Helena resident Diane Carlson Evans, a Vietnam War combat nurse and long-time advocate for military women, was recently awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.“President Biden believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others. The country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice,” stated a White House press release announcing the 20 recipients that included politicians, lawyers and activists. Carlson Evans, 78, who founded the Vietnam Women’s War Memorial Foundation, was unable to travel from Helena to accept her award because of recent cancer treatments. During the ceremony on Jan. 2, Biden presented the medal to Denise Rowan, the first female commander of the American Legion, on Carlson Evans’ behalf.When Carlson Evans asked Rowan to accept the award, she said, “You’re accepting this award on behalf of all the women who served around the world during the Vietnam era. It’s a big award and we’re grateful.”Montana Sen. Jon Tester recommended Carlson Evans for recognition to the White House last year at the suggestion of Donna and Ron Greenwood of Helena. Carlson Evans and her husband, Mike, moved to Helena in 1998 when he took a job as a general surgeon at the VA medical center at Fort Harrison.   Carlson Evans’ dedication and sacrifice began in July of 1968 when she arrived in Vietnam to serve as a U.S. Army combat nurse. She was 21 years old. During the next 12 months, she lived through countless episodes of trauma and terror, many that she recalled in her book, “Healing Wounds: A Vietnam War Combat Nurse’s 10-Year Fight to Win Women a Place of Honor in Washington, D.C.” She held the hands of wounded soldiers while they died. She confronted a U.S. infantryman who tried to enter the hospital wearing a necklace made from the dried ears of Viet Cong dead. He removed it. She cared for dozens of Vietnamese children who had been seared by napalm. During one bombing raid, she witnessed a Vietnamese toddler with badly burned skin hold her hands over her ears and scream with terror until she died. The mud and the blood and the horror were constant.Carlson Evans returned home with post-traumatic stress disorder, which went untreated for nearly 15 years. She also returned home to an ungrateful nation.The widespread derision of Vietnam veterans — many of whom were spit on and called “baby killers” — was a shock, Carlson Evans wrote. In her family, serving in the military had always been considered an honor. But the Vietnam War had changed that. After she arrived home, her father told a local store clerk that his daughter had just returned from Vietnam. The clerk’s reaction — a refusal to look at or speak to Carlson Evans or her father — prompted her to ask her parents not to give her a welcome-home party or to mention her service to the people in their small town of Buffalo, Minnesota.“There was a lot of anti-war sentiment in Minnesota,” she recalled during a recent interview with Montana Free Press. “After I got back, I started classes at the University of Minnesota. The first day, I sat in a classroom and three men in there were wearing their field jackets and their combat boots. That was a big mistake. The professor looked at them and said, ‘Where have you been?’ And the guys got really quiet, and she said, ‘You’re not welcome here.’” The men left the class. Carlson Evans followed them out. She left campus that day and never went back.Not only was her military service mocked and despised, but it was also ignored. In the book it took her 50 years to summon the courage to write, Carlson Evans noted, “I went to visit an old high school friend, Judy…We talked for two hours. She never asked about Vietnam.” And fear kept her from raising the subject. Carlson Evans didn’t even talk about her Vietnam experiences with her husband, Mike, whom she met in 1970. Instead, Carlson Evans endured debilitating nightmares, she said, and became a workaholic supermom so she didn’t have time to think about past traumas. In 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Carlson Evans attended the ceremony alone, too afraid of old feelings and memories to include her husband in the experience. She was anxious about losing control of her emotions, she wrote, which is exactly what happened. Seeing the names of soldiers and nurses engraved into the black granite released a torrent of tears. But then something shifted.“I’d been terrified of crying — afraid that once I started, I wouldn’t stop,” she wrote in “Healing Wounds.” “But now it felt liberating. They weren’t simply tears of loss. They were tears of anger, injustice, 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.Diane Carlson Evans, right, here with fellow nurses, served from 1968 to 1969 as a combat nurse in the Vietnam War. Credit: courtesy of Diane Carlson Evans“For the first time since returning from Vietnam, I felt no shame whatsoever.”She also understood that honoring the past is a powerful way to assist with healing. And she felt a new resolve: to help other women heal. Not just nurses, but all the women. More than 265,000 military and civilian women served during the Vietnam War years.A few months later, that resolve propelled her into action after she found out that a statue titled “Three Soldiers” would soon be placed near the wall to honor Vietnam servicemen. “A memorial for women could at least be a start for female vets to get over Vietnam,” she wrote in her book, “an affirmation that we’d done something honorable, something worth remembering; a sign that we no longer had to hide our experiences.” She founded a nonprofit organization called the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project (later renamed the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation, VWMF) and launched herself into what would become a 10-year fight.That fight turned Carlson Evans into an accomplished speaker and advocate able to navigate a slew of male-dominated organizations, including the U.S. Congress. Her determination, fueled by the support of her husband, their four children and VWMF board members, propelled Carlson Evans past every obstacle, including the Commission of Fine Arts, whose members not only denied approval but compared women veterans to members of the Scout Dog Association and military K-9 Corps.Journalist Morley Safer noticed and contacted Carlson Evans about an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” An episode called “The Forgotten Veterans” ran in February 1989. “After the 60 Minutes piece,” Carlson Evans wrote, “our phone lines lit up with praise, encouragement and donations.” Still, it took another four years for VWMF to realize its goal.On Nov. 11, 1993, more than 25,000 people gathered on the National Mall to celebrate the installation of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. In-depth, independent reporting on the stories impacting your community from reporters who know your town.The post Helena resident and Vietnam War combat nurse awarded Presidential Citizens Medal appeared first on Montana Free Press.