The Healing Power of The Wall

By Diane Carlson Evans

Earlier this year, Vietnam Veteran and former Army Nurse Diane Carlson Evans was honored with the Presidential Citizens Medal. The second highest civilian award, it is given to those who have “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.”

A Minnesota farm girl, Evans joined the Army Nurse Corps after graduating from Nursing School. In 1968, at the age of 21, she shipped off to Vietnam, serving first at the 36th Evacuation Hospital in Vung Tau and then at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku.

A year later she returned home to a country that barely acknowledged women’s military service. For years, she never spoke of her time in Vietnam. Even to her husband. That changed on November 13, 1982, when she attended the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and a year later, when she returned to witness the addition of the Three Servicemen statue. Those events moved her to imagine a memorial honoring the women who had served.

After years of push back, Evans’ vision, backed by the newly formed Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation and hundreds of supporters, finally became a reality. On Veterans Day in 1993, 25,000 people assembled for the unveiling of Glenda Goodacre’s sculpture depicting three uniformed women assisting a wounded soldier.

Today, more than thirty years later, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial remains a place where, as one woman veteran said, magic happens. Where former soldiers are reunited with the nurses who cared for them and where women who served in and during the Vietnam War, in whatever capacity, find recognition and healing. Learn more about Diane’s journey to establish the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in her book Healing Wounds (Permuted Press) available online at major booksellers.

Below is Diane’s moving account of her visit to the dedication of The Wall on Veterans Day, 1982.

The boots, I remember the jungle boots!

A cool breeze swept across the National Mall as I joined a growing crowd. The throng gently pushed me along the path, people unaccustomed to such gatherings but loosely tied in purpose. Though cocooned in this pack of people, I felt a quiet solitude as I neared the names etched in granite on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that was being dedicated this day.

Flags and field jackets, Combat boots and boonie hats. “You were at Cu’ Chi?” you’d hear someone ask.

“Damn, just missed ya. Arrived in sixty-seven. Tunnel rat. Glad you made it home buddy. Too many didn’t.”

Now, as I approached The Wall, and the nearly fifty-eight thousand names of the dead carved in its black granite, any revelry or pride I’d momentarily felt had morphed into numbness. The noise had given way to a deep quietness within myself. It was news of the names on The Wall that had summoned me to this place, but I still feared the memorial’s power and meaning.

A kind of gravity pulled me along the path, down a slope, toward the names. But I kept my head down and looked at the man’s boots in front of me, and other people’s shoes. It gave me a good excuse to avoid eye contact.

I stopped when realizing the granite plates of 1968 – 1969 loomed before me. Was I ready for this? To look up at the names etched on The Wall? Since August 1969, when I’d returned home, I’d look up, instinctively, every time a helicopter flew overhead. But otherwise, in the aftermath of Vietnam, it was safer to keep your head down in moments the war was discussed. Safer, when meeting someone, to say I’d been a nurse in Washington or Texas instead of Vung Tau and Pleiku. Safer to not make eye contact, not reveal more than I’d want to. Safer to rationalize that the soldiers who came to my dreams on stretchers, especially a kid named Eddie, would go away on their own. Safer to keep busy, losing my life in the comings and goings of my husband and children. Safer to scrub the kitchen floor every night, finish folding the clothes at midnight, and get up early to make the peanut-butter-and jelly sandwiches for lunch that day.

The result? I’d never shed a tear over my time in Vietnam. I had no tears. They didn’t solve problems; they only made them worse. Tears would be a copout, proving the experience had actually affected me, which was easier to not believe. As the years rolled by, hunkered down in survival mode, I’d try my best to forget Vietnam. It was less painful to live in the present if you could pretend you had no past. I sought to convince myself that I was never there (and convince my husband that he should never bring it up).

So, yes, even though I came to The Wall as if on a pre-ordained mission, now that I was here, I kept my head down. I was here, but in some ways didn’t want to be, as if to do so was violating my unwritten self-promise to not look back. I looked at the tennis shoes, penny loafers, flats, sandals and literally hundreds of jungle boots worn by the people around me.

Right in front of The Wall, the shoes stopped moving. Some shoes turned toward other shoes and I  knew the people in those shoes were embracing. I heard muffled sobs, reminding me of my patients – my guys – who’d tried so hard to stifle their pain. I heard gasps from men startled when seeing a name on The Wall they recognized. I heard outright sobbing. I was terrified I might do the same and break down. Uncontrollable sobbing. No one would ever see me do that. Ever!

I had a fleeting thought that I’d been wrong not to invite my husband, Mike. We had met in 1970 at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas where he had just finished his internship and was doing a general surgery residency, so he was no stranger to military life. Maybe to protect me, maybe to protect him, I’d always kept him at arm’s length from my war, thinking he could never understand what I understood because he had never been there. Now, I felt a loneliness that suggested perhaps I was wrong. I suddenly missed him.

I followed the shuffling of boots. Had I once started an IV on the guy to my left? Had I cleaned the sucking chest wounds of the guy to my right? Had any of them been my patients, guys whose names I never knew but had never really left me? As opposed, of course to the guys who took their last breath in front of me. The reminders of war that came in the night, jolting me out of sleep as if I were still in my Pleiku hootch? The Wall had 57,939 names. I needed to see two close-up. One, a soldier I had cared for at the 36th Evacuation Hospital in Vung Tau. The other nurse whose death haunted me at night. Instead of my boots, I’d brought only one thing with me from Vietnam to The Wall; my boonie hat, with patches from the 44th Medical Brigade and the 71st Evacuation Hospital.

The crowd around me thinned a bit. I was in the front row, standing before the names. I pushed back the boonie and against all instinct, looked up. Oh My God – So many names. Death. So much death.

The Wall took my breath away, the names as thick as late-night stars over the Minnesota farm of my childhood. Who of you died on my watch? I’m so sorry we couldn’t save you. I’m so sorry for your heartbroken families. We tried. We all tried. WHY?

Then, as my emotions temporarily ebbed, I had a revelation: the memorial itself, created amid much controversy, was powerful. It was perfect.

The two names I now began looking for were those of Eddie Lee Evenson, Panel 28W, Line 17, and Sharon Lane, Panel 23W, Line 112. I looked again at the locations I’d scrawled on a piece of paper, then back at the panel where I thought they’d be. First Eddie’s. I threaded my way through the thick crowd until I came to Panel 28W. My gaze climbed upwards. There he was. Blonde hair, youthful face, lean body. Smiling, Innocent. He had been one of mine. I had touched his body – dressed his wounds and removed his stitches. And now, I was touching him again.

The emotion jolted me out of my trance. I reached to touch his name, but as I did so, a hand lightly tapped my shoulder. I turned. It belonged to a thirty-something man wearing a faded field jacket. His eyes riveted to me as if he knew me – or thought he did. “Ma’am, were you a nurse in Vietnam?”

It startled me. It wasn’t a question I’d ever been asked. With a touch of hesitation, I nodded yes.

He gulped and looked as if gathering his thoughts, or rehearsing, or both. “I’ve waited fourteen years,” he said, voice quivering, “to say this to a nurse but I never came across one until now.” He paused. I felt a twinge of uncertainty as his eyes pooled with tears. He took a deep breath and exhaled, then said two words I’d never heard since getting off of the plane at Travis Air Force Base in California. “Thank you.”

I nodded, feeling anxious. Unused to being in this position. Unsure of his emotional expression.

“I can never thank you nurses enough,” he continued.  “I love you. Thank you for being there for us. You’re all we had.”

He buried me in a smoldering hug that felt like no other. Just as I never wrote down a name and remembered only one from that long list of my patients in Vietnam, I did not get his. He was as nameless to me as all the others. But like the others, he was “mine” in that moment. I don’t ever remember being hugged in Vietnam by a patient. And now, a desperate, wounded warrior was unabashedly hugging me with gratitude. The ice was melting. Yes, along with doctors and medics, some nurse had helped save this man’s life, and, because of it, he was looking at names on The Wall instead of being a name on The Wall. I felt his genuine warmth and desire to simply say thanks. He needed me to accept it. I heard those words “thank you” and realized how much I needed to hear them. It was called healing. That hug was an act, I would learn, far more powerful than we might imagine. And one that had everything to do with how so many of us were feeling after all these years.

The soldier nodded and moved along. I stood there, transfixed, feeling blessed, full, and empty, all at the same time. A new feeling emerged. I belonged! I actually belonged here, to these people. To this place. This place was also my place. If he belonged here, so did I. If Eddie belonged here, so did I.

Gathering myself, I reached again for Eddie’s name and slid my finger left to right.  I wondered if I’d been the first to touch his name. If he lived, he would’ve been thirty-four. To me, he was still twenty-one, the age he was when he first came in by stretcher. Injuries among the wounded were a blur to me. I didn’t remember his specific injury except that he had a delayed primary closure for his wound. We administered pain meds, irrigated, and dressed the wound, and loaded him with antibiotics, and he started to heal. But, there was never certainty in Vietnam. A soldier who got better was often told to get his boots back on, grab his rifle. Such was the case with Eddie.

I took a deep breath and moved toward Panel 23W, Line 112. I was shaken, but amid the crowd of others, was hardly alone in struggling to keep my composure. I had not known 1st LT. Sharon Ann Lane, but we nurses felt we did know her, bound by a common cause. Lane, twenty-five, of Canton, Ohio, was one of eight female nurses whose names were on The Wall. She was killed in Chu Lai on June 8, 1969. Two months before I’d left Vietnam for home. As my fingers swept across her name something inside me shattered like broken glass. For the first time since Vietnam, I cried. Years of contained tears flowed for Sharon, for Eddie, and for the soldier I’d just met who’d embraced me. I cried for the men I’d been privileged to save and for the countless others I had not. Try as I might, I could no longer hold back thirteen years of tears. I’d been terrified of crying – afraid that once I started, I wouldn’t stop. But now it felt liberating. They weren’t simply tears of loss. They were tears of anger, injustice, and futility. They were tears of the betrayals of war by presidents, their cabinets, and others who had no clue what fear looked like in the eyes of a nineteen-year-old kid whose entrails were half in, half out. For the first time since leaving Vietnam I felt no shame whatsoever. I didn’t lose the war nor did the men who fought it. The high command lost the war. And after the war was over, they didn’t stand up for us. Veterans had to build their own memorial with their own initiative, time, and money. Congress had to pass a bill so we could have this memorial. All they had to do was lift a pen to their fingers. But almost three million men and women who served in Vietnam lifted things far heavier and carried those things every day, long after the war was over.

On November 13, 1982, I left The Wall drained and weary. In those magical and mysterious moments, touching the names of Eddie Evenson and Sharon Lane, and being hugged by a stranger, I had, for the first time, given myself permission to feel. And nothing felt so good and bad at the same time. In the years and decades to come, I would return to this place many times, but for reasons beyond honoring Eddie and Sharon. I would return because on that day, I understood for the first time, the power that honor plays in the process of healing.

This narrative is excerpted with permission from Voices From Vietnam, a collection of interviews, letters, and stories from Vietnam Veterans, MIA families, Vietnamese refugees, and students compiled by Vietnam Veteran Bruce H. “Doc” Norton, USMC (Ret), and Dr. Harry Kantrovich, a retired Chief of Naval Operations Command Master Chief, and playwright.