Mash (7 page)

Painless looked doubtful.

“Hey, Painless,” someone else asked, “which way do you think you’ll go? Up or down?”

“I’ve asked the Father to arrange that,” he said, glancing at Dago Red.

“You sure you still got an inside track, Red?” asked Trapper John. “If there’s any chance of a slip-up, Painless might change his mind.”

“My mind’s made up,” asserted the Painless Pole.

Father Mulcahy administered the last rites. As he concluded, there was a murmur of approval. This had been one of Red’s best and most elaborate fixes.

“Well stroked,” said the Duke.

As Painless prepared to enter the coffin and take the black capsule, Trapper and Hawkeye were watching the door anxiously. Suddenly it was thrown open and Radar O’Reilly burst in upon the gathering and, gasping for breath, yelled, “Hold everything!”

“What’s the matter?” Hawkeye said.

“I just got the message,” Radar said. “Painless needs a parachute. The fix didn’t take, and he goes down.”

A low, sudden rumble of discontent swept the room. The group turned its attention to Father Mulcahy.

“What’s wrong, Red?” demanded Trapper John. “You lose your stuff?”

“Never mind the recriminations,” said Hawkeye. “Let’s get on with it.”

He produced a parachute, and one of the chopper pilots helped him get Painless Waldowski into it. By now Painless was feeling the booze.

“I don’t want to be a parachute jumper,” he complained. “I might get killed.”

“You just might,” Hawkeye consoled him. “Get in here, Painless. It’s time for take-off.”

Complete with parachute, Painless got into the coffin. He took the black capsule and washed it down with a shot of Scotch. Within five minutes, he was in dreamland.

Trapper John came forward with a blue ribbon. Reverently, but loosely, he tied it around the Pride of Hamtramck, and the poker game started. At frequent intervals, one or another of the Swampmen got up to check their dentist’s pulse, respiration and blood pressure.

On one occasion, when Painless seemed a little deeper than desirable, he was given a small dose of stimulant. By daybreak, he showed signs of recovery. He was removed from the coffin and taken to a waiting helicopter of the 5th Air Rescue Squadron parked just behind the preop ward. At a height of about fifty feet over the ballfield, directly in front of The Swamp, he was given a large shot of benzedrine intravenously and lowered from the chopper by a rope. A string attached to the ripcord was pulled, and the chute opened. A rescue crew waited below holding a blanket. The pilot released the rope. Painless and his parachute, to the cheers of the gathering, plummeted eight feet into the blanket.

While the chute was being removed, Painless rubbed his eyes, looked around and said, “What the hell’s going on, boys?”

“That’s what we’d like to know,” said Hawkeye. “Come into The Swamp.”

“You look dry,” said Trapper, handing him a can of beer. “Where you’ve been, I hear you can get a thirst. Tell us about it. How’d you get back?”

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” said Captain Waldowski, leaving the tent after downing the beer in three gulps.

Upon his return, Painless, obviously proud and holding a blue ribbon in his hand, informed them, “I don’t know where I’ve been, but wherever it was I sure as hell won first prize. How about a game of poker?”

6

The other doctors in the 4077th spent a great deal of time in discussion of the men of The Swamp. When Duke’s name was mentioned, it was generally agreed that he was the most amiable, and therefore likeable, of the three. Trapper John’s consummate skill as a surgeon earned him the most respect, but when it came to Hawkeye Pierce there was a great divergence of opinion.

The man who hated Hawkeye the most was Captain Frank Burns. He had good reason. He was persecuted by Hawkeye Pierce. Captain Burns was the boss of one surgical shift, and Hawkeye of the other. Working times frequently overlapped, so some contact was inevitable. The more contact they had, the more they hated each other.

Frank Burns was the son of a general practitioner and surgeon in a medium-sized Indiana town. After one year of internship, and as heir apparent, he had joined his father in practice for three years before being drafted. He owned a thirty-five-thousand-dollar house and two automobiles.

Hawkeye Pierce had spent the same three years in a surgical residency, without salary, and had been supported by his wife and hospital poker games. In Hawkeye’s opinion, Frank Burns, despite a definite technical competency, seldom thought and was a fake. In Frank Burns’s opinion, Hawkeye Pierce was an uncouth yokel who failed to understand that learning surgery from a father who didn’t know any was better than formal training in a teaching hospital.

Captain Burns, born to affluence, accustomed to authority, was very definitely the boss of his shift. He found the enlisted men exasperating. At least once a week, it was necessary for him to report someone to Colonel Blake for dereliction of duty. It then became necessary for Captain Pierce to intercede in behalf of the enlisted man, which he always did successfully. This annoyed Captain Burns, and one day he approached Captain Pierce and attempted to discuss the subject.

“Frank,” Hawkeye said, “you stink. I haven’t decided what to do about you, but sooner or later I’ll come to some sort of decision. Now I suggest that you go to bed and lull yourself to sleep counting your annuities or something, before you precipitate my decision, to the sorrow of us both.”

Frank ran to Colonel Blake and complained. Colonel Blake came to The Swamp.

“Pierce,” he asked, “what ails you?”

“Well,”, said Hawkeye, “the guy from the Sox who looked me over once said that, in addition to having a very weak throwing arm, I’d never hit big-league pitching.”

“Jesus,” said Henry, “you
are
crazy. Anyhow, you leave Burns alone. I know what you mean about him, but surgeons of any kind are hard to find. Leave him alone, or it’s gonna be your ass.”

“Yes, my leader,” agreed Hawkeye meekly, as Henry stormed out.

That night when Hawkeye went to work he encountered Frank.

“Hey, Frank,” he said, “one of my kid brothers just got out of jail. I wrote him and told him to go out to Indiana and burn down your thirty-five-thousand-dollar house.”

Again, Frank ran to Colonel Blake who visited Hawkeye in the morning.

“Pierce, have you flipped?” he demanded.

“Whadda ya mean?” asked Hawkeye, who had forgotten all about it.

“I heard what you said to Frank last night about your brother burning his house down.”

“Which brother? I got six.”

“The one who just got out of jail.”

“Well, for Chrissake, Henry, I can’t keep track of things from here. It could be any of them. They all sort of rotate in and out. Forget it. None of them could find Indiana on the best day he ever had.”

When Hawkeye, for the moment and to placate Colonel Blake, let up on Captain Burns, it was Duke Forrest who took over, again in behalf of the enlisted men. This time it was in behalf of Private Lorenzo Boone, the dunce of the Double Natural.

In his nineteen years, Private Boone had been exposed to very little, so his real abilities were difficult to assess. He couldn’t seem to do anything right, which may have been why the Army assigned him to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, where he was given the job of third assistant bedpan jockey in the postop ward. Inept though he was, he did try hard, and he improved with time.

For a while Private Boone was assigned the simple job of computing the liquid intake and output of the more severely ill patients. This was really quite easy. Most of the patients received only intravenous fluids for intake, and they all had catheters in their bladders, so there was no problem in measuring the urinary output. In accordance with medical custom, Private Boone was supposed to measure these quantities in cubic centimeters (cc’s), of which there are one thousand to a quart.

After a few days, the intake figures recorded by Private Boone became open to the question. Several patients were alleged to have taken only one cc, two cc’s, or in extreme cases four or five cc’s in a given twenty-four-hour period, and no output at all was recorded. The ensuing revelation that Private Boone thought cc’s stood for cups of coffee solved part of the problem but did little to increase his efficiency.

It was shortly after this that Captain Burns was taken ill. In fact, he was so indisposed that he spent three days in his tent and, although the nature of his illness was never widely known, its origins were as follows:

Captain Burns was addicted to a common failing in the surgical dodge: if a patient died, he claimed it was (1) God’s will or (2) someone else’s fault. One day he spent six long, hard hours operating on a severely wounded soldier, who’d been in deep shock throughout most of the procedure. Half an hour after surgery, the patient died in the postoperative ward. His final gesture was to vomit and aspirate some of the vomitus.

Private Boone, on his own initiative, quickly brought in a suction machine. It was not functioning, but neither was the patient as Captain Burns appeared and observed Private Boone’s futile efforts.

“Boone,” he said, “you killed my patient!”

Private Boone turned white. He walked away and went to a dark corner and cried. The Captain said he’d killed a man, and the Captain was a doctor and he ought to know.

Duke Forrest caught it. To Captain Burns he said, “Frank, may I speak to y’all outside for a moment?”

Korean nights can be dark. Often you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Captain Burns never saw the hand that broke his nose, split his lip, or the knee that made him terribly uncomfortable for three days to come.

Trapper John was next in line to take on Captain Burns, and it had to do with cardiac massage. Cardiac massage is manual compression of a heart that has stopped. It is done through a hole hastily made in the chest in the hope, usually forlorn, that the heartbeat will resume and the patient will recover. The administrator of cardiac massage compresses and releases the heart between the fingers of one hand with a rhythm designed to approximate the normal heartbeat, and Captain Frank Burns was, without doubt, the leading cardiac masseur in the Far East Command.

At breakfast one morning Trapper John McIntyre, leaving the mess hall, encountered Captain Frank Burns entering the mess hall. Trapper John traveled a fast right to Frank’s jaw, and Frank dropped on the sand floor like a poleaxed steer.

This was the second time within a month that Frank had been assaulted by a Swampman. The first time had been clandestine, but this was public, and again an irate Henry entered The Swamp.

Standing over Trapper John, who was sipping a beer in his sleeping bag, Colonel Blake yelled his usual question. “What’s wrong with you, anyhow?”

“I’m wondering the same thing, Henry,” replied Trapper. “I hear the son-of-a-bitch got up. I guess I’ve lost my punch.”

Trapper rolled over and ignored Henry.

“You wanta know what it’s all about, Henry?” volunteered Hawkeye.

“Yeah, I sure do!”

“Well, you remember, yesterday morning was pretty busy.

The most minor injury was a kid with a shell-fragment wound in his right thigh. It didn’t look like much. Frank decided to get him out of the way so they could get on with the others. As usual, he didn’t think. He took the kid in with a pressure of eighty over fifty, had them give him anesthesia, and started to debride the wound. It turned out the kid’s femoral artery was lacerated and he bled a lot. Then he had a cardiac arrest, and Frank rubbed his heart. It came back, he stopped the bleeding and got some blood into him, and by midafternoon he looked OK. By the time we came on duty last night the kid was in shock again. Trapper took over, figured he was bleeding from the chest wound Frank made, got his pressure up, and opened his chest again to stop the bleeding.

“Now the kid’s OK,” Hawkeye said, “but because that bastard Burns didn’t observe a few basic principles, the boy almost died. Instead of cussing himself out for almost losing a patient, Frank thinks he’s a big hero because he did a successful cardiac massage. Therefore Trapper John administered a knuckle sandwich.”

It took a femme fatale, however, to restore peace, more or less, to the 4077th MASH. She was Major Margaret Houlihan, new Chief Nurse, and one June morning she emerged, not out of a scallop shell like Botticelli’s Venus, but out of a helicopter. She was tallish, willowish, blondish, fortyish. She had a nice figure. In fact, she was a nice-looking, forty-year-old female.