Women Veterans Hoping to Add Nurse’s Statue to Viet Memorial

Women who served in Vietnam opened a fund-raising drive Friday to add a statue of a military nurse to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The women said that it is time to honor their female colleagues for the sacrifices and contributions they made.

“I am very proud of the women I served with,” said Diane Carlson Evans, a Vietnam veteran and founder of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project, “but it came to me as a revelation in 1983 that we as a nation were not recognizing these women. We were not seeing or hearing about them.”

“I tell people I served in Vietnam and they say, ‘Oh. Women served in Vietnam? I didn’t know that,’ ” said Donna Marie Boulay, a Minneapolis lawyer who is head of the project. “Americans don’t seem to know we were there.”

The group is trying to raise $1.2 million to place a statue of a military nurse at the memorial, which now has a sculpture of three young male soldiers and a black granite wall bearing the names of the Americans killed in Vietnam.

There are the names of eight women and about 58,000 men on the wall. About 10,000 women served in Vietnam.

The proposed additional sculpture portrays a woman in fatigues and boots with a stethoscope draped around her neck, to symbolize listening, and holding a helmet.

The group said that it is ready to bring its proposal before the three agencies that must approve it--the Fine Arts Commission, the Interior Department and the National Capital Planning Commission.

Depending on how quickly the agencies act, Boulay said, the goal is to place the statue at the memorial sometime between Veterans Day, 1987, and Memorial Day, 1988.

About $65,000 already has been raised, she said. The $1.2 million is needed to cover the sculptor’s contract, administrative and construction costs, landscaping fees and future maintenance costs.