Have scalpel, will travel

It's conventional wisdom that you should never work with your spouse.

But Dick and Wilhelmina "Willie" Matern are not your conventional couple.

For four decades Dick, a surgeon, and Willie, an operating room nurse, have partnered to save lives in Gallup, Chinle, Vietnam and Nepal.

Dick says he would work with Willie even she weren't his wife of 42 years.

"She's the consummate nurse and the consummate assistant," he said proudly. "She deserves an honorary Ph.D. and an M.D. rolled into one."

As for Willie, her secret for marital and occupational bliss is simple.

"You have to tune him out once in a while," she whispers.

On the surface, the two halves of this Phoenix couple couldn't be more different. Eighty-two-year-old Dick is a bilagáana with roots in Massachusetts. Willie, 74, is Táchii'nii born for Tódích'íi'nii, raised in Gallup.

Dick is a passionate person prone to bluster; Willie is quiet and even-tempered.

But they share a strong Christian faith, and a philosophy Willie sums up like this: "I find it very hard to accept the words 'It can't be done,' or 'It's not how we do it.' That makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end."

And so they have spent their lives, and continue to spend them, doing things that can't be done, on two continents. With Jesus' help, of course.

It was the late 1960s when they met at Gallup Indian Medical Center. Dick was fresh from a stint with the Public Health Service in a military hospital in Vietnam. His brother, a Marine, had been killed in combat and he needed a break from Southeast Asia.

During medical school he had volunteered at the Fort Defiance Hospital and had fond memories of working with Natives, so he had applied for the transfer to Gallup.

Willie Barton was a single mom trying to make ends meet. Finding herself divorced without a college degree, she had applied to nursing school and soon obtained her LPN, which you could get without a diploma in those days.

She was pretty and had a "delightful, very winsome quality," Dick recalled, but that's not what initially attracted him.

"In the operating room, you don't even know who you're working with. Everyone's wearing a mask," he said.

But he soon learned to recognize Willie's style.

"She would hand you what you needed before you even asked for it," he recalled. "Sometimes she would hand you something that wasn't what you asked for, but it was exactly what you needed."

Willie, meanwhile, admired Dick's decisiveness and the fact that he didn't mind getting on his knees and praying when the situation called for it.

The couple was married in 1967.

The newlyweds briefly moved to Phoenix and then took on a private practice in Elko, Nev., where their daughter Birdie was born.

Willie, who had always regretted not finishing high school, took her GED test and passed, but decided to take the classes she had missed anyway at an adult high school in Henderson.

She discovered she liked learning and has since gone on to get her associates, her bachelor's degree in nursing and a master's degree in public health.

Flashback to Vietnam

They were happy, but Dick's mind kept flashing back to Vietnam and the immense need for medical care.

In early 1973, he joined a Christian charity called Project Concern, which assigned him to a teaching hospital and university in Hue. Willie and the children followed in July.

The hospital was one of the best in the country, with equipment left by the U.S. military, but conditions were still primitive by American standards.

Dick recalls a child who'd had the back of his head blown off by artillery - someone had laid him on the bare planks of a hospital bed and as the blood congealed, his head had fused to the plank.

(Incredibly, Dick was able to save him by removing two ribs, filleting them open, and using them to patch the hole in the boy's skull.)

The dedicated but often inexperienced Vietnamese staff needed some guidance. Willie recalls trying to prepare the nurses for a head surgery, her only training tools an egg and a piece of cellophane.

While the military casualties were sad, she found the collateral damage devastating.

"I remember a young girl, no more than a child, being carried in," she said. "Both her legs were shredded. We worked all night amputating them. Her family had betrothed her to one man, but she was in love with another, so she broke it off. Her former fiancé got ahold of a grenade and threw it under her bed."

"We did miracles every day," Dick said. "You have no idea."

At that point, Dick insists, the South Vietnamese and their American allies were winning the war.

"All they needed was some air cover, and they could have gotten the job done," he said.

But in August, the Case-Church Amendment passed and the U.S. pulled out all direct military support. That turned the tide, according to Dick, and two years later Dick and Willie were fleeing the fallen capital of Saigon with hundreds of other Americans and refugees.

Four decades later, Dick is still angry about it.

"We had an ally and we betrayed them, and all Southeast Asia saw it," he said. "It's like deserting your wife in your 60s because you found some 20-year-old."

Disgusted and, in his words, "pretty messed up," Dick sought to chart a new course for him and his family.

In Hue, he had often been called upon to treat children, but he had no formal training in pediatrics. He went to Morton Woolley, the chief of surgery at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, and asked if he could join him for rounds.

Woolley wasn't about to let this combat-tested surgeon off the hook that easily.

"Why don't you become the resident supervisor?" he suggested.

And so Dick had to learn pediatric surgery the way he has learned most stuff in his long life, by doing it.

After a couple years of that, Dick got a call from a doctor who had been a co-worker in Vietnam.

"I was surprised, because the guy hated me," Dick said.

Dick hadn't tolerated wishy-washiness in his operating room, and had earned a reputation "as an S.O.B."

But this time, the doctor was pleading. A Christian hospital in Katmandu, Nepal, was in desperate need of a surgeon.

Truth be told, Dick was already missing the rigors of a Third World operating room. He jumped on the new opportunity, and Willie supported him even though it would mean interrupting her master's degree studies.

Willie thought life in Asia would be easier in a place with no war. She soon found herself wishing for Hue, where at least there were stores.

"Nepal is completely landlocked," she said. "They're entirely dependent on goods brought in from India and China."

Sometimes there wasn't gas for cooking. Sometimes there wasn't anything to cook.

And power outages were an almost daily occurrence. Dirt roads became impassable in the rain.

(Some of you in the middle of the rez might be thinking, "What's the big deal about that?", but remember, Willie was a Gallup girl.)

Dick was in his element, fixing stubborn clubfeet, encountering, for the first time, diphtheria. The DPT vaccine had not made it to the mountain kingdom. He was amazed by the resilience of the people.

"One woman walked nine miles down the mountain with a ruptured appendix," he said, still awestruck. "The pain must have been tremendous."

Queen Aiswarya of Nepal eventually shut the hospital down, accusing the Christian staff of proselytizing Buddhist patients. Dick was jailed and had to rely on the efforts of the American ambassador to be released.

Heading home

By the fall of 1987 Willie was feeling the call to move back to Navajo country. Her mother was getting older and wanted her around, and Dick had started suffering from Meniere's disease, a disorder of the inner ear that causes a loss of equilibrium. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to operate.

Willie took an administrative position at the Chinle Comprehensive Health Facility while Dick tried to take it easy. But he ended up volunteering in the operating room and joining the little Lutheran mission in Many Farms, which turned out to be another fight.

The hierarchy in Phoenix wanted to shut the mission down, but Dick successfully argued for the rights of Navajo Lutherans to have a church nearby. At one point he came to church early every Sunday to wake the volunteer minister, who had a propensity for sleeping in.

He also started a jail ministry that he continues to this day, driving up from Phoenix every Sunday to visit teenage inmates in Chinle's Youth Detention Facility.

"Sometimes I pray with them, sometimes I try to give them a little coaching about their lives," he explained.

Willie helped start up the operating room at the new IHS facility in Fort Defiance before retiring in 2000. The couple moved to Phoenix to be close to their daughter Birdie's two children. Willie has been writing nursing curriculum for the local community colleges as well as looking after her grandchildren.

The little Christian hospital in Katmandu reopened after the Nepalese royal family was assassinated in 2001, and Dick has been back to lend a hand for a few months every year until recently, when financial constraints started to prohibit the $2,200 airline ticket.

Willie has opted to stay home with the grandkids for the last few years, and Dick misses her at the operating table.

"The operations take three times as long without her," he said.

The couple knows it's time to turn the reins over to the next generation of medical practitioners, and they're doing their part. Birdie is a successful physician. Her sister Joy is a neo-natal nurse in Flagstaff, and sister Deborah is a mental health counselor in Gallup. Only John, the lone brother, didn't choose a health-related profession and is a forester for the Bureau of Land Management.

Willie looks at Birdie's two children, a boy and a girl, and thinks she sees the family's next surgeons. The boy is ambidextrous and the girl has inherited her grandmother's even temper.

Reflecting on a long life in medicine, Dick marvels at the progress he's seen: antibiotics to virtually wipe out tuberculosis, vaccines to wipe out diphtheria and polio, even drugs to battle schizophrenia.

"If you had told me years ago we'd be able to cure schizophrenia with a pill, I would have told you 'You're the one who's crazy,'" he said with a laugh.

Willie waxes spiritual.

"In looking back I know that God is looking out for me," she said. "When roadblocks became apparent, there was other opportunities. I remember my mother singing, 'Because He lives I can face tomorrow; Because He lives all fear is gone; Because I know He holds the future, And life is worth the living just because He lives.'"

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