Mash (18 page)

“Do you men really mean it?”

“General,” said Hawkeye, “we know what we’re talking about. We’ve seen more of the inside of these places than you have. We wouldn’t be going out of our way for a Christless Regular Army Colonel if we didn’t mean it! Begging your pardon, of course, General. I forgot.”

“I’ll bet,” said the General, thinking hard now. “Suppose I replaced Henry with someone else? What would happen?”

“The guy’d never last,” Trapper John informed him.

“Positively not,” Hawkeye said.

“Right,” the Duke said.

“OK,” said the General. “I appreciate your coming. Don’t worry about Henry.”

The Swampmen scurried out one door, just before a harassed, scared and premature Henry, seemingly hurrying to his own execution, burst through another.

“Glad to see you, Henry,” the General greeted him. “I probably shouldn’t have made you come all the way down here. Fact is, I’m bored with the company around here. I wanted someone to have a couple of drinks and some lunch with.”

“But what about Major Houlihan?” gulped Henry.

“You mean Hot-Lips?” asked the General. “Screw her.”

“N-n-no th-thanks, G-General,” replied Henry.

11

the temperature at noon, day after day, was between 95° and 100°. The temperature at midnight, night after night, was between 90° and 95°. As the tempo of the war picked up again, the wounded soldiers kept coming by ambulance and helicopter, and the Double Natural was too busy and too hot.

Surgery in the steaming heat beneath the tin roof of the Quonset hut was hard on the surgeons and not good for the patients. Both lost fluids and electrolytes. Captain Ugly John Black, the anesthesiologist, claimed that after any long case the patient, who’d been receiving the appropriate intravenous fluids, was usually healthier than the surgeon. Sleep for the weary workers was absolutely necessary but nearly impossible, particularly for the Swampmen, who were working the night shift and trying to sleep during the day. They gave up any idea of sleeping in The Swamp. Instead they went to the river a few hundred yards north, launched air mattresses, and slept half submerged, in the shade of the railroad bridge where the gentle current kept them wedged against the pilings.

Then two things happened. First, the fighting and therefore the surgery slacked off. Second, Colonel Henry Blake was sent to Japan for temporary duty at the Tokyo Army Hospital and replaced for the three weeks by Colonel Horace DeLong, another Regular Army doctor whose permanent assignment was at the Tokyo Army Hospital.

The period of hard work and the heat had put tempers on edge. About midnight, soon after Colonel DeLong arrived, a soldier was brought in with shell fragment wounds involving his belly and chest. The chest wounds weren’t major but still required that a drainage tube be inserted in the chest for re-expansion of the lung. The abdominal wounds were major, but routine for the organization – the kind of case demanding a sensible plan of preoperative preparation, well controlled anesthesia, reasonably rapid, technically careful surgery, and an awareness, as Captain Hawkeye Pierce had learned again in the case of Captain William Logan, of how easy it is to miss one little hole in the bowel when there are ten or twelve.

Hawkeye Pierce was the gunner again in this one. He saw the X-rays, looked at the patient, knew what had to be done and when would be the best time to do it. He and Ugly John figured this would be about 3:00 a.m., after the patient had had some blood, after the closed thoracotomy had had its effect, and after the patient’s pulse and blood pressure had stabilized.

By one-thirty there were indications that the patient was coming around and that 3:00 a.m. was a fairly shrewd call. At one-thirty, Hawkeye Pierce stepped into the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic to pass the time until the knife dropped. At one-forty-five Colonel DeLong entered the Clinic and carried on as became his rank.

“Captain Pierce,” he stated, “you have a seriously wounded patient for whom you are responsible. I find you in a poker game.”

Hawkeye knew the Colonel had years and overall experience on him, but he also knew that few people had the reflexes for this kind of surgery unless they’d been doing it day in and day out for a while. He understood the Colonel’s unhappiness but, choosing to be unpleasant and uncooperative, he answered, “You betcher ass, Dad.”

“What?” said the Colonel.

“Gimme three,” said Hawkeye to Captain Waldowski.

The Painless Pole gave him three.

“Pierce,” yelled Colonel DeLong, “the soldier requires emergency surgery.”

“You betcher ass, Colonel.”

“Well, Captain, are you going to take care of your patient, or are you going to play poker?”

“I’m going to play poker until 3:00 A.M. or until the patient is adequately prepared for surgery. However, if you’d like to operate on him yourself right now, be my guest, Colonel. I get the same pay whether I work or not.”

The Colonel just stood there. Hawkeye held a pair of aces, didn’t draw anything worth while, waited till the bet came to him and dropped out, knowing by then that the Painless Pole had filled either a straight or a flush.

The Colonel still stood there. Hawkeye lit a cigarette and ignored him. The Colonel said, “Pierce, I want to talk to you.”

Hawkeye said, “Look, Delong, my mood and my tenure of office in this organization add up to I don’t want to talk to you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another Regular Army croaker, and you all give me the red ass except maybe Henry Blake. Why don’t you either take the case yourself or join me at three o’clock?”

Ignored by the poker players who were more interested in the game than in the side show, Colonel DeLong retreated. At two-forty-five Hawkeye left the game. The patient was taken into the operating area. Ugly John started putting him to sleep.

“Send for Colonel DeLong,” Hawkeye told a corpsman.

The Colonel arrived and joined Hawkeye at the scrub sink. Hawkeye was beginning to feel a little contrite.

“Colonel,” he said, “at one-thirty this guy had had less than a pint of blood, and he’d lost two or three. His pulse then was 120, and his blood pressure was about 90. Now, at three o’clock, he’s had three pints of blood. His pulse is 80 and his blood pressure 120. His collapsed lung is expanded. He’s had a gram of Terramycin intravenously. We can operate on him safely. We should do it quickly, but we don’t have to do it frantically or carelessly.”

The operation went the usual route. Numerous holes had to be repaired, and one piece of small bowel had to be removed. After an hour all the apparent damage had been corrected.

“Now, Colonel,” said Hawkeye, “I’m going to sandbag you. Do you figure we’re ready to get out of this belly?”

“Obviously you don’t think so, and I don’t know why,” admitted Colonel DeLong.

“Well, Dad, we haven’t found any holes in the large bowel. They’ve all been in the small bowel, but the smell is different.

I caught a whiff of large bowel, but it ain’t staring us in the face, right?”

“Right,” the Colonel said.

“So if it ain’t staring us in the face it’s got to be retroperitoneal,” Hawkeye said, meaning that the perforation had to be in a portion of the large intestine hidden in the abdominal cavity. “Therefore, and from the look of the wounds, I figure he’s got a hole in his sigmoid colon that we won’t find unless we look for it.”

They looked for it and found it. The Colonel was impressed. They closed the hole, did a colostomy and closed the belly.

Afterwards, over a cup of coffee, the Colonel said, “OK, Pierce, that was a nice job, but you must realize that I can’t afford to tolerate the rudeness and insubordination you demonstrated when I tried to talk to you during the poker game.”

“So don’t afford it,” suggested Hawkeye.

“Pierce, you don’t like me, do you?”

“For Christ’s sake, Colonel,” exploded Hawkeye, “why don’t you go to bed? Right now I don’t even like myself, and all I need to set me off is to be bugged by a Regular Army medical officer.”

The Colonel went to bed. There wasn’t much else he could do.

Two days later there was no work at all. The heat persisted. It was too hot to drink. It was too hot to sleep. It was too hot to play baseball. It was too hot to play poker. The Swampmen made a halfhearted effort at rehabilitation. They’d been reading some Somerset Maugham stories about Malayan rubber plantations. At 9:00 a.m. they got their ice cube tray out of the refrigerator in the laboratory. Soon they were sitting in chairs in front of The Swamp, holding tall glasses of Pimm’s
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Punch, and making believe they were Malayan rubber plantation foremen. Whenever a Korean houseboy came into sight, they yelled at him to get to work and start turning out the rubber, and they were thus laconically passing the time when Colonel DeLong sauntered by.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he greeted them.

“You just out from home?” asked Trapper John.

“No, I’ve been in Tokyo for some time.”

“Y’all married?” asked the Duke.

“Yes.”

“Bring your wife with you?” asked Hawkeye.

“Of course not.”

“I say, I wish I knew how you fellows get away with it,” said Trapper. “We three have our brides along, and it’s pure grief. They can’t stand the beastly climate, and they won’t let us commingle with the native girls. You don’t know how lucky you are!”

“I believe I’ll wander down to the pool for a dip,” said Hawkeye. He got his air mattress from the tent and headed for the river. The others followed, leaving the Colonel standing with his mouth open.

“Oh, I say, Colonel,” Trapper called back to him, “perhaps you’d join us for a set or two of doubles later, after the heat has abated?”

So they went to the river, swam a little and slept a little. By 3:00 p.m., Hawkeye Pierce was awake, pensive and bored. He lay belly down and naked on his air mattress, peering into the murky water below.

“Hey, Duke,” he asked, “whadda ya know about mermaids?”

“Nothin’,” Duke assured him.

Trapper John, a leading authority on many subjects, joined the conversation.

“In my opinion, there are mermaids in this river.”

“I’m forced to keep an open mind on that,” said Hawkeye. “Certainly, if there are mermaids in this river, we’d be just plain foolish not to grab a few of them.”

“How y’all gonna catch a mermaid?” asked Duke.

“In a mermaid trap, naturally,” said the Hawk.

“How do you make a mermaid trap?”

“Just like a lobster trap, only bigger.”

“Let’s get goin’ on it.”

“OK”

They paddled ashore, dressed, went to the supply tent, where a cooperative sergeant provided material and tools. Hawkeye Pierce, in his boyhood, had built many lobster pots. For a man of his experience and background, the construction of a mermaid trap didn’t seem to present a major problem, and the next morning found the Swampmen well along on their project when again Colonel DeLong dropped by.

“What are you doing here, gentlemen?” he asked.

“Buildin’ us a mermaid trap,” Duke informed him. “Y’all want to help?”

The Colonel was trying to blend into the environment. “I see,” he said. “Where do you expect to catch mermaids?”

“The river’s alive with them,” answered Trapper.

“I see,” said the Colonel again. “Assuming that you are able to catch one of these creatures, what do you propose to do with it?”

Hawkeye gave the Colonel a look of impatience and scorn. “We’re gonna screw the ass off her,” he stated.

The Colonel was desperately trying to hang in there. “Do you have reason to believe that mermaids may be effectively utilized for that purpose?”

“Oh, Finest Kind,” Hawkeye assured him.

“Numero Uno,” said Trapper John.

“Yeah,” said the Duke,

Colonel DeLong retreated to his tent to think. Colonel Blake, before departing for Toyko, had deliberately and perhaps maliciously not briefed him on the Swampmen.

Meanwhile, Hawkeye had words with the Duke and Trapper John, which went something like this: “I haven’t built a lobster trap in years, and I’ve lost the touch. This mermaid trap has already become bigger than I am. Let’s change the game. We got this guy DeLong buzzing anyhow. Let’s convince him we’re nuts, and maybe he’ll ship us out for awhile until Henry gets back and catches on. They got psychiatrists in Seoul, and we’ll be close enough to get back if business picks up.”