Mash

by Richard Hooker

  “But, we can’t…”

  Hawkeye sat Captain Banks on the edge of a desk and handed him the phone.

  “Be nice, Captain. Call the X-ray technician. If you give us any kind of a bad time, me and Trapper John are going to clean your clock. We are frustrated lovers and quite dangerous.”

  Captain Banks called. While awaiting the technician, Trapper and Me Lay placed a small catheter in the baby’s esophagus. A few minutes later, radio-opaque oil was injected through the catheter. It revealed the abnormal opening between the esophagus and the trachea but no significant narrowing of the esophagus. This meant that anything the baby ate could go into his lungs but that, happily, once the opening was closed, the espohagus would be able to accommodate the passage of food. It required careful preparation, proper anesthesia, early and competent surgery and good luck.

  “Me Lay, let’s you and me get a needle into a vein,” Trapper said, and then, turning to Captain Banks, he said, “You there, in the shiny shoes, tell the lab to do a blood count and cross-match a pint. We won’t need that much, but it’s a term they’ll understand. Then tell the OR to get set up for a thoracotomy. We’re going to operate in about two hours. Hawkeye, you stick close to Alice, or whatever his name is, and see that he performs efficiently.”

  The Officer of the Day had no choice but to perform efficiently. The nurses were routed out, not at all pleased at the prospect of operating a second time with the pros from Dover. There was, in fact, outright grumbling which Hawkeye Pierce brought to a rapid conclusion.

  “Ladies,” he said, “we are sorry to get you out at this time of night. However, we stumbled upon this deal, and we can’t walk away from it, no matter whose rules are broken. This baby will die if we don’t fix him, so let’s all be nice and just think about the baby.”

  Fortunately, nurses succumb to this kind of pitch. They gave up any show of resistance, particularly after they saw the baby, but Hawkeye caught Captain Banks calling Colonel Merrill.

  “Now, Captain,” he chided him, “I may give you a few lumps, but first I must call the Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse.”

  So doing, he talked to Colonel Cornwall, explained their situation and made a few suggestions. Fifteen minutes later, as Colonel R. P. Merrill stormed into the hospital, he was met by four British officers who loaded him unceremoniously into their Land Rover and returned to the FKPH&W.

  After Captain Banks had been stripped naked, and locked in a broom closet by the two Swampmen, the operation was finally started. Me Lay’s anesthesia was excellent, the nurses cooperated completely, and Trapper and Hawkeye indulged in none of the by-play that had marked their first local appearance. After an hour and a half of careful work, Trapper had closed the fistula. They shed their gowns and discussed the postoperative care.

  “I think we better leave him here,” said Trapper. “You can’t take care of anything like this in that whorehouse hospital of yours, can you, Me Lay?”

  “Not too well, but I don’t see how we can keep him here. Merrill will be all over us in the morning.”

  “Leave the kid here,” Hawkeye said. “We’ll be in and out and can look after both him and the boy we did this morning. I know how to keep Merrill off our backs.”

  At 3:00 A.M., back at the FKPH&W, they had a drink with the British officers who told them that Colonel Merrill was upstairs asleep, having been coaxed into having a drink and a sedative.

  “But what about when he wakes up?” asked Me Lay.

  “Send a naked broad into his room and take some pictures,” suggested Hawkeye.

  “Oh, I say!” Colonel Cornwall said.

  A few minutes later, Colonel Merrill began to stir and awaken as the girl joined him in bed. Witnesses to the scene filled the doorway while Trapper John leisurely shot a roll of film.

  “I told you so! I told you so!” chanted Hawkeye. “He’s a dirty old man. A disgrace to the uniform.”

  “The blighter should bloody well be cashiered from the service,” asserted Colonel Cornwall indignantly.

  “I’d say that depends on his behavior from now on,” said Trapper John, pocketing the film.

  The Swampmen were to tee off in the Kokura Open at ten o’clock the next morning. One of Me Lay’s assistants was instructed to obtain proper clothing, since they did not wish to wear Papa-San suits forever.

  Awakening at 8:00 A.M., weary but determined to be ready for the tournament, they drank coffee, ate steak and eggs served in bed by the ladies of the house, and donned sky blue slacks and golf shirts.

  On the way to the course, they visited their two patients. The baby was far from out of the woods, but the Congressman’s son was doing well. Before leaving, they entered the colonel’s office.

  “Where’s that dirty old man?” Hawkeye asked the secretary.

  The colonel came out, but he didn’t roar.

  “Colonel,” said Hawkeye, “we’ve qualified for the Kokura Open so we’re going to the course. We expect your people to watch that baby we operated on last night like he was the Congressman’s grandson, which for all we know he may be. We expect to be notified of any change for the worse, and if we find anything wrong when we come back this afternoon, we’ll burn down the hospital.”

  The Colonel believed them.

  They arrived at the golf course at nine-thirty, practiced putting and chipping, took a few swings and, with their English confreres there to cheer them on, they pronounced themselves ready to go. They weren’t. The activities of the previous days, and nights, had taken too much out of them, and by the end of the third day, what with having to check repeatedly on the Congressman’s son and the baby, they were hopelessly mired back in the pack.

  “I guess that does it,” Trapper said, as they sat in the bar at the club. “We might have a chance if three guys dropped dead and a half dozen others came down with echinococ-cosus.”

  “What’s that?” Colonel Cornwall wanted to know.

  “The liver gets so big you can’t get your club head back past it,” Hawkeye said, “so we’ve got no chance.”

  “We’re proud of you anyway,” the colonel informed them. “You gave it a good go, you did. I must say, though, I shouldn’t give up surgery for the professional tour if I were you.”

  “I guess we figured that out already,” Trapper said, “but what I can’t figure out is what we’re going to do about this baby we’re stuck with.”

  “But you chaps have done all you can,” the colonel said.

  “No, we haven’t,” Trapper said. “After the big deal we made saving his life, what do we do now? Leave him in a whorehouse?”

  “Leave it to me,” Hawkeye said. “I think it’ll be safe now to take the kid back to Dr. Yamamoto’s Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse.”

  They went to the 25th Station Hospital, said good-bye to the Congressman’s son who was well on his way to recovery, and picked up their small patient. Riding the Land Rover back to the FKPH&W, Trapper had a thought.

  “We oughta name the little bastard,” he said.

  Hawkeye had considered this problem twenty-four hours earlier. He had even laid a little groundwork.

  “I have named him,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure how much I can con Me Lay Marston into,” Hawkeye said, “but the name is Ezekiel Bradbury Marston, VI.”

  “Oh, I say,” Colonel Cornwall said.

  “Obviously you are either nuts or you know something,” Trapper John said eventually. “Which is it?”

  “I know something. I know that Me Lay and the Broad from Eagle Head have one daughter and that’s all the kids they’re ever going to have. I’ll save you the next question. Remember I was away for a while last night? I went to one of those overseas telephone places and called the Broad from Eagle Head, whom I’ve known longer than Me Lay has. To make a long story short, she agrees that a name like Ezekiel Bradbury Marston must not die!”

  “Hawkeye, you are amazing,” admired the
Colonel.

  “For once, I gotta agree,” agreed Trapper.

  At the FKPH&W, they placed Ezekiel Bradbury Marston, VI, in a laundry basket, left instructions for his care and returned to the bar where they found the unsuspecting parent, Me Lay Marston.

  “What are we going to do with this kid, Me Lay?” asked Trapper.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, Jesus, Me Lay, you’re not much of a whorehouse administrator if you don’t have some ideas on the subject.”

  “Good-looking kid,” said Hawkeye. “What’s his mother like?”

  “A nice intelligent girl. She asked me this morning what we’d do with the baby. I’ve been looking into a few possibilities, but I’ll tell you right now there aren’t any good ones.”

  “Too bad. The little chap’s half American,” said Colonel Cornwall. “Any way to get him to the States?”

  “Only one way,” said Me Lay.

  “What’s that?”

  “Get somebody to adopt him.”

  Hawkeye said, “Me Lay, why don’t you adopt him?”

  Me Lay looked miserable. He lit a cigarette and sipped his drink.

  “That idea’s been popping into my head ever since we operated on him,” he said, finally, “but how can I do it? Am I supposed to call up my wife and say I’m sending home a half-breed bastard from a Japanese whorehouse?”

  “You don’t have to,” Trapper told him. “Hawkeye called your wife last night. The deal’s set. All you have to do is arrange the details.”

  Hesitating only a moment, Me Lay got up, went to the hospital area, picked up the baby and brought him to the bar.

  “What’s his name, Me Lay?” asked Trapper.

  “Gentlemen, meet my son, Ezekiel Bradbury Marston, VI, of Spruce Harbor, Maine.”

  Late that night a flyboy who’d been in Seoul earlier in the day brought word of increasing action on Old Baldy. The next morning the pros from Dover, having withdrawn from the tournament, but still clad in sky blue slacks and golf shirts, boarded a plane for Seoul.

  9

  In the middle of a hot, humid and bloody afternoon Lt. Col. Henry Blake finished a bowel resection, assessed the grief in the admitting and preop wards and then stepped outside to smoke, pace back and forth and, about once every ten seconds, look hopefully to the south. From the number and nature of the casualties, and with the privileged information from Radar O’Reilly that the situation on Old Baldy would get worse before it got better, he knew that he—that all of them—were in trouble. Between his looks to the south he swore at the Army for taking two of his three best cutters to Kokura and not getting them back in time.

  As he ground out his butt, drew a deep breath and made a half-hearted attempt to square his sagging shoulders, he took a last look down the valley and saw it—a cloud of dust. Henry smiled and, for the first time in twenty-four hours, relaxed because he knew that just ahead of just such a dust cloud had to be a jeep driven by Hawkeye Pierce. Seconds later Hawkeye and Trapper, in sky blue slacks and golf shirts, jumped from the jeep.

  “Hail, gallant leader!” Hawkeye said, snapping off a salute.

  “The organization looks busy,” observed Trapper John to Hawkeye, “so I wonder what its gallant leader is doing, just standing here and dilly-dallying in the sunshine.”

  “Beats me,” Hawkeye said.

  “You guys get your asses to work!” yelled Henry.

  “Yes, sir,” Trapper said, saluting.

  “Sure, Henry,” Hawkeye said, “but we’d appreciate it if you’d get our clubs out of the jeep and clean them.”

  They ran for the preop ward where the scene informed them that they were in for the busiest day of their lives. What they were yet to learn was that they, and the entire personnel of the 4077th MASH, were in for the busiest two weeks the Double Natural had ever known. For a full two weeks the wounded would come and keep coming, and for a full two weeks every surgeon and every nurse and every corpsman, as the shifts overlapped, would work from twelve to fourteen to sixteen hours a day, every day, and sometimes some of them would work twenty out of the twenty-four.

  It could have been chaos, and it almost was. They came in by helicopter and they came in by ambulance—arteries, lungs, bowels, bladders, livers, spleens, kidneys, larynxes, pharynxes, bones, stomachs. Colonel Blake, the surgeons, Ugly John, Painless Waldowski, who, when he wasn’t extracting shattered bone and wiring jaws, was passing gas to back up Ugly John, were in constant hurried communication, trying to maintain some order to the flow. Their objective was to provide each patient with the maximum preparation for and the proper timing of his surgery. This was controlled, of course, by the availability of the operating tables and the surgeons. As each new chopper brought new emergencies, plans and timing constantly had to be changed because some cases had to be moved directly from chopper to admitting ward to OR.

  From one flight of choppers the Swampmen found eight new arrivals, all of whom needed maximum and immediate attention. The worst was an unconscious Negro private who was the bearer of a note from the doctor in the Battalion Aid Station. The note stated that the patient had been knocked out when a bunker had collapsed, had awakened and then had slowly subsided into unconsciousness again. This was a neurosurgical problem, but the 4077th had no neurosurgeon because such cases were supposed to be sent to the 6073rd MASH, which had several.

  Trapper John looked at the note and then at the boy. He looked in his eyes. The right pupil was dilated and fixed. His pulse was slow, his blood pressure negligible.

  “I’m afraid this one has an epidural hematoma,” he said. “Duke, haven’t you been that route a little?”

  “Yeah,” Duke said, “but not enough to be a pro.”

  “You’re a pro now,” Trapper said.

  Duke quickly examined the patient. He found indications of pressure on the brain from blood accumulating between the skull and the outer brain lining.

  “Right now,” he ordered, “lug this one into the OR.”

  The Duke ran ahead of the stretcher. In the OR he encountered, fortunately, the boss, chief, honcho, leader and head coach of the operating room nurses, Captain Bridget McCarthy of Boston, Massachusetts.

  “Quick, Knocko,” he commanded, “y’all get me gloves, knife, hammer, chisel, Gelfoam and a drain.”

  Captain Bridget McCarthy was maybe thirty-five years old, five feet eight inches of solid maple, and she did not ordinarily tolerate much lip from the Swampmen or her immediate superior, Major Hot Lips Houlihan, either. This last endeared her to the Swampmen who did not call her “Knocko” for nothing, for they knew she could take out any one of them in a head-on. More than anything, however, she was also a nurse who had come specifically to be a nurse, so when Duke gave orders with fire in his eye she asked no questions and said, “Yes, sir.”

  The right temporal area was quickly shaved and scrubbed, and Duke incised down to the bone. He had no desire to go through the skull with a hammer and chisel, but he also had no choice. The appropriate drills for making burr holes were at the 6073rd with the neurosurgeons, so he did the best he could. With luck, or skill born of need, he cracked a jagged hole in the skull in less than a minute. As he broke through, blood flowed out in a torrent. The torrent quickly diminished to a dribble and then Duke exercised highly commendable surgical wisdom. The wise surgeon, particularly when out of his field, knows when to quit, so Duke refrained from looking for hemorrhage beneath the dura mater. He settled for the drainage of the epidural hemorrhage, and the pressure on the brain was relieved. He stuffed Gelfoam down toward the bleeding site, put in a rubber drain, closed the skin with silk sutures, and the soldier began to stir and moan. As his breathing improved and his pulse picked up, the Duke spake the words that, if they ever name a medical school after him, may be carved in stone over the entrance to the administration building:

  “He might make it, even if all I really did was hit him in the head with an axe.”

  As Duke went, then, to the postop ward to write o
rders on his patient, Captain Bridget McCarthy went to the other end of the operating tent to find out what the excitement was. The excitement was the patient who’d arrived on the same chopper with the epidural hematoma. Hawkeye had looked at him quickly, found him to be in shock, semiconscious but not, it seemed, in immediate danger. His clothes were saturated with mud, as was his hair, and there was a muddy, bloody bandage around his neck.

  “Get that bandage off so I can see what the hell’s underneath,” Hawkeye told a corpsman, and he went on to the patient on the next stretcher.

  The corpsman removed the bandage. The patient turned his head to the left. Blood shot two feet into the air from the hole in his right neck where a mortar fragment had entered. The soldier yelled.

  “Mama, Mama!” he yelled. “Oh, Mama, I’m dying!”

  It looked like a gushing well, and a fascinated group gathered to watch. As the well crested and the blood descended, it fell on the face of the soldier and into his mouth. He coughed, spraying his rapt audience with blood.

  Hawkeye ran over. In haste, and instinctively, he stuck his right index finger down the hole, blocking off the severed common carotid artery. He had stopped the flow of blood, but he had also tied up his right hand, and he wondered: “What the hell do I do now?”

  “Bring him to the OR right on this stretcher,” he yelled. “I can’t take my finger out. Find Ugly John and get his ass in here!”

  As Knocko McCarthy followed Hawkeye into the OR, she had no chance to ask questions. Hawkeye was still sounding off orders.

  “Start somebody cutting off his clothes…Tell the lab to come in with a couple of pints of low titre O, and type and cross match him for five or six more…Get somebody to do two cutdowns and start the blood…Come to think of it, get somebody to start rounding up donors, and send some cowboys to Seoul for all the goddam blood they can get…And get that Christly gas passer in here!”