MINNEAPOLIS — Whenever Diane Carlson Evans comes back home to her family farm in Buffalo, MN, she feels a sense of peace.
She watches her little nieces and nephews play on the yarn, and sips her coffee on the porch with her brother Maynard.
"I love coming back home," she said. "Lots of good memories here."
But Carlson Evans said coming home didn't always feel that way.
She volunteered as a Vietnam War combat nurse, and when she returned home to Minnesota strangers didn't welcome her with open arms.
"There was outright hostility toward us," she sighed. "We were warned that if you wear your uniform home, you'll be accosted in someway, verbally or otherwise."
So she kept quiet about her time in Vietnam. When her mother, also a nurse, wanted to throw a party, she said she wouldn't attend.
"We just submerged out the pain," she said. "We didn't want to be made to feel humiliated and we just pretended we were never there."
But she didn't forget the eyes of the men she helped. She remembers their wounds, and their last words. She remembers how hard the women worked taking care of soldiers and Vietnamese civilians next to her.
In the following decades, she watched the Vietnam Veterans Memorial go up in Washington D.C. and noticed something along the National Mall that was missing: recognition of the women who served in the war.
For 10 years Diane fought for the Vietnam Women's Memorial, and was often brushed off.
"They said 'you’re the woman who has come out of the corn field!'" she recalled. "It made me angry. And the angrier it made me the harder I worked."
She became the founder of the Vietnam Women's Memorial, the nation's first and only memorial to military women on the National Mall.
Diane leaned on others, as well as looked inside herself and her experience in Vietnam to see the statue go up. She detailed her fight and time in Vietnam in her book, Healing Wounds.
On Saturday, the founder, author, and veteran finally got her warm welcome home.
Maynard set up his shop with tables, enough to sit around 50 people wanting to see his older sister. Starting at 9 a.m., neighbors, friends and extended family came to give Diane a heart-felt thank you.
"They need to know her sacrifice," said Maria Felger, Buffalo resident and fellow veteran nurse. "And it's all wrapped up in this woman called Diane Carlson!"
Veterans stood in a line with a pen, waiting for a picture, signature, and a chance to say thank you.
Also in the crowd were families who have lost soldiers in the Vietnam War.
"When Danny died, I remember us huddling as a family," said Jan Fitzpatrick, who still remembers the knock on her family's door to deliver news of his death."
Family members of Buffalo's Garryl Cardinal and Melvin Scheuble were also there to thank Diane. Both young men died in the war as well.
"It was the welcome home for Diane she never got," said Maynard. "Yup. It was her welcome home."
Earlier this year, Evans was nominated by U.S. Senator Jon Tester of Montana for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.