Chapter Text
Dear Dad,
Remember when I was in the fourth grade and had to write a short story about ‘something unlikely?’ I couldn’t think of anything, because I thought if something was really, really unlikely, it wouldn’t be the kind of thing that a fourth grader could think up on the fly like that. You told me to open up my mind, shake it, and write whatever fell out. I wrote about me writing a story that got an A — the most unlikely thing of all — and my teacher called you in for a conference and said you ought to have me tested.
Well, I need to bug you for writing advice once more.
Something weird happened today. I met a kid named Ben Waters from Maine, who was born at Portland General. You might’ve been there when he was born. I might’ve even been there when he was born, because I used to sit there in the lobby after school waiting for your shift to end. I’d stare at all the sick people and wonder about the things that made them sick. I think that’s why I became a doctor.
But this isn’t about me. It’s about the other Ben-from-Maine, who everybody called Lucky. He was barely 19 and full of the kind of shit all barely-19-year-olds are full of. He thought he’d live forever. He thought being over here was some sort of grand adventure, some sort of dive into the deep unknown. He carried with him these preconceived ideas about the chivalric notions of warfare — he loved the far-awayness of it. The dignity (or rather, the perception of dignity, because you and I both know there is no dignity in war). The strangeness.
In fact, he loved the mystique of it all so much that he wanted to re-enlist, and so I took him on a walk to try to talk him down from his ledge before the ground gave out beneath him. You might’ve noticed I’ve been talking about him in the past tense, and that’s because something happened on that walk. First of all, I’m alright. Ten fingers, ten toes, four arms, and they’re all original parts. The problem is that Lucky didn’t come back. Not even one part of him came back.
I don’t want to talk about what exactly happened, because it isn’t the kind of thing good people talk about, and I’d like to think that despite everything I’ve seen over here, I’m still good people. It was something unlikely — something that would’ve definitely gotten me an A in the fourth grade (and gotten me tested, too)— but it was war, Dad. Pure war, like in the movies, but also not like the movies at all, because in the movies everything happens for a reason. Everything is a plot device. A rising action, a falling action, a climax, a resolution. Real life isn’t so neat and tidy. A lot of things happen for no reason at all. And I guess what I’m trying to say is that Lucky died for no reason.
He told me a lot about his old man, and I know that the good people thing to do is to write to him and tell him. Tell him what? Well, that’s where you come in. BJ says there’s nothing you can tell someone who lost their son that can make them feel better. But I don’t think that’s what I’m trying to do. I think I’m trying to write something that makes this make sense. As a father — as a father of a boy who’s at war — what could someone say to you that you make this make sense? “This,” of course, being the war broadly, and the sacrifices made therein.
Except that’s the other thing. Sacrifice. There are good people over here who throw themselves on grenades to save their friends, or who risk their lives driving necessary medical supplies to and from the front. And when those people die, it makes sense. It’s still tragic, of course, but there’s a reason. They died FOR something. They died so that someone else didn’t. They died so that someone else’s father didn’t get the kind of letter that their dad got. They died in the pursuit of the betterness of man, of goodness, of a morality and an ethos that feels rarer and rarer by the day out here. But Lucky died in an accident. There wasn’t an enemy in sight. It was a clear kind of day — a good day for fishing, or a picnic, or a walk. I guess I’m just having a hard time understanding a universe in which innocent people can die for no reason on nice days.
Maybe I’m writing this letter — not THIS letter, but the one to Lucky’s dad — for all the wrong reasons. Maybe I’m writing it because I want his death and all the deaths like his to make sense to ME. Maybe I think that, in addressing Lucky’s grieving father, I can address part of me that’s grieving, too, but from a safe and comfortable distance. Maybe that’s the only way we ever tell ourselves the truth, when we trick our heads into believing that we’re telling it to someone else.
Hawkeye set his pen down and took a deep breath. His head hurt, his hand was cramping, and he was tired. He felt nauseous, and cold, and sad. He looked over the letter, written in the same sloppy handwriting that had prompted his mother once to proclaim, “Oh, with penmanship like that, you’re definitely going to be a doctor someday!” His note took up the front and back of one sheet of lined paper and about half the front of another. He stacked his manuscripts neatly against each other, with care and with tact, and then he tore them firmly to bits.
He could never tell his father about the kind of things that happened in war. That, he decided, would be a sadistic thing to do. But he sometimes wrote letters he’d never send in the hope that he’d think about them long enough that his brain auto-generated its own response. But this one was a real thinker.
A gust of wind rattled the canvas walls of the Mess Tent, and Hawkeye pulled the long sleeves of BJ’s coat down over his hands. That was another thinker, he thought. BJ’s coat. He was wearing BJ’s coat. And it seemed like it was something he was always meant to do. Like deja vu without the specifics of memory, only the vagueness of a familiar feeling he couldn’t place.
The PA system screeched to life, scaring Hawkeye half out of his wits, and Radar’s voice boomed through the camp.
“Income wounded, folks! Both medical shifts report to the compound for triage!”
“‘War is an ill thing, as I surely know,’” he quoted Kipling, one of his favorites. “And this one’s turning out to be a real doozy, huh?” That last part was all him.
He rushed out into the compound, ignoring the dull throbbing in his head, but he was quickly stopped by BJ.
“Where do you think you’re going?” He put a hand on Hawkeye’s chest.
“The voice of God — which sounds eerily like a farm boy from Iowa — boomed down from above and told me there’s wounded in the compound,” Hawkeye eyed him strangely.
“You’re wounded!”
“Fifteen stitches,” Hawkeye pushed past BJ as the sound of choppers cut through the stillness of the night. “As long as I’ve got all my limbs, I can still operate.”
“Hawk—”
But Hawkeye was already halfway gone, and BJ rushed out in tow just as an ambulance pulled up. There wasn’t time to argue.
And they fell into their steady rhythm. It was like clockwork, the way the camp moved. It almost seemed choreographed, like a dance, but a dance implied some sort of passion, some sort of romance, some sort of artistic expression, and there was none of that in triage. It was mechanical. It was robotic. They were gears grinding in the horrible machine of war, and as they worked with a clinical precision and faces like stone, they remained aware of this fact.
Hawkeye ordered a few boys who had come in on the helicopter to be taken in to Charles straight away — sucking chest wounds, arterial damage. He called for a litter, and they took them away, and Hawkeye wondered vaguely when he stopped feeling scared. He blamed the numbness he felt instead on the cold seeping deep into his bones, and he kept working, because he had to.
A bus pulled up with a few medics, and Hawkeye climbed inside and inspected the first body lying on a stretcher.
“Compound fracture,” he told Margaret, who was just a few paces behind him. “He can wait, but get him some morphine.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“We got one real bad back here, Doc,” said one of the medics, who couldn’t have been older than 18 himself. “Landmine. It blew his leg clean off. We got a tourniquet on but he’s in real bad shape.”
That fear he’d thought he’d forgotten about came back with a vengeance. It sunk its teeth into Hawkeye and held him in its bite, and he suddenly felt as if his tattered Army boots were made of lead. Try as he did to move forward, something held him in place. It felt cinematic and cruel. He could see, in the dim light wafting in from the bus windows, a young man splayed out on his back. His green fatigues were stained a deep, wet red and hollow in places that should’ve been filled with flesh and bone. It was like the rest of the world had gone dark and there was a single stagelight on the wounded boy, and Hawkeye was both the audience and the hero, except he’d forgotten his lines.
“Pierce!” Margaret gave him a shake. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” Hawkeye heard himself say.
And then, as the audience to his own horror show, he watched himself move forward, feeling like something on an assembly line. A part being manufactured. Bent beneath the low clearance of the bus roof, he examined the soldier methodically, and methodically, he decided he was dead. Pale. Cold. Stiff. Blue. Dead. He’d been dead for awhile. Probably since Battalion Aid. And the parts of him strewn about the cold Korean countryside were dying, too, in a dozen fucking camphor trees, a dozen patches of yellow grass. And for all those dozens of parts in all those dozens of dying places, there would be one letter sent home, and it would be long, but it wouldn’t say anything at all.
“The first stage of death is called pallor mortis, a posthumous paleness caused by the collapse of capillary circulation throughout the body,” Hawkeye turned to Margaret and the medic, who exchanged a look of mingled concern and confusion. “And then algor mortis. And then rigor mortis, when calcium is released into the cytosol after death due to the deterioration of the sarcoplasmic reticulum, and then livor mortis, the fourth stage of death, wherein gravity causes the red blood cells to sink through the serum, and the body turns purple and red.”
“Hawkeye—” Margaret began.
“These things are academic,” Hawkeye interrupted. “Ask any doctor in the world and they’ll be able to tell them to you, just like I did, because we read it in med school and never forgot how terrible it was to learn that death is so neatly organized,” Hawkeye laughed, a shrill and sharp sound. “Any doctor can explain how death happens. But if you can find me a doctor who can explain why it happens to young people for no good reason at all, I’ll give you a Nobel Peace Prize. Or a kiss on the lips. Maybe both."
Hawkeye reached over to shut the dead boy’s eyes, because it always felt like the right thing to do. But for a moment — just a moment, a flash as quick as a lightning bolt — it was Lucky’s face staring hollowly back at him, eyes wide and empty in a permanent, judging stare. Hawkeye startled and jumped, hitting his already aching head off the roof and immediately dropping to his knees with a cry. Margaret and the young medic rushed to his aid, and hearing the commotion, BJ appeared out of what might as well have been thin air.
“What happened?” he rushed into the bus and helped Hawkeye stagger up to his feet.
“He hit his head!” Margaret reached up to check if his earlier wound was bleeding.
“I’m alright!” Hawkeye shook himself free from her touch, from BJ’s, and from the startled medic’s. “These busses aren’t made to accommodate anyone bigger than Radar. That’s all. I’m fine. Beej, help me get this kid outside. Margaret, call for the morgue.”
“We’ll get him,” BJ nodded toward the medic. “You go lay down.”
“I’m not a dog,” Hawkeye scoffed. “Let’s go.”
“Hawk,” BJ touched his arm, and for some reason, it was enough to make Hawkeye stand still. Very few things in the world have ever done that before.
“I’m serious,” BJ went on. “We can handle the casualties. Go get some rest, alright?” A beat. “Don’t make me get Colonel Potter.”
“Tattletail,” Hawkeye accused, tearing himself away from BJ and stalking out of the bus. The chaos of triage had calmed to a steady flow of mildly wounded men hobbling into pre-op on the arms of nurses, and the lights shining through the OR window told Hawkeye the party had already started. And as much as he hated to admit it, BJ was right. He wasn’t in any state to operate — his vision was blurry and he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. The light hurt his eyes. He couldn’t focus. He was more dangerous to those patients right now than the bullets they’d been shot with.
But as he sulked back into the Swamp and collapsed on his stiff cot, he thought again about the stages of death. Pallor mortis was really the second stage, he mused. The first stage of death was being alive. As he reached for his notepad, he realized that wasn’t exactly the kind of thing he could say to Lucky’s father, either, even if it brought him personally a morbid sort of comfort.
The whole act of writing a letter felt at once moot and necessary; he thought of the boy who had died in the back of the bus. Who would write a letter to his parents? And who would write a letter to the tens of thousands of other parents who had watched their children board planes to a place called Kimpo and would receive them home in a box? Hawkeye was struck by the sudden banality of it all, of the war, of the Army, of the organized stages of death. But amid that disillusioned, dispassionate triteness, Hawkeye felt a reawakened vigor, too. He couldn’t stop the war. He couldn’t stop the Army. He couldn’t stop death. Nor could he control a single one of those things. But the one measly thing he could control was the letter to Lucky’s father. And he was going to control the hell out of it.
***
“Ten hours,” BJ groaned, stretching out his arms over his head until he heard something give a satisfied crack. “I resected five bowls, removed a lung and eight toes — all from different people, mind you — and re-attached another five, hopefully to their original owners, but it gets a little hard to tell. A toe is a toe, no matter where you go.”
His joke was lost on Charles, who merely huffed and quickened his pace ever-so-slightly. BJ found himself missing Hawkeye. He would’ve laughed. He always laughed.
“You think he’ll be okay? Hawkeye, I mean,” he added the last part when he remembered Charles couldn’t read his mind.
“He just had a few stitches, for goodness' sake,” Charles dismissed.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I happen to know that Major Houlihan put in a call to Sidney Freedman in Seoul," he said. "Not for Pierce specifically — some poor sod in post-op thinks he's a ghost." Charles laughed, and then decided it wasn't really all that funny, and quickly sobered. "But I'm sure Freedman will grace us with his presence. He’ll be in by nightfall.”
“Sidney!” BJ stopped walking while he considered this. “You know, Charles, that does make me feel better. There’s a first time for everything. Usually conversations with you make me feel worse.”
“Ha, ha,” replied Charles, unamused. “Though I fear Pierce would fare better with one of the local medicine men. At the very least, they could offer him an herb for his neurosis. What can a quasi-medical quack psychiatrist offer than empty platitudes?”
BJ frowned. “And there’s the worse.”
He followed Charles into the Swamp. Charles immediately fell into his cot and pulled the covers up over him, paying no mind to the mountain of balled-up papers and discarded, half-written letters strewn about the room. Hawkeye was ground zero, sitting cross-legged in his bed, writing furiously. He looked up briefly and waved at BJ with his pen, but returned to his work without a word.
“You’re up early,” BJ remarked.
“I’m up late,” corrected Hawkeye absently. “I haven’t been to bed yet.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
Hawkeye shrugged and set his notebook down on his cot with a huff.
“It’s this damn letter. I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything, Hawk,” BJ sat down in his own cot, tearing off his boots and massaging his aching feet. As tired as he was, he figured there was no use in trying to get to sleep now. It would feel too cruel to leave Hawkeye to his writing, and Hawk was still wearing his coat. To BJ, that meant something, though he didn't know what.
“No, I do,” Hawkeye insisted tiredly. “I was there when it happened. I was right next to him.”
“That doesn’t make it your fault, you know.”
“I know.”
“Or your responsibility.”
“It isn’t about responsibility or blame,” Hawkeye said. “It’s just...I was right there, Beej. Of all the people on this stupid planet that Ben Waters ever met, I was the last person who would ever see him alive, who would ever see him whole. I can't change that, and I can't stop it happening to someone else. But I can control this letter. It's the only power I have in the whole world.”
Hawkeye looked off to the side for a moment, and BJ imagined he was looking at something far beyond the torn canvas walls of the tent. There were tears in his tired eyes, and the way his chest heaved made it seem like something big was building up inside of him. BJ couldn’t quite bring himself to look without feeling like he was intruding. But he didn’t have to look. He knew Hawkeye beyond sight.
“Hawk,” BJ said after awhile. “Talk to me.” It was a plea, really; BJ couldn’t stand the silence.
“I don’t know what to say,” Hawkeye’s voice made it sound like his head had been screwed on too tight. “I feel so strange, Beej. I have since last night. Like I’m outside of myself. Like I’m...like I’m watching it all happen, and like I’m seeing Lucky dead over and over again, and I’m trying to find a way to put it into words in a way that doesn’t feel...manufactured. Rehearsed. But this whole world feels manufactured, doesn’t it? We’re all parts of a machine tasked with fixing other parts when they break down, just so that machine can go on steamrolling over everything that’s ever made sense.”
BJ took a breath and pulled himself out of the warmth of his own cot to plop himself down on the side of Hawkeye’s.
“Rumor has it Sidney’s gonna be in town tonight,” he told him. “Maybe you can talk to him?”
Hawkeye shook his head. “Not unless Sidney has a degree in letter writing. That’s the only thing that’ll make me feel better, Beej. I need to write this letter.”
BJ put his hand on Hawkeye’s arm and let it linger there. “I know, Hawk.”
“I just...I keep thinking about his father, and about mine, and about how my dad would’ve reacted if a different Ben had stepped off the path,” Hawkeye leaned into BJ’s touch and shut his eyes, and for a short, sweet moment, BJ thought Hawkeye might fall asleep like that, with his forehead tucked against BJ’s shoulder. It wouldn’t have been the first time, and it wouldn’t have been the last; when you’re in a place like this — in a war — warmth is warmth, and touch is touch. But Hawkeye sat up instead and looked BJ in the eye. When he spoke, he seemed to choose his words very carefully. BJ had learned this was a dangerous thing.
“You know, I think if I died in some really big way...I don’t think it would soften the initial blow of my dying, but if I was shot on my way to Battalion Aid to save a patient, or if I jumped onto a grenade to save a village or something really big like that, I think my dad would eventually be okay. He’d miss me, yeah, and he’d cry on my birthday and at Christmastime, but eventually, I think he’d be okay, because I died for a reason. Because of a choice I made, because I’d chosen to put someone else’s life ahead of my own, because I was brave, and valiant, or one of those other buzzwords you read about in soldiers’ obituaries,” Hawkeye took a deep and contemplative breath, and BJ gave his arm a squeeze.
“But if I died like Lucky did, with my fly down and pissing, I think that would kill my old man, you know? Because there’s no reason for that to have happened. Lucky went out with a bang only literally, but figuratively, he went out with a sigh and a puff of smoke. And that’s why I don’t know what to write, Beej. I can’t say, your son died saving a life, or your son was a brave man who laid down his life in the service of others, because he died in a random act of war. It was untargeted and impersonal and cold. Death didn’t even have the courtesy to look him in the eye.”
“And then,” Hawkeye continued. “There’s me. I was right there. I was right next to him. I’m a doctor — his doctor — and I’m supposed to make him better, and I-I thought that we’d go on a walk and that I could talk him out of re-enlisting. But if I hadn’t thought that...if I hadn’t decided to play God in this horrid, godless little play in which we’re all characters in search of authors, he’d still be alive, and maybe he’d grow up and go home and take over his father’s seafood restaurant. Maybe he’d get married, have a few kids, and settle down for a life of whittling wood and fishing out of Misquamicut Bay. Because, Beej, he was just a kid with a million lives ahead of him. He was a kid who wanted to see the world, and now there’s nothing left of him to bury. He was a kid who was born at the hospital my father worked in my whole life. We had the same name.”
Hawkeye’s voice broke all at once, like a glass vase that had been teetering on the edge on its pedestal for ages and finally tumbled to the floor in shards. He fell back against his pillow and sobbed. There was something terrible about the way he cried, because he cried like he meant it, with all that he was and all that he’d ever be. Some people, BJ had learned, cried for the theater of it all, in neat little sniffles, simply to say that they had been moved to tears. But when Hawkeye cried, it was because he had to, because something terrible inside him was coming loose and working its way further and further out with each hiccup, with every wail. He cried like a child, or like a man who remembered what it was like to cry as a child and feel so wholly helpless, so infinitesimally small, so unheard, so alone.
BJ laid down beside Hawkeye in the cot that was realistically too small for one man, let alone two, but he made it work. He pulled Hawkeye up against him and held him there. It felt strangely like putting pressure on a wound to stop the bleeding. Neither one of them spoke. If Charles was awake across the tent — and BJ knew that he was — he didn’t speak, either. There was nothing to be said.