, near the Cambodian border. She served in-country in 1967 and 1968, and returned to the U.S., staying in the Army for 6 years total, discharging as a captain. “I hadn’t realized how much loving the soldiers would make me hate the war. I wanted to know what they were dying for.” In the U.S., she married another Army vet, Mike Evans, a surgeon who treated soldiers who had come home. He hadn’t been deployed to Vietnam, and while very supportive, he didn’t experience PTSD flashbacks like she did. They were bad enough that she had to give up nursing, because even civilian patients would bring back the memories, the flashbacks.
In November 1982, Evans went to Washington D.C. to attend the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veteran’s Day. “I left my husband and kids at home,” she said. “I went to Vietnam alone, and I’ll do this alone.” A black polished granite slab engraved with the name of 57,939 fallen service members in the war, the Memorial includes the names of five women — Army and Air Force nurses who were killed or died during their deployments. (More names have been added since: they are listed on the wall in the order of their deaths.) Carlson Evans felt seen. She felt included. There were thousands of other veterans there for the dedication; she was hugged countless times by soldiers who were remembering their own nurses from when they were wounded.
It didn’t matter if she was “their” nurse. She stood at the wall, but it took her awhile before she could lift her head and look at it, which left her sobbing. She found the two names she was looking for: a sweet soldier from back home in Minnesota named Eddie Lee Evenson (Panel 28W, Line 17), who was killed on 23 March 1969 at 22; it hurt so much she decided she could no longer be friends with patients. The second was a fellow nurse, Lt. Sharon Lane of Ohio (Panel 23W, Line 112), who on 8 June 1969 became the first nurse, and first female service member, to die of combat wounds in the Vietnam War, at 25.
Most of the names she couldn’t remember. Some of the faces, she didn’t even know. “There was one who didn’t live and I would never find his name to touch. I close my eyes; I’m with him now, standing at his bedside. I move the blankets to find his hand; I draw it close to me. I hold it gently, I don’t let go. I feel his youth. I notice the contrast; a young Black man holding my hand; I press gently asking him to do the same if he hears me. He does. I move to his face, concealed by dressings, and speak softly to him. The night is bleak. I tell him I’ll be there through the night, that I won’t leave.” Only once he died did she leave, “never knowing his face — only the shroud and his touch, which belongs to me. I am haunted by a Black man I’ve never seen; sheathed in white. Sheathed in white, covering the blast, delicately swirled around his face, chest, arms, legs, all tinged with red. I hold his hand while his blood turns cold. He gave me his hand and soul to hold that night. I don’t remember his name.”
A vet at the wall noticed her boonie hat with patches from the 44th Medical Brigade. “Were you a nurse in Vietnam?” he asked. Yes, she said. Through tears he told her, “I’ve waited 14 years to say this to a nurse. Thank you. I can never thank you enough. I love you. Thank you for being there.” She said those “simple words were the most powerful, profound words that I will ever remember. They were precious words, to him and to me. This wounded soldier had lived; he survived and he was grateful.” But her peace didn’t last: after getting home the dreams returned. She went to the Veterans Center in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but they had never worked with a female vet before. Still, her counselor told her she needed to confront her past so she could move forward. She avoided group counseling, afraid to be the only woman and would probably be shunned by the male veterans. But she went anyway — and was seen, included, and welcomed by the men. All of them were in pain. All of them had nightmares. All of them were there for each other. And all of them wanted to get past it, and move forward.
Some veterans didn’t think the Memorial was adequate: it looked like a gigantic gravestone, they said. Veterans had lobbied President Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt to add a statue to the memorial. It was quickly commissioned and unveiled in 1984; it was called Three Servicemen. Service …men. “I was so struck by it, it took my breath away,” Carlson Evans said. “There are no women in this statue! I felt so empty. I thought of all the women I had served with, and what they went through, especially in the emergency room, and doing triage. And I was beginning to realize the country really didn’t know we were there.” Yet there were more than 10,000 women who served in Vietnam, about 90 percent of them nurses. “Vietnam was on TV, and there were all the Vietnam movies,” she continued, “but it was all about the men, and people didn’t know we were there. I didn’t see anything to remind me that women were in Vietnam. … And the strangest thing, I started thinking, ‘Maybe I wasn’t really there. Maybe I am imagining it.’”
She spoke with sculptor Rodger Brodin, a veteran himself who agreed to design a statue of a nurse. He needed an actual nurse’s uniform to model from — and a female model of an appropriate age. The latter he could get, but Evans went back to the family farm and opened her footlockers for the first time in 15 years. It was there, still caked in the red dust of Pleiku. She reached into the pockets and pulled out her bandage scissors, a hemostat, and a tourniquet. It was all used in the sculpture. Meanwhile, Evans worked on fundraising, creating the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project Inc., which later was later certified as a Foundation. Then came lobbying for permission and a location. There was significant opposition; the “Three Servicemen” sculpture “really” represented everyone, she was told. She received threats. There were complaints that the woman in Brodin’s sculpture was an officer (virtually all nurses were). “One journalist asked me what it would take to place a statue of a woman at the Wall,” she said years later. “Quite spontaneously, I said, ‘an act of God and an Act of Congress’.”
She had to settle for two of the latter, and with those, she was granted space for a statue — at Arlington National Cemetery. Funding it was up to her. But when President Reagan signed the legislation, he declared it would be placed near the Wall. Brodin’s design was not chosen; a design competition brought 317 entries. By 1990, Evans’ Foundation had raised nearly half of its $3.5 million funding goal. (The campaign slogan, donated by an advertising agency: “A Small Donation Makes Monumental Difference”.) The winning design was finally unveiled on Veteran’s Day 1993. Evans, of course, was there, and returned on Veteran’s Day for most years after that, complicated only by her husband and four children wanting her to be at home at least once, since her birthday, November 10, needed to be spent traveling to Washington D.C. for Veteran’s Day, each November 11. Diane Althea Carlson Evans, who had retired with Mike to Helena, Mont., died on May 20, from cancer. She was 79.
