In 35 years of marriage, Bill McDaniel’s wife, Shirley, had never seen or heard him cry.

It was understandable, then, that she was freaked out when the retired admiral called his Oak Harbor home from the other side of the planet and quietly wept into the phone.

The hurt had finally overwhelmed him. McDaniel was aboard the USNS Mercy, off the coast of Bande Aceh, Indonesia. A team of civilian and military doctors and nurses aboard the giant Navy vessel spent six weeks treating residents of the devastated region after the Dec. 26 tsunami disaster.

After Bande Aceh, the ship of doctors went to the island of Nias to help people injured in a large earthquake.

McDaniel may be best known as the “the mole” from the reality TV show, The Mole II, which ran almost three years ago. He was the old guy who pretended to be a happy bumbler while all the while shrewdly sabotaging contestants’ efforts to win money.

But earlier this year, he was acting as a liaison between the U.S. military, local governments and aid organizations to get help to the people who need it. He walked through the devastation on Bande Ache and helped with the patients aboard the ship.

Finally, after a long day of heartbreak and triumph, McDaniel broke down on the phone with his wife.

“I scared the bejesus out of her,” he admitted. “She thought something was wrong.”

But there was nothing wrong with McDaniel. He was doing the most important work of his life. He said the experience, which cost him many tears over the many weeks, will stay with him forever. He left knowing that he, along with hundreds of other American volunteers and military personnel, made a difference in the lives of some of the poorest people on the planet.

On Jan. 1, Admiral Tom Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet and an old friend of McDaniel’s, called him and asked him to help out with the tsunami relief effort. Fargo needed someone to go to the region ahead of the hospital ship to smooth the waters.

McDaniel was the right man for the job. As a former Navy man, he knew how the military worked. But since he was retired, he was free from the chain of command.

“My job was to tip-toe through the minefields, not to offend anyone and get the job done,” he said. “I let them know that we weren’t there to run the show.”

McDaniel said the web of local governments, local military, non-governmental organizations and United Nations organizations were “primed” to accept U.S. help by the success of the USS Lincoln. The aircraft carrier, which included sailors from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, delivered more than two million pounds of food and water in the early days of the relief effort.

McDaniel said USNS Mercy’s involvement in the relief effort was, in part, an experiment to see if a combination civilian and military operation aboard a military vessel could succeed. Many of the best doctors and nurses in the world volunteers their time, mainly through Project Hope, to work on and from the ship.

It was a success. “It worked wonderfully,” he said. “Just wonderfully.”

The giant hospital ship, one of two in the Navy, holds 1,000 beds and has a dozen operating rooms, 6,000 units of blood and a large trauma center.

The medical volunteers treated people who were injured in the tsunami or fell ill afterward. McDaniel said one of the most common ailments was dubbed “tsunami lung.” People who had breathed in dirty water from the tsunami came down with pneumonia and other infections, even leading to brain abscesses.

On of the early patients was Iqbal, an 11-year-old boy who lost his entire family in the tsunami. Men in a boat found him about two miles out at sea, holding on to a piece of driftwood. His uncle found him a few days later in a camp.

McDaniel said the boy was so sick and wasted when he got to the ship that his lungs didn’t show up on an X-ray. He had to be put on a ventilator and it didn’t look good for him. But somehow he survived.

“He became the symbol of our effort there,” McDaniel said.

In addition, the medical personnel treated people many people who were suffering from ailments and injuries that had nothing to do with the tsunami. They treated birth deformities, burn victims and cancer.

“They don’t have access to doctors,” he said. “These people had some of the worst tumors in the world.”

McDaniel tells stories about a shy 4-year-old who had a cleft palate repaired. Or there was the 4-year-old burn victim who had been unable to walk for two years because his legs were fused together when the burns healed. He left gleefully jumping up and down with happiness, excited about getting to ride on a helicopter.

There were also those who they couldn’t save. Doctors could not save an eight-month-old baby. The crew flew her and her mother to Abidin Hospital so she could be on Indonesian soil in her final moments, something so very important to the people.

While just about all of the Bande Aceh residents lost family members, McDaniel said the people were remarkably gracious. He said the people are very poor and had always been treated badly by people with more power than they had. .

The curator of national museum of Jakarta expressed this sentiment in a speech that she gave to the crew of the USNS Mercy.

“Here you not only healed their bodies,” she said, “but you treated them with such gentleness, such compassion and such great courtesy. For the first time in their lives they were treated as human beings who have worth.”

McDaniel spent much of the time on the ship making rounds, gathering patients’ stories and taking photographs. He said he was especially touched by the children, many of whom were orphaned, and the amazing and sometimes heartbreaking artwork they created.

Bande Aceh itself was like a different world. McDaniel said the devastation from the tsunami was indescribable. Like a nuclear holocaust. About 150,000 people died in 10 minutes when the waves struck.

Six weeks after the disaster, McDaniel brought TV news reporters to the beach. Red flags dotted the landscape, indicating where bodies were still being found. Dolls, baby shoes, cooking utensils were scattered on the sand.

“Desolation like that is truly incomprehensible,” he repeated. “Incomprehensible.”

In all, the medical personnel from the USNS Mercy treated 11,500 people and performed 257 surgeries on the ship. A number of children with the most serious ailments were sent to hospitals in the U.S. for treatment.

On the way home, the ship was diverted to Nias, an island off Sumatra, where an 8.3 earthquake hit March 28. McDaniel went to work again, coordinating efforts and getting help where it was needed.

And help was needed. Hundreds of people died and thousands were injured when buildings crumbled.

“In Nias, as bad as it was, it was comprehensible,” he said. “Bande Aceh was something that will touch us the rest of our lives.”

McDaniel is home in Oak Harbor now, where he is just coming to grips with his experience. He plans on giving talks about the disaster effort and even possibly writing a book. He wants the proceeds to go to the people who were treated aboard the ship.

He said the best thing to come out of the terrible disaster is the relationships among people. He said the newspapers in Indonesia touted all the effort that Americans were making to help people, and even pointed out the lack of help from other Muslim nations.

“We succeeded in totally changing the opinion of the largest Muslim nation on earth toward Americans,” he said. “How many billions of dollars do we spend to try to change the opinions of people toward Americans worldwide and it doesn’t work? Well, this worked.”

He hopes that the U.S. government will learn from the experience and continue to cooperate with civilian agencies to do good work overseas.

For McDaniel, he was changed, possibly softened, by the experience. His eyes get misty and his voice is full of emotion when he speaks about the people he met.

“I cried more in Bande Aceh than in the last 50 years of my life,” he said.

You can reach Jessie Stensland at jstensland@whidbeynewstimes.com or 675-6611.