Statue Honors Female Vietnam Veterans : Memorial: Many at capital unveiling say it is part of the healing process.

In a sun-lit ceremony that mixed tears, smiles and speeches, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial was unveiled Thursday as the United States symbolically welcomed home its female veterans.

“The journey for most of us still isn’t over,” said Diane Carlson Evans, a former army nurse and Vietnam veteran who led a 10-year campaign to create the monument. “Many are just beginning their healing. But this is our place to start.”

The statue of three women and a wounded soldier is a memorial to the approximately 11,000 American military women who were stationed in Vietnam during the war--most of them as nurses.

For the unveiling, members of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project board and several others held hands in a semi-circle around the monument, which was shrouded by a red, white and blue parachute. As they stood in the warm afternoon breeze, many wept or shared hugs while music from the movie score of “Dances With Wolves” was played.

As the music stopped, each of the 11 people in the semi-circle clutched the nylon cover and pulled it away to reveal a life-size bronze work. It depicts an Army nurse sitting on a stack of sandbags holding a wounded male soldier while a second woman looks skyward and a third kneels, holding a helmet and looking at the ground.

“I wanted to reflect their emotions, courage, compassion,” said Santa Fe, N.M., artist Glenna Goodacre, who sculpted the 2,000-pound memorial. The monument is located 300 feet southeast of the statue of three Army infantrymen near the Wall of Names on the site of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It is at the west end of The Mall near the Lincoln Memorial.

The unveiling came midway through a daylong series of events that began Thursday morning with 6,000 people joining in a march to the memorial. The day ended with a candlelight vigil. But the highlight was the dedication ceremony, which lasted more than two hours.

Many in the audience and on the speakers platform shed tears as veterans recounted their experiences, both during the war and since, as they struggled to come to terms with their largely unacknowledged service to their country.

“What the women who served in Vietnam endured is almost impossible for any of us to comprehend,” Vice President Al Gore, an Army veteran who served two years in Vietnam, told the crowd of about 25,000. “We worked very hard as Americans to break the circle of pain and begin the circle of healing.”

In the keynote address, Col. Jane Carson, a retired nurse who served with the Army Nurse Corps in Vietnam, said that the project itself has helped salve psychological wounds. “Many women veterans have started the healing journey as a direct result of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project,” she said. “They didn’t realize until now how much they needed this monument.”

Goodacre told the crowd that the woman looking at the sky in the monument is perhaps looking for a helicopter. “Her hands and her face express her anxiety in this moment of crisis,” she said.

The woman gazing at the ground “epitomizes the agonies of the war, the despair, the fatigue, the frustrations that so many of the veterans felt,” she said.

Goodacre said that all four of the figures in the sculpture bore a minimum of identifying information, such as military rank, so that they might readily symbolize all veterans. She also noted that she placed a blindfold on the male figure for that reason.

Creation of the statue stretched over a decade. Evans, who served as an Army nurse in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, said that she thought of the idea when she saw the statue of three Army infantrymen designed by Frederick Hart, which was placed near the Wall in 1984.

Hart’s statue was erected amid protests that it destroyed the original intent and design of the Wall, which was created by Maya Ying Lin and dedicated in 1982.

Although there are no records documenting the number of American women who served in Vietnam, it is estimated that about 11,000 were stationed there during the war, mainly as nurses. Others served as physicians, physical therapists and as personnel in the medical field, air traffic control, military intelligence and administration. Eight military women who died during the Vietnam War are recognized on the Wall of Names.

An additional unknown number of civilian women served in Vietnam with the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services and other humanitarian organizations. Others worked for the USO and Special Services in providing entertainment and recreation for troops.

Some critics have belittled the new sculpture’s artistic merit. But leaders of the project said they were unfazed by such criticism.

“We don’t care what the art critics say,” Evans declared at the ceremony. “We did not build this memorial for art critics, and they do not need to come here and critique it.”

The statue was funded by private donations. Four million dollars have been raised for the project since 1983, but leaders of the effort have not disclosed its cost.

Others appearing at the dedication ceremony included entertainers Harry Connick Jr., who sang “America the Beautiful,” and Crystal Gayle, who performed “Til the White Dove Flies Alone,” a song written for the dedication by New York composers Rod McBrien and John Linde.

President Clinton was visiting a veterans’ hospital in Martinsburg, W.Va., and did not attend. Organizers of the event presented a scale model of the statue to him and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton earlier this week.

* RELATED COVERAGE: A32, B3