Here is the first of two posts on the Women Vietnam Veterans, to accompany the evolving exhibition Poppies: Women, War, Peace. They will merely scratch the surface of the bigger picture that was the Vietnam War. The second post will come to you from Washington DC where I shall meet some of these women. In September I plan to be in Vietnam itself, meeting Vietnamese women who fought, and suffered, in what became the most controversial war in modern history.
First, the US Army Nurse Corps, the Registered Nurses who began arriving in Saigon in 1956 and by 1968 saw their numbers swell to 900, the majority of them female, tending to the sick and injured, on all sides. By 1973, when the last troops left, 5,000 nurses had served.
Here, Diane Evans contributes to the anthology of poetry, Visions of War, Dreams of Peace Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (edited by Lynda Van Devanter and Joan A. Furey 1991).
Left Behind
I search my soul
And memories of war
To find that lost space
That part of me that’s gone
Left in Vietnam so many
Years ago and hoping
Someday to find it and
Make me whole again
I didn’t leave behind
A limb, an arm or a leg
What is it then that’s gone
It can’t be seen and
Perhaps just as a lost
Limb it can never be
Retrieved
1st LT Diane Carlson Evans served with the US Army Nurse Corps in 1968 and 1969 at the 36th Evacuation Hospital in Vung Tau and the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku.
Photos © Diane Evans: at work at a hospital in Vietnam, 1968; at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington DC which she worked to establish in 1993.
