Sarajevo Patients Flee in Daring Flight to U.S. : War: The airlift of the wounded is the culmination of three years of work by a Huntington Beach woman.

The patients were whisked from their hospital beds Monday in armored cars, forced to dodge sniper fire on their way to the airport to begin what authorities called the riskiest evacuation thus far of those injured in the Bosnian war.

The daring airlift is the culmination of three years of work by a Huntington Beach woman who has struggled to bring medical care to the sick and injured in the former Yugoslav federation. And when the 18 wounded and a six-month-old with a heart condition arrive in the United States as part of the first medical airlift to this country from the ravaged city of Sarajevo, Sonja Hagel will be there to meet them.

“Operation Second Chance” was carried out by the United Nations and the U.S. Air Force in cooperation with a Swiss-based relief organization. But Hagel--a Century City Hospital administrator--has been the driving force behind the effort.

This afternoon, when the injured land at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, Hagel will witness the fruits of her work. After they are examined by military doctors, the 19 patients--all of whom require specialized treatment they cannot get at home--will be flown to hospitals across the nation, most in California, for free care.

Irvine Medical Center will provide reconstructive surgery to a 42-year-old man whose left lower leg was shattered by a grenade in July 1992. And a 40-year-old man whose legs were blown off in a blast will go to the Los Alamitos Medical Center, where he may learn to walk again on artificial limbs.

Although the International Organization for Migration’s office in Washington has a list of Bosnian patients and their destinations, some hospitals still didn’t know Tuesday exactly which patients they would receive.

Dr. Gonzalo Covarrubias, an orthopedic surgeon who has donated his services to do surgery on the wounded Bosnian who will arrive at Irvine Medical Center, said he did not know anything about the patient or his injuries, other than they would require his specialty.

“It is a mystery,” he said.

Covarrubias said if the patient arrives at the hospital Thursday evening, he expects to do lab work and X-rays Friday and schedule surgery on Monday, after the patient has rested from the long trip.

Robert Shaw, chief executive of Irvine Medical Center, which is a member of the American Medical International hospital chain, said he used to work for National Medical Enterprises, where he met Hagel.

“Sonja made a personal phone call to me and we were happy to be part of the project,” Shaw said.

Meanwhile, Subah Sulejmanegic, a Culver City resident who emigrated from Bosnia 30 years ago, said Tuesday she was scrambling to find people within the Bosnian communities of Los Angeles and Orange counties who can act as translators at the hospitals and put patients up in their homes while they recuperate.

She said she has been informed that some patients may have to remain with American families for two to three months.

Elsewhere, a 15-year-old girl who lost vision in her right eye after a bomb explosion will be sent to Hagel’s own hospital in Century City, where surgeons hope to perform delicate surgery that could restore her sight.

In Delray Beach, Fla., doctors will administer bone grafts to a 25-year-old man whose leg was shattered by a bullet. In Dallas, a 36-year-old man with a fractured pelvis and shrapnel in his hip will undergo exploratory surgery and months of physical therapy.

While there have been other medical airlifts from the war-torn region, the arrival of this group marks not only the largest such humanitarian effort, but also the first time that patients have come directly from Sarajevo, where the most intense fighting is occurring. Previous airlifts emanated from Zagreb, in Croatia.

“Just getting a doctor to screen the patients so we could find out what sort of needs there were took four months,” said Francis Sullivan, an official with the International Organization for Migration, the Swiss-based agency that coordinated the difficult evacuation. “Wherever you go there are bombs blowing up, snipers, gunshots. People are fighting in the streets; every time you turn the corner it’s war.”

While the group’s doctors were selecting the neediest patients in Sarajevo, Hagel--who began her career as a registered nurse--was in the United States, trying to persuade hospitals and doctors to donate their services to the war victims.

It was not, she recalled, an easy task.

“This is a day and age when health care reform is on the table,” she said. “We are getting a whole lot less dollars, therefore our revenues are less. Now if you’re the administrator of a hospital and Sonja Hagel comes along and says, ‘Hi, can I have $100,000 or $200,000 and, by the way, give me your best doctors,’ what would you say?”

“I had to encounter many nos before I got yeses.”

Of the 18 hospitals participating in Operation Second Chance, 14--including Century City Hospital--are owned by National Medical Enterprises, a for-profit nationwide chain. Neither Hagel nor officials of the hospital chain could estimate how much the donated services will cost. That amount will not be known, they said, until doctors get a chance to examine the patients.

“We’ve got patients with one leg, half a leg, one arm, no arm,” Hagel said. “They require prosthetics. You’ve got to teach them how to do things, how to manage in society, the basics of daily living. They are going to have to relearn and rethink everything. These are very, very complex cases.”

A resident of Huntington Beach, Hagel first visited the Balkans three years ago, before the fighting erupted. In Croatia, she met a 14-year-old boy who had been badly burned at 4 and required intensive plastic surgery that was unavailable. When his family asked for her help, Hagel brought the boy and his mother home to live with her. She persuaded Century City doctors to care for the child.

She subsequently organized Hands Across the Sea, a pen pal project that linked California children with youngsters in Croatia. In January, after founding “Operation Second Chance,” she returned to Croatia with a team of surgeons and a film crew in an effort to bring medical aid to the injured there and to spread news of their plight to the rest of the world.

During that mission, doctors performed 30 plastic and reconstructive surgeries on war victims, and briefed Croatian physicians on state-of-the-art medical techniques. About the same time, the International Organization for Migration, a 42-year-old international agency headquartered in Geneva, asked her to recruit hospitals to participate in its fledgling airlift program.

The organization said it has helped 150 war victims from the former Yugoslav federation receive specialized medical treatment in Europe and the United States. During Monday’s evacuation, patients were taken from two hospitals in Sarajevo to the airport, which has been under frequent sniper fire. An Air Force C-130 touched down for 30 minutes, scooped up the patients and took them to Ramstein, Germany, where they spent 48 hours before leaving for the United States.

Hagel has never met the wounded who will be helped by her efforts; she learned their identities just five weeks ago, when Sarajevo doctors selected them. But during these past five weeks, the hospital administrator said she has spent nights and weekends learning whatever she can about those people, reviewing case files as she phoned various participating hospitals to see who could care for whom.

“We’re at the 99th hour,” she said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Washington. “I’ll be touching their souls, touching their very skins tomorrow, and I will sleep well tonight, knowing that I can do that.”

Times staff writer Leslie Berkman contributed to this report.