HA NAM, Vietnam – The sea parted at 1:53 p.m. Sunday.

That's when the bus of American doctors, nurses and volunteers turned into the driveway of Ha Nam Hospital, into the waiting crowd spilling from the front stairs, down the front walk and into the roadway.

Parents, more than 300 strong, waved the arms of infants with deformed lips and cleft palates and crossed eyes.

They engulfed the bus as if their very bodies were forming an embrace.

You could live a lifetime and never feel such appreciation.

"I started crying on the bus," said registered nurse Joanne Heil, who still could barely talk about it 15 minutes later. "Overwhelming."

Some stopped and turned as they walked, taking in the crowd. Others dabbed their eyes with tissues.

"It was like I was in slow motion," said volunteer Jackie Vu, 22, of Lake Forest. "Everyone who looked at me just seemed to have something wrong with them. I was a little ashamed of all that I have. I was embarrassed to look in their eyes because I'm so healthy."

This was Day 1 of work for the surgery team of Project Vietnam, a medical aid mission of 152 volunteers led by Santa Ana pediatrician Quynh Kieu and her husband, Chan Kieu, an anesthesiologist at Fountain Valley Hospital.

Over the week they will do surgeries, such as correcting cleft palates, that have a high rate of success, don't require extensive follow-up care and can make a big difference in a child's life. Clefts, openings in the roof of the mouth or the lip where the two sides failed to fuse, are common birth defects. In the United States, they are routinely corrected, often before the newborn leaves the hospital.

While this group is doing surgery, another group of volunteers will hold walk-in health clinics in schools. Another will lead training seminars for Vietnamese doctors and nurses.

The surgery team traveled 14 hours by train from a short sightseeing tour in Hue, then two hours by bus to Ninh Binh before dawn, then another hour to the hospital. In all that traveling, there was hardly a street passed that wasn't lined with squalid homes, with dust and dirt and peeling paint, crumbling buildings and desolation.

Northern Vietnam is poor. Yet the people are genuine and disarmingly friendly, shouting hello to Americans with waves and broad - if sometimes gap-toothed - smiles.

Those who greeted the Americans at Ha Nam Hospital were parents with children needing some kind of surgery. They surged through the front doors and up three flights of stairs before hospital officials became overwhelmed. Shouts and gestures urged them back. Then outside. For the rest of the day, confusion reigned. Utter chaos. But in the best possible way. Glorious chaos in the name of caring.

Some volunteers admitted patients, taking down names and numbers. Others led them upstairs to doctors. Others translated. Others checked vital signs. Others taped names and numbers to patient foreheads, then photographed them. Up. Down. Through hallways. Over balconies. Under intense pressure. The surgeries won't even start until today. This was just pre-op.

An Alaskan doctor's assistant in a Hawaiian shirt danced and cooed to one screaming infant, so intent on calming her that he needed a volunteer to lift his stethoscope to his own ears.

On another floor, volunteers handed out M&Ms, then another lurched into the lobby with a box of Popsicles.

On the second floor, pediatrician Barry Behrstock, 55, of Corona del Mar, pushed large bills of Vietnamese dong into the hands of a desperate mom too poor to feed her malnourished child, who has a cleft lip. It helped her, but it helped him too.

"You feel great," he said as the afternoon faded, his shirt untucked and sweat sticking to his scrubs. "It doesn't get any better than this."

By 4:40 p.m., someone ducked a head into the third-floor office where pediatric ophthalmologist Steve Prepas, 54, of Laguna Beach was doing examinations, saying, "I don't want to rush you but you have 200 patients still waiting outside."

Prepas smiled - and would be the last doctor to leave the hospital Sunday night.

By day's end, the volunteers had selected 36 patients for cleft lip and palate surgery, and 19 for eye surgery.

The chaos, however, has not ended. Doctors still have nothing with which to sterilize their equipment. It's lost in the rooms of boxed medical supplies. And only one suction device could be found.

The surgeries begin today at 7 a.m.

TRUNG LUONG, VIETNAM – It was an odd twist of fate that these men should come on this day: veterans of the North Vietnamese army seeking medical help from Americans on the day America celebrates Veterans Day.

The old soldiers were scattered among the 500 locals at a walk-in clinic put on by Project Vietnam, a medical-aid mission based in Santa Ana.

One soldier had been left wounded in Long Binh and picked up by an American who treated him before putting him in a prisoner–of–war camp.

"An American doctor saved my life on the battlefield," he said in Vietnamese, bowing and offering his hand to a doctor's assistant.

Another carried his ailing 87-year-old father-in-law on his back.

"During the war, we fought against the Americans," said Van Minh Tuan, 55. "But now they come back here to help us. I deeply appreciate it."

It was the end of that war that forced thousands to flee South Vietnam, many settling in Orange County. Several of those former refugees are now part of Project Vietnam and took part in Tuesday's clinic, including an Orange dentist, a Santa Ana insurance agent, a Placentia optometrist and an Irvine academic counselor.

"The people here, their lives are so harsh," said dentist Dr. Minh Dinh, 45, of Orange, after pulling more than 20 teeth before lunch. "They are poor, but they have dignity. And there are no complaints, ever."

Not even from patient Van Trong Sam, 40, a local rice farmer who for nine years had a tooth with a broken root.

"It's been painful," he said through an interpreter within seconds of the extraction, "but my family didn't let me go to the dentist because they were afraid it would affect my brain, cause me mental illness."

The dentist has her own pain. For years it came in the form of a recurring nightmare of her family's bus ride to the airport the day Saigon fell - April 30, 1975.

The bus was so packed that people were on top of people, she said. People were fainting from the heat, including the mother of a 3-month-old infant. Passengers pushed the child to Dinh, then a 12-year-old girl sitting near a window, to give the baby some air.

"I was so scared," she said. "Soldiers were shooting at us. The baby was turning blue. He was limp. His arms and legs were limp. I was holding a dying baby in my hands. I had nightmares for years and years."

Now her dream is to someday build an orphanage in Vietnam.

For those who once lived in Vietnam, emotions this week have been sparked by everything from the smell of rice cooking outside to the sight of chicken grass to a conversation with a lost woman. And those emotions are mixed with a feeling of helplessness. That the need is too great, the country too poor. Sadness seems unavoidable.

Phuc Tran, 34, of Placentia is an optometrist who brought 800 pairs of used eyeglasses with her to give out. On Monday's clinic at a school, she handed out dozens. But Tuesday's clinic drew mostly older people, and the prescriptions didn't match.

"It's almost a failure today," she said.

Tran was only 5 when her family fled, and this is her first return trip to her homeland. And that momentary feeling of failure doesn't overcome that.

"I don't want this to end," she said. "I'm just enjoying it so much. I haven't left this place yet, and I'm already missing it."

Yet her most memorable moment of the week came after a confused elderly woman asked her where she was.

"I couldn't tell her where we are," Tran said. "I'm supposed to be here to help, and I couldn't tell her anything. I just felt sad. Really sad. Like you want to cry but you can't."