Diane Carlson Evas, 1946-2026

Diane Carlson Evans, the former U.S. Army Vietnam War nurse who led the long fight to build the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., died May 20 at 79.

“It is with a heavy heart to learn of the passing of VVA life member and trailblazing Army Captain Diane Carlson Evans,” said National President Tom Burke. “Diane was a true American hero, volunteering at age 21 for the Army Nurse Corps and serving a life-changing 1968-69 tour of duty in the burn unit and pre- and post-operative units at the U.S. Army’s 36th Evacuation Hospital in Vung Tàu and the 71st Evac in Pleiku.”

A founding member of Eau Clair, Wisconsin, Chapter 5 in 1983, Diane Evans went on to “spend a lifetime working as a forceful veterans’ advocate,” Burke said. That advocacy—and her personal experiences in the war and after coming home—led to the idea of a memorial at The Wall in Washington to honor the American women who served in the Vietnam War.

Diane Evans’ many awards include the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2025 and the VVA Lifetime Achievement Award. She received the VVA award at the 2022 National Leadership Conference, following the publication of her acclaimed memoir, Healing Wounds, which dealt with her service in the war, her emotional turbulence after coming home, and her fight to get Women’s Memorial built.

“I feel peace,” she wrote near the end of the book. “The grace I used to pray for when the causalities came in has been showing up more frequently. Prayers have been answered. Faith restored. Joy permitted. Guilt quieted.”

J. Craig Venter, 1946-2026

Craig Venter, a biochemist who did groundbreaking research on decoding the human genome—one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in modern history—died at age 79 on April 29. He credited his service in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam during the war as a pivotal event in his life and scientific career.

Venter joined the Navy as an aimless teenager in 1965, trained as a corpsman, and arrived in-country in August 1967. He served for a year at the Danang Navy Hospital. He worked as senior corpsman in the hospital’s intensive care ward in the receiving/triage unit during that combat-heavy time, including during Tet ‘68.

That intense experience, Venter later said, helped turn him “from a young man without purpose into one compelled to understand the very essence of life.” After mustering out of the Navy, he went on to receive a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California Medical School in San Diego in December 1975, which launched what would become a history-making scientific career.

Venter’s many accolades include the National Medal of Science, which he received from President Obama in 2009, and VVA’s first Excellence in the Sciences Award which he accepted at the 2008 National Leadership Conference in Greenville, South Carolina.

“I’ve received a lot of honors,” he told The VVA Veteran in 2008, but the Excellence in the Sciences Award “is a particularly meaningful one. It goes back to the raw origins, right?”

Duery C. Felton, Jr., 1947-2026

Craig Venter, a Vietnam War veteran best known for his pioneering work for the National Park Service in developing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection of items left at The Wall in Washington, D.C., died March 15. He was 78.

Felton served a combat-heavy tour of duty as an RTO with the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam from February-December 1967. After coming home, he went to work for the National Park Service in the Nation’s Capital, and joined Vietnam Veterans of America in the early eighties.

He was a Board member of VVA’s now-defunct Washington, D.C., Chapter 43, when he began working on a project to formalize the collection of articles that visitors began leaving at the base of The Wall soon after the memorial’s 1982 dedication. Today that collection contains more than 400,000 items.

Felton and his fellow chapter members worked to try to make the collection a reality. “Chapter 43 lobbied, wrote letters, visited Congress, spoke out at public meetings,” he said in a 2015 VVA Veteran interview. “For a long time, it wasn’t clear there would ever be a memorial collection. And there may not have been without Chapter 43. So let the record show that, if not for the efforts of VVA Chapter 43, I don’t think we’d have this extraordinary collection today.”

Felton, who went on to become the Curator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection, was a member of Silver Spring Maryland, Chapter 641 when he died. VVA recognized his extraordinary work with our Excellence in the Arts Award, which he received at the 2015 National Convention in Springfield, Illinois.

“I can think of only a few VVA members who have been more dedicated to their fellow Vietnam War veterans that Duery,” said Mokie Porter, VVA’s Communications Director, “and he was just that for decades.”

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