Vietnam War Statue : Nurses Face Monumental Frustration

Diane Carlson Evans got the idea in 1983 when she visited a Minneapolis art display saluting Vietnam veterans. “Everywhere I looked,” she recalled of the artwork there, “I saw men.”

She had been an Army nurse in Vietnam, and it was clear to her that the role of women in that war--their valor under fire and constant exposure to death and the horrors of combat--was being ignored.

So, hauling her old footlocker from her parents’ farmhouse in Minnesota, Evans pulled out her fatigues for the first time since she had left Vietnam in August, 1969. Dried blood still stained her boots.

The tattered uniform no longer fit, but she persuaded a young friend to dress in it and pose as a nurse. Rodger Brodin, the sculptor and Vietnam veteran whose work had caught her eye in Minneapolis, agreed to work on a statue.

3,000 Volunteers

It wasn’t long before Evans and 3,000 volunteers nationwide, using miniature models of Brodin’s work, had raised close to $1 million to have their statue placed at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Veterans’ groups were enthusiastic and Congress liked the idea, too. Even actress Loretta Swit, who played the Army nurse “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the TV series “MASH,” voiced her support.

All along, Evans and the others assumed that their statue would be placed near the V-shaped Vietnam Memorial, a powerful wedge of black granite that has been credited with helping heal the psychological wounds of forgotten veterans. And as the money added up, they began to envision a dedication ceremony for Veterans Day, 1989.

But while Evans had lived through bloody battles half a world away from her home in Wisconsin, she and the other nurses who set out to honor the 10,000 American women who served in Vietnam weren’t prepared for the bureaucratic jungles of Washington.

‘Power Within Her’

In a letter to Evans, sculptor Brodin had once waxed poetic about his creation, a war-weary nurse cradling an upturned helmet. “There’s a power within her,” he wrote, “that even I cannot describe.”

J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art and a key figure in deciding which designs get chosen for memorials in the capital, had less trouble with an assessment. “The poor nurse,” he said recently, “looks like she’s about to upchuck.”

Which just about describes the feeling of the nurses after four years of legislative and bureaucratic battles that have left their design rejected on aesthetic grounds. Along the way, the grass-roots campaign was split by a power struggle. Lawsuits and charges of internal mismanagement abounded, and the future of the entire project is still in doubt.

“I think we did it backwards,” concedes retired Air Force nurse Linda Spoonster Schwartz, legislative affairs director of the group, The Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project. “We’re very good nurses, but trafficking in politics is not our second nature.

“If you want to commit suicide or have a coronary,” she adds ruefully, “I can handle that quite well.”

From the start, the Vietnam Memorial has been a project cloaked in emotion and controversy. Its original design by Maya Lin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, was a wall inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 Americans, including eight women, who died in the war. At first it was bitterly attacked as a mournful “gash” that inspired feelings of shame.

Emotions rose shortly after the memorial’s dedication in 1982, when then-Interior Secretary James G. Watt, bowing to demands from many disgruntled veterans, decided almost single-handedly to place near the wall a bronze statue of three fighting men designed by sculptor Frederick Hart.

Watt’s move was later criticized by women veterans, who felt that Hart’s depiction of three males, symbolizing the 3 million men who served in Indochina, ignored the contribution of the 10,000 American women who also served. Watt’s action also prompted Congress to pass new laws governing the selection of monuments--laws that, ironically, now effectively pit the Vietnam nurses against the influential Brown, head of the five-member federal Commission of Fine Arts.

Site Selection

Under Congress’ selection process, there first must be legislation establishing that a particular person or group should be honored. Next a site is selected. And only then is a design chosen by the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, which also dislikes the Brodin statue.

In the case of the nurses, Brown seems to imply, two people in Minnesota simply made a statue and decided they were going to cram it down the throats of official Washington and visiting tourists for hundreds of years to come, regardless of whether others found it appropriate or aesthetically pleasing.

“The poor sculptor got assured (by the women) that whatever he did would automatically be plunked down there,” Brown says of Brodin. “He came and testified and seemed a reasonable type. I don’t know that they are stuck always having the same artist. We try to focus attention on these memorials on a national level, not just a group in Minnesota.”

Brown would rather see the Vietnam women’s salute become part of the All-Women’s Memorial, a $25-million monument and museum planned for the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery to honor all women who have served in the U.S. armed forces.

‘Among Great Monuments’

“It’s going to be very large scale, very prominent and take its place among the great monuments of Washington,” Brown says, adding pointedly:

“One would hope that any subgroup of those gallant women who served in all wars could see their way clear to submerging their own particular anxieties and have that memorial symbolize everyone. But this (Vietnam group) is the era of the ‘me generation,’ so we’ll have to see how it goes.”

How it has gone so far is not what might have been expected, given the project’s aim to promote sisterhood and healing among Vietnam nurses. A power struggle over alleged misuse of more than $300,000 in donations resulted in the ouster last summer of co-founder Donna-Marie Boulay, who says she is “overwhelmed” by the injustice of her removal.

During the skirmish two lawsuits were filed--one against the board by two of its members, and a copyright suit against Stuart Pharmaceuticals, the project’s primary donor, by Brodin. Although both suits have since been dropped, friendships have been severed and feelings have been bruised. Some women have become so distraught over the project’s difficulties, according to legislative director Schwartz, that they had to seek counseling, take medication or be hospitalized.

“What people don’t understand is that women see this statue as finally, after 20 years, a sign that our government cared about what they did,” Schwartz says. “Women vets have had more difficulty readjusting to civilian life than even some of the men because of the kind of work they did. Nurses experienced death and dying on a daily basis and were exposed to hostile fire constantly.”

Mother’s Letter

She cites a letter to the group by the mother of a nurse who served in Vietnam. “(The) daughter committed suicide while she was waiting for the statue’s dedication,” Schwartz said. “She said if the statue had already been up, her daughter would not have committed suicide.”

(Brown agrees that this has been the most emotionally charged drive for a memorial that he can recall. When told that some women were hospitalized after the commission rejected the statue design, he said: “I’m sorry if it seemed to have that effect. There are a lot of women who were pretty upset at the whole idea that it should grow into these kinds of proportions.”)

Details of the internal strife began to trickle out when the group, after raising money to fund and erect the $135,000 statue, asked Congress for legislation authorizing it. Sensing concern about the group’s financial dealings, Congress ordered an audit which revealed--to the surprise of some project members--that more than $385,000 had been spent on public relations and consultants.

In addition, some project members were dismayed about the spending habits of Boulay, who they say ran up large, poorly documented travel charges. When she traveled to Washington on project business, for instance, Boulay had stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, one of the city’s most luxurious.

“I certainly did, several times,” Boulay acknowledged by telephone from her Minneapolis law office. “The reason I did was I got a very big discount as a lawyer.” A Ritz-Carlton reservations clerk said the hotel does have special rates for lawyers, the least expensive room rate in the last few years having been $105 a night.

Suit Filed

Last May, Evans and another board member, Karen Johnson, filed a suit against other board members, charging them with failure to supervise Boulay and maintain proper corporate and financial records.

Boulay, they charged, had endorsed the television series “China Beach” without approval, spent corporate funds beyond board guidelines and caused, by her failure to work with sculptor Brodin, a copyright suit to be filed by Brodin against Stuart Pharmaceuticals, the project’s major corporate backer with a pledge of $500,000. (In his suit, Brodin accused the firm of using the image of his statue improperly in a promotional manner.)

The women’s suit was dropped within five days, but it was the start of a major shakeup. In June, the project moved its headquarters from Minneapolis to Washington. A month later, the board voted to remove Boulay “for cause” and adopted a revised budget “to reflect a more respectful attitude toward the supporters and contributors.” It also discontinued some of the expensive public relations contracts.

Evans said that Boulay’s mistakes were “not intentional, just bad judgment, nothing malicious. Some of the costs got carried away for public relations.” The fact that their friendship as co-founders was severed “hurts,” she said. “It can’t help but hurt.”

The board’s actions “boggled my mind,” says Boulay, who insists that the money spent on public relations was necessary to persuade Congress to pass a law authorizing the statue.

Yet, despite the expensive lobbying campaign, the project settled last October for legislation that is not statue-specific. A Senate provision specifying that the memorial consist of a statue at the Vietnam Memorial was amended by the House after critics complained that such language would circumvent the very law Congress had passed to stem the tide of monuments in Washington. The women’s group decided to support the House version and asked the Senate to pass it, which it eventually did.

Boulay now predicts that the legislative change could doom the statue. “I would dearly, dearly love to be 100% wrong,” she said, adding: “I’m morose on the subject.”

The newly organized group has paid off enormous debts, retooled its budget process and resolved to move forward. “We’ve really turned it around,” Schwartz gamely maintains. “This project has never been in a better position than it is right now.”

But that’s if you consider a holding pattern good position. Before the Brodin statue can be placed as part of the memorial, the group must clear several time-consuming hurdles.

First, it must persuade the new secretary of the Interior, Manuel Lujan Jr., to advise Congress that a women’s Vietnam memorial be placed in what is known as Site 1, which includes the 2.2-acre site of the Vietnam Memorial.

Assuming Lujan does recommend Site 1, which is anticipated, Congress then must vote to place the women’s memorial near Lin’s wall and Hart’s statue. The legislation passed last October contains such a recommendation, but it is non-binding.

And unless Congress also specifies that Brodin’s design is the one to be selected, Evans and her group will then find themselves right back where they started: before J. Carter Brown and the Commission of Fine Arts, seeking approval of the statue.

Brown shows no signs of a change of artistic heart. He is more enthusiastic about the idea of a bas-relief, perhaps depicting a large-scale war nursing scene. A statue of one white Army nurse, he says, might only compound the problem: Veterans not literally symbolized by the figure--black and Asian women, or service women who weren’t nurses--would feel excluded in the same way the women felt excluded by the statue of the men.

And he is concerned that adding more and more elements to the Vietnam Memorial may set off an endless parade of interest groups seeking their own monuments.

Although having an open competition to design the memorial “would certainly be one way of getting out of a preconceived idea,” Brown says, “I would hate to see a competition that would exacerbate the situation of hitching to a particular star.”

Even though one of their own paid consultants recommended that they consider placing Brodin’s statue at or near the all-women’s site, the nurses are adamant that the memorial be placed at the Vietnam Memorial or nowhere, and that it be the Brodin statue or nothing. They used models of the statue to raise money, they note, and they claim it is already famous and promoting healing.

“We won’t accept anything other than a statue. That’s not equal,” said Evans. “For five months, Rodger and I worked on that statue, and we didn’t tell anybody. Then we heard there would be a statue of three men at the wall. I wasn’t bitter. I just felt empty. We decided we would work on the statue and if we liked it, we would try to put it on the Wall.”

The idea of a bas-relief is greeted no more enthusiastically. “If the men’s statue doesn’t detract from the memorial, why would a woman?” asks Evans. “A bas-relief or a plaque would seem second-rate and make the women feel second-rate.”

(To that, Brown responds, “If they could get the bronze doors of Ghiberti I wonder if they would think that’s second-rate. I’d hate to see people make up their minds on purely extraneous political grounds without considering it as a design question.”)

Placing the memorial at the all-women’s site, across a bridge over the Potomac River, “sends a message similar to the back of the bus,” said Schwartz.

In retrospect, Evans concedes that starting with a specific statue meant they went about this effort “backwards. We made mistakes. Perhaps we really didn’t know the process.” Adds Schwartz: “I think the project now has learned a lot.”

The group’s target date of Veterans Day for the dedication “may not be possible,” Schwartz concedes. “It’s a cherished notion that’s dying hard, but there’s still a glimmer of hope. It’s not easy to do this.”