Sisterhood of War: Minnesota Women in Vietnam

6. "Before You Can Forget, You Need to Remember"

137 6 Before You Can Forget, You Need to Remember” The Vietnam Women’s Memorial TWO DAYS AFTER VETERANS’ DAY in 1982, Diane Carlson Evans stood with approximately 150,000 others to participate in the dedication ceremony for the newly unveiled Vietnam Veterans Memorial, commonly known as “theWall.” She stood in the sea of faces as senators , veterans’ organization representatives, and political dignitaries offered a long-overdue “thanks” and “welcome home” to the three million U.S. troops who had served in Vietnam. More than fiftyeight thousand of those troops never made the journey home. Their names—among them the names of the eight military women killed in Vietnam—were etched into the black granite of the Wall. D-M Boulay was in Washington, D.C., that November, too, for a meeting of the American Association of Nurse Attorneys. She didn’t attend the dedication ceremonies for theWall, however. “I couldn’t bear the thought of being there on the dedication day with all those people,” she said. “Crowds are not my favorite place. So I waited until the next day.” After visiting the Wall, she returned to Minneapolis and went back to work at her law practice.1 If both Evans and Boulay had been moved by the Wall, they both were also chagrined to learn, in 1983, that a statue of three male soldiers was to be added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1984. “The Wall was complete,” Evans explained later, “because the men and women who died in Vietnam were together on the Wall.” But now that visitors to the memorial would see, in Evans’s words, “men “ 138 SISTERHOOD OF WAR in the flesh and blood and portrayed visibly as men,” she worried that women’s contributions to the war would be erased. So Evans contacted Minneapolis sculptor Rodger Brodin and asked him to create a statue for nurses who had served in Vietnam. At the same time, Boulay and her associates at the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program in Minneapolis were discussing the implications of adding a statue of only men to the Wall. In late 1983, Boulay, Evans, Brodin, and three Marine veterans of the war met to discuss the possibilities for honoring women veterans. Brodin brought a sketch of the nurse statue he and Evans had envisioned, and a plan was born. As Boulay put it at the time, “They’re putting up a statue of the men, for the guys who served. What if we do the same for women?” Thus began a collaboration that prompted the formation of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project, Inc. (VWMP) in 1984 and ultimately led to the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in 1993.2 Although Evans and Boulay were the prime movers behind the original idea to build a memorial to women who had served in Vietnam, it was the collective efforts of women Vietnam veterans from across the country that made the project a success. And a colossal effort it was. In contrast to the speed with which the Wall and statue of three men were proposed, built, and dedicated (roughly a two-year process for each), the effort to build a memorial for women spanned ten years and three presidential elections, required the approval of three federal commissions and two acts of Congress, involved hundreds of women veterans in a national grassroots publicity campaign, generated an often heated public debate over the significance of gender to military service and national memorials , and witnessed two distinct design models. Because the project was based in Minneapolis for the first few years of its existence, Minnesota’s women veterans played an especially important role in the campaign, and most of the fifteen nurses I interviewed for this project contributed in some way to its success. This chapter focuses on their contributions and the healing effects that this work, and the Memorial itself, eventually had for so many of them. As Diane Evans put it, “Before you can forget, you need to remember.”3 “Before You Can Forget, You Need to Remember” 139 From the Wall to Rambo to Three Fighting Men: The Origins of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project The Wall is a place of healing for many Vietnam veterans. It was for Evans, who captured the effect of her visit to the Wall in 1982 in a poem she wrote a year later. That beautiful black granite Wall, now...