BETHLEHEM -- She landed on Utah Beach, treated wounded soldiers in five countries, crossed Germany with Patton's 3rd Army, witnessed the horrors of Buchenwald, and celebrated V-J Day in a hospital tent near the Czech border.

Not many who lived through so much in World War II are still here to remember on Veterans Day 2007. Fewer are women. Nuns are even rarer.

Back then, she was Helen Boothroyd, a young army nurse from Massachusetts. Today, she is Mother Irene of the Abbey of Regina Laudis. How one became the other is a saga in itself, but, suffice to say, the trail was blazed by war.

On first glance, it might seem difficult to connect the 87-year-old woman wearing a head-to-toe Benedictine habit with that 5-foot-4-inch blonde in an officer's uniform, smiling from a faded photo.

But sit with Mother Irene for awhile, listen to the stories told as if they happened yesterday, watch those blue eyes glisten with memories, and more than six decades seem to melt away...

"So many thousands of men," she said in an interview with the Sunday Republican, talking about all the soldiers she helped treat in battlefield hospitals. "Somehow, although there was never time to really know any of them, they become part of you."

The oldest of the 37 abbey residents, she is still caring for people today and bears the title of "infirmarian."

"She has a nurse's soul," said Mother Margaret Georgina Patton, whose very name resonates with the abbey's World War II origins.