For Diane Carlson Evans, going to Vietnam to serve as a U.S. Army nurse was a calling.

“I left the farm in 1968 to go to Vietnam,” she recalls. “I was a combat nurse, trauma nurse in two different hospitals. Everything was a front line in Vietnam. There were no safe places.”

Evans, just 21 at the time, traveled far from her Buffalo, Minn. home to serve.

She was in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, among those caring for the wounded on the front lines.

“It was very touching, very emotional,” says Jean Mahaffey, a retired U.S. Navy nurse, now living in Eden Prairie. “You were just trying to let them know that they were safe in a hospital, safe in a ship or shore, and we were going to do the best we could to care for them.”

The casualty numbers were high.

Names of those killed are etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, also known as ‘The Wall.’

“Eighty-eight percent of U.S. women in Vietnam, military women were nurses,” Evans says. “350,000 men were wounded in Vietnam, and more than 58,000 names are on The Wall.”

On Thursday, Evans was awarded a Presidential Citizens Medal for her service and for a decade-long mission here at home.

“She wanted women to be recognized for what they had done for the service,” Mahaffey notes.

Visiting the Vietnam War memorials in the 1980s, Evans felt they didn’t show the importance of the 10,000 women who served in-country in that conflict.

“There were eight nurses that were killed in Vietnam, and they were on the wall,” Mahaffey explains. “She said, ‘But where’s the dedication to the women that were all there to take care of these patients?’”

“I told my husband, I said, ‘If they’re going to have a statue portraying men, there has to be one for women or they’ll never know we were there,’” Evans adds.

With two other former nurses, Evans launched the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation in 1984, a nonprofit.

The group lobbied Congress and pushed for support.

The goal was to build a memorial honoring Vietnam nurses, who, like the returning soldiers, came home to a skeptical nation.  

“We were mistreated, unrecognized, unheralded for all that we had done,” Evans says. “And I was going to do everything I could to dedicate a monument honoring my sister veterans on the National Mall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”

Janis Fitzpatrick, from Waverly, was among those cheering the project on.

Her brother, Daniel Bodin, a U.S. Army infantryman, was killed in a firefight in Vietnam in February 1968.

Fitzpatrick says the nurses who tended to the wounded were unsung heroes.

“Caring so much for them and their families,” she explains. “Knowing that she may be the last person holding their hand or saying goodbye to them, or encouraging them, in spite of what was happening.”

Congress approved the project in 1988, and the memorial was dedicated in November 1993 on Veterans Day.

“Diane was really more a mentor and a support,” says Kristin Hannah.

Hannah is the author of ‘The Women’ — a novel about an army nurse in Vietnam.

She visited the memorial during a 30th-anniversary celebration last year.

“It was very apparent to me and very moving how much this memorial meant to the women who served and their families,” Hannah says.

Evans wasn’t at the White House to accept the medal in person because she’s fighting a new battle — kidney cancer linked to Agent Orange.

Evans, now 78,  lives in Montana and says she has difficulty traveling but adds with the help of immunotherapy, doctors haven’t found any evidence of new cancer growth.

She says she’s been honored to share her memorial mission with those she and others cared for.

“I’m overwhelmed, of course, and would only accept it on behalf of my sister veterans.” Evans declares. “A lot of people on that team were veterans who’d been wounded, who stood by us and said if it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be here.”