USA Today – The annual Veterans Day observance will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial and will honor the women who served and led the way for the expansion of roles of women in the military.(Photo: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)

90% of women who served in Vietnam were nurses

The military’s ban on women in combat roles was lifted this January

Diane Carlson Evans was a nursing student in Minnesota in the late 1960s when she noticed her male friends and classmates getting called up one by one to go to Vietnam.

Very much aware of the war, she visited a recruiter and asked how she could join the effort.

“I decided I needed to be there, too,” she says.

The Army needed nurses, so, after graduating college and undergoing basic training, she served as a nurse in evacuation hospitals in Vung Tau and Pleiku, Vietnam from 1968 to 1969.

Carlson Evans says she and other nurses put their youth and inexperience aside to treat serious injuries and unfamiliar diseases while serving in combat zones.

“We were young taking care of the young,” she says.

The memory and legacy of the women who served in Vietnam and paved the way for future generations will be honored at the annual Veterans Day observance Monday with a ceremony at 1 p.m. at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Also, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, located near the iconic Vietnam Wall.

Carlson Evans, who is the founder and president of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation, says she initiated the effort for a women’s memorial when she found out that a statue of three men would be added to the Vietnam Memorial in the early ’80s.

“Every story is about the men. People don’t even know women were in Vietnam,” she recalls thinking at the time. The women’s memorial “heightens awareness that women went off to war, and this is what they did. And their contributions are worthy of recognition by the nation.”

Sculpted by Glenna Goodacre, the bronze statue depicts three uniformed women with a wounded soldier.

via Women’s role in Vietnam honored on Veterans Day.