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‘I’m going to be here for two years,’ Val said. It was great to hear her voice, despite the distance between them. ‘You should come visit.’
‘Val, you know I miss you, but your mother’s really not up for traveling, with her hip-‘
‘Then take Hawkeye,’ she suggested, without hesitation. ‘I was going to invite him anyway, thought he might want to see the place-‘
‘I don’t know, sweetie,’ BJ said with a sigh. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Anytime, just give me some warning so I can request some leave and make plans,’ she told him. ‘I should go, I think our five minutes is almost up. Love you, Dad. Miss you-‘
‘Miss you too.’
He initially wasn’t going to mention the invite to anyone. Peg couldn’t go, and he wasn’t sure what Hawkeye would think about it. And truthfully, he didn’t think he wanted to go. Sure, he wanted to see Val. The idea of not seeing her for years made his heart ache, but he supposed that’s what it felt like when your youngest flew the nest. Why she’d landed where she did, he had no idea-it was easy to see her as a doctor, he wasn't the least surprised when she made those intentions clear. What he did find hard to believe was that a child of his would join the military, never mind request a posting in Korea, of all places. He could support her choices even if he didn’t understand them, which meant not telling her that when he’d hung up the phone after she told him about the posting in Seoul, he’d stalked off to Hawkeye’s place and spent half the night crying on his friend's couch.
Supporting her choices meant he’d take the five-minute monthly long-distance call, and he’d write her letters and send her care packages. Visiting her was not in the plans.
But a few nights later, as he and Peg and Hawkeye sat around in the backyard, grilling burgers on a hot summer weeknight, as you could do in retirement, he let it slip, and then laughed it off. Go on vacation to visit Val in Seoul?
‘We don’t have much on in October,’ Peg said. Hawkeye, who’d managed to stick what looked like half a hot dog in his mouth at once, nodded while he chewed. ‘You two should go see her-‘
‘You really think-?’
They'd persuaded him, but BJ was still just skeptical as they climbed on the plane.
‘Much nicer than the last time I crossed this ocean,’ Hawkeye mused, as he settled into the window seat, squirming a little to adjust himself into the plush, business class seat.
BJ had let him have the window seat because he knew he got claustrophobic, but also because he knew Hawkeye would be much more excited by looking out the window than he was going to be. Hawkeye wanted to see Korea, his curiosity had not diminished in forty years. BJ just wanted to see his daughter.
Despite stubbornly trying not to get invested in the place, he was enraptured as their cab headed from the airport to the hotel Val had picked out for them. He had his face pressed to the window, staring at the skyscrapers, the people on the street, the libraries, and zoos, and shops-so many shops. This couldn’t be Seoul. This wasn’t the Seoul he knew.
It was the third day when Val picked up the rental car and swung by the hotel to collect BJ and Hawkeye. When she got there, she handed BJ a couple of maps, with a route highlighted, and a village circled. One of the maps was entirely in Korean.
‘Here, you’re in charge of these,’ she had said, as BJ paged through them in surprise. ‘I should be able to get us to Uijeongbu, but you’re going to have to get us from there-‘
‘-to where?’ BJ asked skeptically, flipping through the stack she’d given him, turning them a little bit to try to figure it out, Hawkeye peeking over his shoulder.
‘I went through some archives and found the coordinates,’ Val said, as though they would know exactly what coordinates she was talking about. ‘Thought you might like to see it-‘
‘See what?’ BJ asked, but Hawkeye put it together.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Beej, come on, it’ll be fine. You better let me navigate though. Last time I let you navigate these roads, we got lost and got bailed out by Ralph and a motorbike.’
‘Wait, you want to go to the camp? I don’t think there’s anything left,’ BJ protested. ‘Another wildfire would have blown through by now, or it’ll all be overgrown-’
‘Worst case scenario, we’ve had a nice drive in the Korean countryside, that’s an improvement. Come on, Beej-‘
Hawkeye still never ceased to surprise him, all these years later, although he wondered if this was more him indulging his niece than his own desire to see the remains of their old army camp.
As they drove, BJ kept one eye on the map he was in charge of and one eye on the road that stretched out in front of their rental car, paved and flat, and full of cars. They were somehow, according to the charts Val had found, on the same road BJ, Hawkeye, and Radar had driven over four decades ago, not that anyone would have recognized it. Somewhere along here, he’d watched a company get shelled, he’d treated his first casualties, he’d seen a soldier get his face blown off. But that couldn’t have happened here, he thought.
BJ glanced in the mirror towards the back seat and frowned a little.
‘What are you doing back there?’ he asked curiously. He’d been so riveted on the changes in the landscape, he couldn’t imagine that Hawkeye would be any different, but he was scribbling something on the notepad he’d taken from the hotel.
‘I thought I’d make a little map of the camp,’ he explained. ‘Just in case we can’t recognize everything.’
He leaned forward to show it to BJ, who nodded in approval, but had navigating to do.
‘Next left,’ he told his youngest daughter.
They passed through Uijeongbu without incident, Hawkeye still scribbling away, and BJ looking for something-anything-familiar in the little town he’d once known but nothing caught his eye. In the outskirts, he expected the road to turn to gravel or dirt or to disappear entirely like it used to, but it didn’t, just narrowed a bit. The pavement looked a little more worn, but there wasn’t any of those potholes that would bounce your head against the ambulance roof or nearly out of the jeep. The scrub that had once surrounded this road was instead filled with small apartment blocks, with little convenience stores on the corner, interspersed with factories and office buildings. The buildings got shorter after a mile or so, and things started to become more rural.
BJ turned his attention more thoroughly to navigating for the last mile or so, with several turns onto smaller roads, as they passed farms and small homes, telephone poles, and power lines, and a handful of other cars.
Finally, one more turn and they seemed to correspond with the X on the map, but it didn't look familiar to him.
‘This can’t be right,’ BJ said, glancing between the map out the window, as Val pulled over the car.
‘No, no, no, that’s the helipad, with that flat top-‘ Hawkeye said from the backseat, pointing to a green and brown mound rising up a few houses away. ‘Right?’
BJ peered at it and squinted, pushing his glasses up his nose when they slipped, and recognized the small, flat outcropping. It was covered in brush, with just a few saplings poking out from the underbrush-clearly no helicopter had landed there in decades. Staring in amazement, he unbuckled his seatbelt and started climbing out of the car. Hawkeye started to do the same, clutching his hand-drawn map in his hand. He could see the resemblance, but he couldn’t quite believe it. He expected coming back would transport him back, that it would be a series of flashbacks, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. This-the inability to connect to a place that had changed him so fundamentally-was not what he expected.
‘Yeah,’ Hawkeye confirmed, as they turned around and evaluated what was around them, Hawkeye turning the map as he did. ‘Yeah, we must be right where the Swamp was, and OR‘ he pointed across the road, and then turned his palm upwards at a spot a little to the left. ‘Well, the latrine must have made for good fertilizer.’
But there wasn’t an army tent there, or an old shack made of surplus lumber and corrugated metal, or a latrine. They were standing on a paved road, with a small drive leading up to a beige brick house on one side of the road, and a farm on the other side, with neat rows of new plantings just starting to poke up through the soil, and two greenhouses nestled in the corner of the plot. BJ turned his attention back to the house-it clearly had a few years on it, with chipping paint on the door frame, a sagging gutter on the corner, and spots of rust on the white metal fence around the yard. There were lace curtains in the window, and a children’s bicycle leaned up against the side of it.
Further down the road, in both directions, there were more small plots and a couple more modest homes, and beyond that, what seemed like a little village center. Val had emerged from the car as well, camera in hand, and Hawkeye started showing her where things were on his crudely drawn map, but BJ was only half-listening, as his attention had been diverted by the sound of laughter, and his eyes searched for a bit-and he needed to squint a little-to find the school and the playground they were coming from. It wasn’t a big school, maybe a couple of rooms, and a couple dozen students on the playground, but it wasn’t the school itself that was striking to him.
BJ didn’t need to ask Hawkeye what had once been there, because the contours of the land were coming back to him more and more every second, but that was it-everything else was new and unfamiliar, and the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
‘Dad, are you alright?’ Val asked.
‘Beej?’ Hawkeye added, and BJ they'd probably been talking to him while he was staring, transfixed.
‘The mine field,’ was all he could choke out.
‘Yeah, it was over there,’ Hawkeye pointed it out to Val, and he saw the school too. ‘Oh,’ he whispered, his voice suddenly tight, and reached over to squeeze BJ’s shoulder. ‘I’m sure it’s safe, they’ve stripped so many minefields-‘ Hawkeye continued, rambling and sounding like he was trying to reassure himself a little bit.
‘I know,’ BJ said, choking on his words. ‘It’s gone, Hawkeye. It’s all gone.’
‘I’m sorry there isn’t anything for you to see,’ Val added, frowning a bit.
‘Nothing to see?’ Hawkeye gasped. ‘‘You think I’m sad that it’s all gone? It was an olive-drab monument of human suffering, Val! Look, now there’s a school! There’s farms, there’s houses, there’s a village, there’s people, there’s lives, there’s laughter, there's bicycles and lace curtains-‘ but Hawkeye couldn’t continue either.
BJ leaned against the car as Hawkeye babbled and Val asked him questions. Whatever he’d expected when they came out there, this wasn’t it. He caught a glimpse of the scar on his right wrist and rubbed it. This place had been a scar for him for so long-something raised and angry, slightly faded with time, but always there, and always present in his memory, in the flashbacks and the nightmares, in the stupid reminders that popped up now and then-the classical pieces made him think of Charles’ record player, every time he saw a maroon bathrobe or a blue Hawaiian shirt, the smell of a strong cup of coffee.
He had expected to see his scars reflected on the landscape when they came. He was expecting to see maybe a dilapidated shack, or a rusted jeep, maybe some lumber salvaged from camp rotting in a field somewhere, but he couldn’t see any sign, anywhere, of what had been there fifty years before. The land that had once been an epicenter for pain, and suffering, a testimony to the destructive tendencies of human nature, did not bear those marks any longer. The mine field-a particularly vivid reminder of that destructive nature-was gone entirely, replaced instead by something that was a testament instead to the future, to hope and optimism, a place for the next generation to get a start, and grow up into a brighter and better world. The children laughing there would hopefully never understand the fear and misery that had once permeated this area.
Hawkeye put an arm around BJ’s shoulder, and BJ reached up and squeezed his hand. MASH 4077-the structure- was gone, and it wasn’t mourned.
There was life again in that little bend in the road outside Uijeongbu. There was joy. There was a gentle breeze coming from the hills, not enough to chill them, but enough to make his daughter’s hair whip around, and she shook her head gently to get it out of her face.
He smiled at her, his youngest daughter-this had been a trip to sate Val’s curiosity, not for BJ’s benefit, not for his catharsis. Those memories that had stabbed at him over the decades, that woke him up in the middle of the night, were starting to feel dull, a part of the background, always a part of him but no longer an angry, raised scar to tug and pull at the stretched skin of his psyche.
They must have been an odd sight to anyone who would drive by-he doubted this village saw many tourists, never mind two old Americans and their younger blonde companion, just stopped by the side of the road-but no one did. Hawkeye handed Val his sketch at one point, and she wandered a small path around the car, obviously trying to place herself in the camp they’d so often described.
‘We’ve got all day, should we have a walk around?’ Hawkeye suggested, when the silence stretched on too long for his liking, gesturing to the hill that had once seen a constant stream of helicopters bearing the wounded in and out.
The brambles made it clear that nothing had landed there in decades, and even the stairs the Corps of Engineers had put in were gone, though a steep walking path persisted where they'd once been. As they reached the top, between the young trees, they could still see a bit of what had once been camp-and was now greenhouses and fields, homes and schools.
* * *
The bench they found at the top of the hill was crude, the wood slightly rotted, and it shook slightly as Hawkeye sat down. Unsure that it would hold all three of them, Val decided to wander around a little, taking pictures, examining the landscape, listening to them reminisce in the background.
She'd heard all the stories before, some of them a dozen times, at the reunions and weddings and funerals she'd crisscrossed the country for over the years. That raucous white-tie wedding in Boston a few years back, the roadtrip they took, all the way to Maine, when she was a kid, the 100th birthday party the whole city of Hannibal Missouri turned out for, the quiet funeral in Philadelphia, which remained the only time she'd seen her father in a church.
She'd heard the stories so many times before, she could almost recite them with her dad, and she found herself mouthing the more memorable lines with him.
'And then-vroom-he drove off and took the tent pole with him-'
Hawkeye's infectious laugh echoed through the hills as they reminisced but there was something about it-the way Hawkeye was laughing, the tenor of her father's voice as he recounted the incident, that was different. She puzzled over it as the stories continued and she listened quietly, but it was several minutes before she worked it out-their stories were not punctuated with the occasional mournful sigh, heavy silence, pause, or grunt of anger. Even the happy stories had featured them, but she'd never noticed them until their absence.
The conversation did slow after a bit, and Val heard her stomach rumble a little as she checked her watch.
'We didn't bring a picnic, did we?' Hawkeye asked, though she knew he already knew the answer. 'Just as well, it would probably taste like that dreck they served us in the mess hall-'
'We'll stop in Uijeongbu on the way back,' Val offered. 'There's gotta be a million and one noodle shops there.'
'That sounds good with me,' Hawkeye agreed, rising to his feet slowly, and her father followed suit. 'Ready?'
'Mm,' Val and her father agreed together, in sync, and she giggled a little at how much their mannerisms mirrored each other. She may have looked like her mother, but she was his daughter.
'There's nothing left,' her father said, squinting at the small break in the trees just before they descended the steep part of the hill.
'Well, one thing-' Hawkeye corrected from the rear, and both Val and her father turned around to see him pointing in the bushes. She didn't recognize what Hawkeye was looking at, and still didn't understand it even after her father pulled out a rock, mostly unremarkable except for some chipping whitewash on one side. It made sense to them, however.
'Kept my promise,' her dad said, his voice tight again, staring at the rock.
'Still glad you said it,' Hawkeye answered. He clapped his best friend on the shoulder, but looked away, and Val could see the glassiness in his eyes as well. Her father returned the favor, and they stood that way for several second, shoulder to shoulder, as though they were holding each other up. 'Glad it's the only thing left,' he added, looking out at the village again.
'Me too.'