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MEMORIAL HONORS WOMEN WHO SERVED IN WAR
-- "We
would not forget any woman who served in support
of our
armed forces. They answered the call, too. They
count."
Diane Carlson Evans, who served as a
nurse in Vietnam, helped lead the campaign to build a memorial to
women who had served in the war. (Contributed photo) |
For more about women veterans, use the VA
Watchdog search engine... click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/sessearch.
php?q=women+veterans&op=ph
Story here...
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=309935
Story below:
-------------------------
Memorial honors women who served in war
By Karen Spears Zacharias
Staff writer
It’s her daddy’s fist slamming the table that Diane Carlson Evans
remembers whenever she thinks back to that morning in 1966 when she broke
the news to her family that she was headed to Vietnam.
“I can still see his hand leaving that coffee cup,” Evans said. “That
tight fist on the table, then he walked out the kitchen and went out to
the dairy barn.” He never said a word.
“Dad has a hard time saying what he feels,” said Evans, now 62, speaking
from her home in Montana that she shares with her husband, Mike.
That fist slam said it all.
“My father was devastated,” Evans said.
The crusty Minnesota dairy farmer never counted on sending his daughter to
war. His sons, yes. Volunteering for military duty during times of war is
expected of Minnesota farm boys. But his daughter? The pig-tailed sprite
who’d rode her first tractor sitting on her daddy’s lap? He hadn’t counted
on that.
Her mother handled it better.
“Mom’s a nurse. She’s very calm,” Evans said. “Many of her nursing friends
had served during World War II.”
Veterans Day is the time to honor our troops for their service. That
gratitude has historically been focused on the men who served. An
estimated 2.5 million women have served in the armed forces since the
American Revolution, yet their service is often unheralded.
 Perhaps,
in part, because women like Evans too often dismissed it. Or tried to
forget it.
Memories come easily now for this former Army captain. There was a time —
an entire decade — when Evans refused to speak of the war in which she
served.
Although she had two older brothers in the military, she was the only
family member who ended up in Vietnam. The eldest brother was disqualified
after he injured a knee in a jump with the 101st Airborne. The other,
drafted in 1966, the same year Evans volunteered, was sent to Germany.
“I went to Vietnam to care for the soldiers,” Evans said. Her voice held
steady as she recalled how unprepared she’d been for what was to follow.
“You don’t see those kinds of wounds in triage. Those blast injuries. The
punji stick wounds. The severe injuries caused by water buffalo and
snakes, tigers and monkey bites.”
Not to mention the diseases borne in a tropical climate — the parasites
and the malaria. How does one find training for that on the ward or in the
ER of a Minnesota hospital?
“Soldiers were dying of things I never imagined I’d see, things like
cerebral malaria. All those young guys, so young, so brave. And all they
wanted was to get back to their units, to their buddies.”
After she left, her father fell into a depression that lasted the entire
time his daughter was in Southeast Asia. He’d walk from the barn to the
house in time for the Walter Cronkite broadcast every single night during
1967 and 1968. Infuriated by the protests, he could not abide the way
those faithful soldiers, soldiers like his daughter, were being treated.
The 21-year-old Evans was struggling with her own sense of injustices: “So
many young men were suffering and dying. If the American people weren’t
supporting it and the government wasn’t giving us a clear mission, then
why were we there?”
The struggle to forget
She came home from Vietnam and got on with the life she envisioned for
herself. She married, had kids and a part-time job. There were no missing
pieces to her life — only a hidden one.
Once, years after the war, when her surgeon husband was in his residency
program in Texas, he mentioned to several other residents that his wife
had served in Vietnam.
“I got so furious with Mike,” Evans recalled. They’d been at a party. She
had gone off by herself, away from the others, glued to the television.
“It was the day the POWs were coming off the plane,” she said. “As I saw
them reunited with their families, I broke into a cold sweat. I began
shaking. When Mike told them I’d been in Vietnam, I turned around and
walked out of that house.”
She didn’t want people to know that she’d served. She’d felt betrayed by
her country.
It’s an emotion common to Vietnam veterans. One people in this nation are
tired of hearing about. “Get over it,” they say. But it’s like author Tim
O’Brien, himself a Vietnam veteran, said in his book “The Things They
Carried” — that’s the thing about remembering, you can’t forget.
Evans tried to forget the names and faces of the boys, dead and dying,
hurt and wounded. When night terrors roused her from sleep in fits of
primal screams, Mike knew better than to ask his wife what the dream had
been about. He knew the answer already. It was always about Vietnam.
In 1982, after Evans learned there was going to be a dedication of the
Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., she told her husband that she
had to go — alone, the same way she had gone to war all those years ago.
It was a turning point for her, seeing all those names etched in that
polished granite.
Evans ran her fingers across the names of soldiers she knew and those she
didn’t know. She thought of their mommas and their sisters, the wives and
girlfriends who grieved for them still, and all those daughters they never
got the chance to father.
The memories returned, unrelenting, like a tide at full moon. She searched
until she found the name of 2nd Lt. Sharon Ann Lane. Lane, an Army nurse,
was working at the 312th Evacuation Hospital at Chu Lai on June 8, 1969,
when a rocket struck. The blast killed two — one of whom was Lane.
Although the Vietnam War would take the lives of other women, Lane was the
only American woman to die as a result of direct enemy fire. The Canton,
Ohio, native is one of eight women whose names are inscribed on the
Vietnam Memorial Wall. The news of Lane’s death spread through the ranks
faster than a stream of lit gasoline. Evans still remembers where she was
when she first heard it.
“I knew it within an hour of her death. It was like when JFK was shot. I
was calibrating an IV when someone told me an Army nurse had just been
killed in Chu Lai.”
Everyone expected that America’s sons would die. No one expected that
daughters would, too. Evans thought of her own father and understood,
finally, why his tight fist had come down so hard on that table.
In 1982, while standing in front of that black granite mirror, Evans shed
her first tears over Vietnam. They would not be her last.
The fight to remember
Two years after her first trip to the Wall, the veteran nurse read that a
new statue was being placed at the site. A statue of three American male
soldiers.
What about my sisters? Evans wondered. Why aren’t the women who served
being recognized?
From her Montana home, Evans determined that she would find a way to
memorialize the women who served in Vietnam. All of them. The nurses and
the support personnel. Military and civilian.
If they served, they mattered.
“In the beginning we named our project the Vietnam Nurses Memorial project
because I didn’t even know that Special Services existed,” Evans said.
“The only women I knew in Vietnam were all nurses. I didn’t know then that
there were women who served in Vietnam in a different capacity.
“I knew the Red Cross was there, but I didn’t know there were others there
who were just as dedicated to serving our men and women in the armed
forces.”
Once she learned of them, however, Evans broadened her vision for a
women’s memorial.
“We would honor all 265,000 women who served throughout the world during
the Vietnam War,” Evans said. “We would not forget any woman who served in
support of our armed forces. They answered the call, too. They count.”
Hospital for the mind
Barbara “Ann” Eller went to Saigon in 1970, but she has never considered
herself one of the women who served in war.
“I think of the people who served as those who carried guns and were
getting shot at,” Eller said. “I like to say I worked in Vietnam.”
The Fayetteville native was working with the Armed Forces Special Services
in Panama when she got a call asking if she’d be willing to relocate to
Saigon. The year was 1971. Sure, she said, why not?
Eller, now 72, shares a Haymount home with her 102-year-old mother. Her
mother sits in a recliner, shuffling through the day’s mail. On the dining
table is a stack of photo albums, their bright covers long ago faded away.
Inside the albums each photo is precisely cataloged.
“I was a librarian,” Eller said with a chuckle.
Libraries are called hospitals for the mind. Ask any soldier who served in
a combat zone absent of laptops and cell phones and anything but the
rudimentary technology, and he’ll likely say that the hell part of war was
most often its sheer boredom. Eller and her staff saved such soldiers from
losing their minds.
If her photo collection serves as evidence, Eller was not a demure
librarian; she was the sassy sort. There are snapshots of her learning to
do the funky chicken. Snapshots of her in a mod pantsuit, holding a wig.
Snapshots of her surrounded by friends, Vietnamese and American. She’s
smiling in every Polaroid.
Eller considers herself the fortunate girl. She was getting paid to travel
the world, and even if that meant going to a war zone, she was never in
any danger.
“I felt safer on the streets of Saigon at night than I did in downtown
Fayetteville during the day,” Eller said.
Maybe with good reason. She worked in Saigon for four months and then was
transferred out to Long Binh, where she stayed for the next 14 months. She
could hear the shells going off nearby, and she ate in the mess halls with
the dust-off pilots every day, but that’s about as close as she got to any
action.
She worked six days a week, long hard days. There were hundreds of books
to catalog and keep track of, all by hand-stamped card. Eller had a staff
of 15 employees to oversee. And all those magazines shipped in from the
States? She was in charge of those too.
“There were a lot of Playboys, of course,” she recalled. “And Car and
Driver.”
She staffed and maintained the Bookmobiles — green vans marked “Army
Library Services.” She’d earned her graduate degree in library sciences
from the University of North Carolina and took a job in Detroit before
signing up with the Armed Forces Special Services.
In Detroit, she had participated in antiwar marches. In Vietnam, Ellers
never discussed the politics of war. Her job, as she saw it, was to serve
those who served.
“I had a choice to go — they didn’t,” she said.
For her sisters
It’s been 15 years since Diane Carlson Evans stood alongside fellow
veterans — sisters and brothers — to dedicate the memorial statue
conceived by sculptress Glenna Goodacre.
It took 10 years of laborious efforts on behalf of a lot of people,
spearheaded by Evans, to get the memorial built. That effort included two
separate pieces of congressional legislation and the approval of three
federal commissions. Evans never shied away from facing those who opposed
her. Her time in the field had taught her not to back down from a fight.
She did it for women such as Lt. Sharon Lane and Barbara Ann Ellers,
because Evans wanted the world to know that women served too. And that
whether they served on the front lines or back behind the razor wire,
their service mattered.
Military correspondent and author Joe Galloway remembers Nov. 11, 1993,
the day the Vietnam Women’s Memorial was dedicated.
“There was a grand parade down Independence Avenue past the White House to
the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. We gathered up all the 1st Calvary Division
veterans to march together behind our color guard.
“Just before the march kicked off, suddenly there appeared between Gen.
Hal Moore and myself a short, red-haired former Army nurse.
“She introduced herself and said she and her buddies from the 85th Evac
Hospital — who had treated our wounded from the Ia Drang Valley battle
that November of 1965 — wanted to march with us.
“We felt truly honored to have them join us, and more than a few eyes had
tears in them. That nurse held the general’s hand and mine all the way
down that parade route.
“The courage and compassion of the women in Vietnam earned them the
respect of everyone who served there. At any of the gathering of veterans
when a woman tells me she served in Vietnam, I get up and give them a big
hug and heartfelt thank you. God bless them all.”
Recently, Mark Mitchell of Benton, La., wrote a note to the advisory board
of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.
“I was choppered into the 67th Evacuation Hospital at Qui Nhon in July
’69,” he wrote. “The nightmares of the triage room have abated only
because of the medications the VA gives me. Now I can sleep restfully, but
that does not erase the visuals, sounds nor smells in my mind.”
Mitchell was placed in a C-130 and sent to a hospital at Cam Ranh Bay.
“There is no way I can say thank you enough,” he said. “When I think of
you and my sisters, my eyes get misty and my stomach tightens.”
Mitchell keeps a photo of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial on his desk as a
reminder of the sisters who served alongside him.
“I look at it with great love and respect every day of my life.”
Sentiments such as Mitchell’s are often expressed at the site of the
Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington. And whenever Diane Carlson Evans
hears stories such as Mitchell’s, she’s reminded of the protracted fight
she and others waged to get the memorial built.
“I wouldn’t give up on the site,” Evans said. “I fought really hard for my
sister veterans the way I’d fought for my brothers in Vietnam. And when I
see what our memorial has done for the families of these soldiers and the
families of those who lost loved ones and the powerful and profound way in
which it touches them, I know the fight was worth it.”
America’s daughters
Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 90,000 women have served in the war on
terrorism. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, almost 16,000
women are now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If a memorial were built today, using the names of those killed in Iraq
and Afghanistan, more than 100 of those 4,775 names would be of women
killed in action.
Despite a reluctance by the American public to acknowledge it, and the
disconnect echoing in the hallowed halls of Congress that continually
denies it, women are in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Spc. Monica Lin Brown, a medic with the 82nd Airborne Division, was the
first woman serving in Afghanistan to earn the Silver Star. In 2007, Brown
saved the lives of her comrades by running through enemy gunfire and using
her body to shield wounded soldiers from incoming mortar rounds after a
roadside bomb detonated near their convoy.
At a time when only one-half of 1percent of America’s population serves in
the military, when so few carry the burden of freedom for so many, the
women serving in our armed forces count more today than ever. She counts
especially to the men she serves alongside.
This Veterans Day, be sure to thank a veteran — a female veteran. Whether
she is wrapping wounds at Womack Army Medical Center or working as a grunt
in Kabul, or running a bookmobile in Baghdad, her service matters.
Editorial writer and columnist Karen Spears
Zacharias serves on the advisory board for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial
Foundation and for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Educational Board. She is
the daughter of Staff Sgt. David Spears, KIA, 1966.
-------------------------
posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
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