Bernice was an U.S. Army nurse stationed at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Mark was a Combat Platoon Leader, also stationed at Fr. Benning. From the beginning of their romance, Mark Scott knew he would be deployed to Vietnam. It was 1969 and Bernice, who had received orders for Japan, knew that when they separated the chances were that they would never see each other again. Instead of taking advantage of the easier stretch in an Army hospital in Japan, she asked for a change in her orders. She was told in no uncertain terms, “This is the Army. You go where you are told.”
Undaunted, Bernice wrote to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, remarking that his daughters were about her age and how he would feel if they were separated from their husbands. She received a letter back from the Surgeon General of the United States under orders from the president that she should be sent to Vietnam instead of Japan. They were married in February 1969 (after all, she had told the president that he was her husband) and both left for Vietnam on the same flight.
She was assigned to a Medical United Self-contained Transferable (MUST) unit near the front. He had been fighting in the jungle for about three weeks when he was wounded. When she was notified that he had been wounded and would be coming to the unit on a medi-vac flight, she had a long wait. The helicopter had been a target and had crashed. Mark was again wounded before he had even reached the unit.“We were a hot item,” said Mark, “everyone knew that we were newly weds and my unit actually built us a little house of our own. It had two rooms, wood walls, a tin roof and our own outhouse.”
Both of them decorated veterans (he with the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantry Badge and she with the Army Commendation Medal) and now residents of Lakeside, the Scotts will be the honored guests at the special Veterans Day “Angels of War” observance staged by the Thomas Paine Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) on Saturday, November 10, 5 p.m. at Salvador’s Restaurant in Ajijic. Tickets are 200 pesos and include dinner of Chicken Cordon Bleu or Sea Bass Mango, and, of course, the rest of the fascinating story of Bernice and Mark Scott. Tickets are on sale at Diane Pearl Colecciones, Salvador’s Restaurant and from Sandra Loridans at 766-2981.