The setting for Bruce Williams-Burden’s 21st birthday wasn’t quite what he had imagined.

He celebrated the occasion at an enlisted men’s club in Okinawa, Japan — just two days before reporting to duty in Vietnam as a Navy Hospital Corpsman in 1969.

“A Marine said, ‘Doc, let me toast your birthday. It might be your last one.’ ”

Williams-Burden spent a total of 10 months caring for wounded in Vietnam. Some of the chilling images imbedded in his mind resurface from time to time even 44 years later.

(ABOVE: Williams-Burden’s military identification card shows a young Navy Hospital Corpsman. He turned 21 two days before he reported to Vietnam and served parts of 1969 and 70.)

“There’s reminders when you watch this or hear about that,” said Williams-Burden, now 66, retired and living in Freeland. “I get all revved up inside when I hear about ISIS or something like that. It does press buttons and I’m sure I’m not the only one.”

Williams-Burden’s experiences in Vietnam drove him to acquire the tools to offer better medical care and also taught him a coping mechanism he continues to employ today.

After serving for nearly four years in the Navy, he went on to spend 40 years in the civilian world as a physician’s assistant. He retired in June after spending the past 28 years working for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Seattle.

After moving from Bellevue, Williams-Burden’s world has opened up on Whidbey Island,  where he looks at everyday life through a variety of lenses.

In Vietnam, he developed a passion for photography as a way to escape some of the horrible images of war.

He continued to master his craft during his travels in medicine and now is focused full time on his pursuit of shooting pictures.

Although he’s been hired to tackle documentary types of photography assignments since 2002, more recently he’s concentrated on turning his pictures into art.

In recent months, he joined the Whidbey Allied Artists and took part in his first art show with the group in Coupeville in October.

“I hardly slept last night, I was so excited,” Williams-Burden said, standing before a body of his work on display at the show’s opening at the Coupeville Recreation Hall.

He pulled out two special images he took while in Vietnam, photos of two young children whose innocent stares were a welcome departure from the dark images of the battlefield.

(LEFT: To keep his mind off the horrible images of war, Bruce Williams-Burden resorted to photography  as often as possible. He snapped these two shots of children while serving in Vietnam.)

“I got interested in photography when I couldn’t get the pictures out of my head from the things that I saw,” he said. “I just kept doing it.”

As a part of relief teams for natural disasters and other callings during his medical career, Williams-Burden always kept a camera nearby.

He later started his own side business called Critical Images Photography, providing documentary and event photography for the Department of Homeland Security, the military, fire departments, laboratories, the FBI and even the White House.

For fun, he accepted an invitation to document the United States team at the 2001 Amputee Soccer World Championships in Rio de Janeiro.

“You’d be surprised how fast guys with Canadian crutches run,” he said.

Williams-Burden and his wife Lorna, a retired pediatric nurse, are entranced with island living after moving into a home on two acres in March.

He joked that they lived so close to Interstate-90 in Bellevue that the traffic sounded like the ocean.

“When we’d go to the ocean, we’d say, ‘That sounds like I-90,’ ” he said.

Williams-Burden is often outside on Whidbey, looking to capture images of things “most people don’t pay attention to.” He likes to capture a detail in a photo that is out of the norm.

“His photographs are more personal because he’s involved in a lot of them,” said Helen Bates, also a member of the same artists’ group.

Williams-Burden has also written two military history books since 2010, “Luminous Base” and “Intrepid Souls.”

“Luminous Base” tells the stories of the 57 Navy Corpsmen who lost their lives on or around helicopters during medical evacuations from 1962 to 2007. “Intrepid Souls” is about the Marine Corps and their medical personnel during the first six months of the war in Korea.

As a Navy Hospital Corpsman, Williams-Burden flew countless combat helicopter medical evacuations with the Marine Corps in Vietnam.

His training didn’t prepare him for the scenes that would unfold in a dark helicopter in a foreign land with lives in his hands. He was often the only medical personnel onboard.

During one moonlit evening in the fall of 1969, the medevac unit he was a part of responded to an incident near the Que Son Mountains about 45 minutes away from the Navy Support Activity Hospital in Da Nang, South Vietnam.

A tripwire set off a “daisy chain” of explosives, killing one soldier and leaving 10 others in dire need of medical attention.

Williams-Burden remembers running on a field in the darkness toward the injured with a crew member yelling at him to stop — uncertain of what undetonated explosives might lay ahead.

More than 600 Corpsmen were killed during the Vietnam War out of the estimated 58,220 U.S. military deaths.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Williams-Burden said. “I kept going.”

He tended to 10 people suffering from multiple wounds onboard that helicopter. He remembers the chaos inside the dark helicopter with wind blowing in and a red light to guide him. Two died en route to the hospital; the eight others survived.

“It was just very overwhelming,” Williams-Burden said. “But that wasn’t a normal kind of thing. Most of the time, you would stop and pick up someone and move on.”

The experiences in Vietnam profoundly impacted Williams-Burden, leading to four more decades in healthcare.  One of his sons, Sean, followed in his footsteps as a Navy Corpsman and is now an emergency room nurse at Northwest Hospital.

“It served as an impetus for me to want to do better for myself and help people with more training and more experience,” he said.