Anne Philiben of Bend, Ore., sports an Australian soldier's hat, a keepsake from the Vietnam War when she was a nurse at Vun Tau.

They could have been the cast for the popular "M*A*S*H" television series about the Korean War's 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.

But 40 years ago in the Vietnam War, Capt. Harley Kelley, lieutenants Ann Demolski, Candy Curley, Anne Philiben and Jodie Wallschlaeger, corpsman Bill Coyne and their fellow soldiers were the real doctors, nurses and assistants for the 36th Evacuation Hospital.

"Our unit was so close to 'M*A*S*H,' it was scary," Coyne said Friday at the onset of a reunion in Las Vegas for 79 members of the 36th Evac.

The unit was a surgery hub of Quonset huts and concrete walkways at Vun Tau on the Mekong Delta for wounded U.S. and Australian soldiers and Vietnamese civilians.

"Harley (Kelley) was the best of the best. He was our Hawkeye," said Demolski, a registered nurse and retired colonel from Incline Village who is the Nevada Army National Guard's deputy state surgeon.

Philiben, who was Demolski's roommate, recalled "the horrendous ride" aboard a C-130 to reach Vun Tau.

"We had just lost an engine," she said.

That was after the 15 nurses and 85 replacement soldiers had been dropped off at Alpha Camp in the night with no weapons or flashlights.

"This was 'Welcome to Vietnam.' ... We had no idea if anyone was coming to get us."

Demolski said her Vietnam experience was often a blur of medical personnel scrambling to get the wounded into surgery to remove bullets and shrapnel and treating children who had been burned by napalm.

Wallschlaeger of Mankato, Minn., said she was "too naive to know what it was all about. You're pretty shocked when you see the first mass casualties."

Said Demolski: "No training can prepare you for that. ... The level of humor is the only way you can get through this. We had to have so much fun to cover up the tragedy."

Kelley, a draftee surgeon who arrived in Vietnam at age 34, agreed that many in the unit who were not regular soldiers "didn't have a lot of Army protocol."

"But none of us wore dresses like (Cpl. Max) Klinger did," he said, referring to the character played by Jamie Farr in the "M*A*S*H" series.

Nevertheless, like in the series and the novel by Richard Hooker, Kelley said the real scene was busy and gut-wrenching.

"There were a lot of casualties. We were swamped," he said, referring to the 1968 Tet Offensive when "all hell broke loose."

Kelley of Bend, Ore., recalled the training he went through in Texas after he was drafted.

"They knew we were going to Vietnam, so they taught us jungle medication for malaria and dysentery. They also shot goats with high-powered rifles, then we had to operate on their wounds. It gave us an idea of what a high-powered rifle injury was like."

In Vietnam, he said, bullet wounds would be left open after surgery to allow them to drain and reduce the infection rate.

"Then five days later we would suture the wounds," he recalled.

During the Korean War and especially World War II when the front was always moving, the hospitals had to be mobile. In Vietnam, Kelley said, the evacuation hospitals were in more permanent locations during the 15 years of fighting.

Candy Otstott, whose maiden name is Curley, was 20 years old when she arrived at Vun Tau during Christmas 1967.

"I remember the children with burns from white phosphorus and napalm," said Otstott of Fairfax, Va., who volunteers to help soldiers and families at Arlington National Cemetery and Walter Reed Army Hospital.

"We had helicopters to evacuate troops to a higher standard of care," she said.

Like Kelley, she also served on hospital staffs along Iraq's southern border during the Persian Gulf War.

Demolski, whose hometown is Belleville, Ill., said she arrived in Vietnam on Christmas Eve 1966.

She left the 36th Evacuation Hospital in the spring of 1967 to go with Kelley to the 95th Evacuation Hospital, leaving a villa setting to work in a more harsh environment. They worked in inflatable surgical units and lived in tents in Da Nang, "the mortar pit of the nation," she said.

Helicopters often would pass over the nurses' makeshift, open showers, where they would get a brief reprieve from the constant duty of tending to the wounded.

"It was terrible, the wounds we'd treat," Demolski said. "We saw a lot of death. It was not unusual to sit with a soldier during his last minutes. You would just stay with them and hold them. That's all we could do."

The war experience, she said, has bonded the group for life.

"You sometimes forget those you laugh with," she said. "But you never forget those you cry with."