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It’s a hot, muggy day when Oliver pulls the jeep out of the 4077th and heads for Kimpo. By rights it ought to be Radar or one of the corpsmen picking up their newly-arrived chest cutter from the airbase, but Oliver volunteered to do it—or, more accurately, Oliver explained to Henry why his going instead was the only sensible choice. Radar is too busy, Klinger can’t be let near any of the brass, and everyone else has more important things to be doing. Post-op is quiet enough that sparing a surgeon would be less of a disruption for everyone.
It can’t be Trapper in case they do get wounded, because Frank and Oliver only work decently together with Trapper there as a buffer, and it certainly can’t be Frank, wounded or no. Even Henry, oblivious as he is to the tensions in his camp most of the time, can see that allowing Frank Burns free rein to give his own interpretation of life at the 4077th would not make for the best first impression on a new surgeon.
By the time Oliver is halfway there the clouds have rolled in once more and are again threatening to start up the unending drizzle Oliver was hoping they had finally escaped. The roads are still choked with mud and standing water from the past two weeks of rain, and more than once Oliver has had to crank the engine to get the jeep out of a hidden quagmire where used to be solid road. It’s not an auspicious start to the journey.
Still, he makes it to Kimpo without incident and finds his way to the personnel office easily enough. The sergeant on duty casts a dubious glance at his captain’s bars, but the caduceus on his collar seems to be convincing enough and the sergeant hands over the new surgeon’s flight information without comment: Benjamin Franklin Pierce, arriving at 12:15 today at Hangar B, then to report to Personnel Headquarters.
Oliver sits down to wait.
The door opens again at 12:24, and in slouches a man whom Oliver would be hard-pressed to describe as anything other than disheveled. He is roughly as tall as Oliver and Trapper, but reedy, with a sort of underfed look belied only by the softness of his face and hips. His Class As are rumpled from the flight and he is unshaven—by choice rather than by strength of five-o-clock shadow, it looks. Frank Burns is going to hate this man. Oliver likes him already.
“Benjamin Franklin Pierce?” he says, catching the man’s attention. Pierce swivels his head like an owl to find Oliver and look him over, blinking even more owlishly as he takes in Oliver’s mud-caked pant legs, his captain’s bars, his caduceus, but—notably—doesn’t linger on Oliver’s face or hands.
Finally, apparently satisfied that Oliver does have the look of a welcoming committee, Pierce grimaces good-naturedly and sticks out his hand. “Hawkeye, please. No one calls me Benjamin.”
“Hawkeye?”
“The Last of the Mohicans. My dad’s favorite book.”
Oliver supposes that Benjamin Franklin is a very ostentatious name for such a lackadaisical-looking man, so he can’t blame Hawkeye for shunning it.
He takes the offered hand, pleased to find Hawkeye’s handshake firmer than he might have expected based on the rest of his mannerisms. “Captain Oliver Jones, 4077 MASH. Do you have all your stuff?”
“Everything I could stuff in my pockets before they dragged me kicking and screaming out of my home and stuck me on a plane here,” Hawkeye says, hefting his standard-issue duffel bag with an easy grin. “I guess the conscription never ends, if they’ve suckered a surgeon into being my chauffeur today?”
“I volunteered,” Oliver says, and doesn’t elaborate further.
“Well then, lead the way,” Hawkeye says and gestures grandly towards the door. He stumbles over the final word, biting off the rest of the phrase—Tonto, Oliver’s mind supplies. So Hawkeye does see color after all. He’s just decent enough to bite his tongue.
The drizzle still hasn’t let up when they step back out into the compound, which seems to dampen Hawkeye’s spirits and shake the tenuous hold he is obviously keeping on his nerves. Oliver is so used to it by now that he barely even notices the fine drops settling like mist on his fatigues.
“Does it always rain like this?” Hawkeye asks as they settle into the jeep and Oliver starts the engine. His pout is boyish, making him look much younger than he did on first glance. Oliver thinks he might be thirty at most, half a decade younger than Oliver and Trapper. Fresh out of residency and completely unprepared for what he’s been forced into.
“Not always. The rain’s the better option, though,” Oliver says.
“How?”
“Do you prefer a wet heat, or a dry heat?”
“I’m from Maine,” Hawkeye says. “Or Boston via Maine. Summers can be sticky.”
“You haven’t seen sticky yet,” Oliver tells him, fighting back a rueful laugh. No need to make Hawkeye dislike the idea of being here even more than he already must. “When it’s raining at least the moisture is coming from somewhere.”
Hawkeye casts a dubious glance at the passing scenery, so different from what he’s used to. “Charming. Have you ever thought about becoming a tour guide?”
“I tried, but the field was too competitive. Med school was the best I could hope for.”
Oliver waits for Hawkeye’s response. It’s the kind of banter he and Trapper would engage in, and saying it now is partly a test to see whether Hawkeye is game to play along, too. If he does, Oliver can begin probing at everything else.
Hawkeye throws his head back and cackles. He has a loud, honking, delighted laugh that Oliver knows immediately is going to send Trapper into answering hysterics and drive Frank up the canvas wall. “Your parents must be so disappointed.”
“Devastated. No son of mine is going to become a brain surgeon, my father said.”
“A brain surgeon,” Hawkeye says, with a low whistle. There’s a new shade of respect in his gaze when he turns back to Oliver. “What the hell is the army doing scooping you up? Cardiothoracic I understand; chest wounds go hand in hand with war. But surely you’re more useful back home than in a warzone.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Oliver chooses once again not to elaborate. Hawkeye will learn the reality of working at a MASH soon enough; Oliver doesn’t need to start in on the gory details right away. He has bigger priorities.
The 4077th isn’t perfect; Oliver would never call it that even in jest. The whole US Army is a mess of bigotry and misguided do-good chauvinism. But—if you don’t count Frank and Hot Lips, which Oliver doesn’t—the space Oliver has carved out for himself within that hellish war machine isn’t half-bad. He’s respected, he’s useful, and he’s determined that no new upstart surgeon fresh out of residency is going to upset that balance.
Not that he thinks Hawkeye Pierce would, having now met the man. Hawkeye is wide-eyed and covering for nerves, clearly still wet behind the ears and missing home no matter how flippantly he talks about having been ripped away from it. Oliver can see already that once Hawkeye gets his feet under him he’ll be a force to be reckoned with, but before that happens Oliver and Trapper can do their best to point all that potential energy in the right direction.
The further they get from the airbase, the more Hawkeye’s nerves seep into his physical bearing. He drums his fingers on his knee, taps his foot against the wheelwell, hums little tunes to himself. The reality of his situation is settling in.
“Is it supposed to make that noise?” he says, trying for unbothered and failing.
All Oliver can hear is the creaking of the chassis as they rattle down unpaved roads and the squelching of mud under the tires. In the distance, thunder rumbles. “What noise?”
“That sort of thunderclap—oh,” Hawkeye says, as the skies open.
It’s immediate; there’s no time to pull the jeep over and find shelter in the trees before the downpour starts. One minute the clouds are threatening rain, the next, it’s there.
It’s a desperate scramble to maneuver the jeep into the bushes and find a tree under which to huddle, and by the time they’ve reached relative shelter they’re both soaked to the bone. Hawkeye is perhaps better protected from the elements in his stiff Class-A jacket, but he removed his hat somewhere along the road and his hair is plastered to his forehead, dripping pathetically into his eyes and off the tip of his prominent nose. He looks miserable.
“So,” he says, peering out into the curtains of rain as he gathers the shreds of his earlier good humor back to himself, “it’s like this often?”
Oliver has to admit he’s impressed by how quickly and easily Hawkeye has decided to pretend none of it bothers him. Not many new arrivals recover their aplomb so soon. “Often enough. You get used to it.”
“Doesn’t seem like something I want to get used to.”
Oliver can’t argue with that. He lets the silence hang between them as Hawkeye watches the rain with a critical eye, clearly working this new weather phenomenon into his understanding of life in Korea.
“I should have just said to hell with it and told the draft board I was a homosexual after all. I’dve lost my license, yeah, but at least I’d be dry,” he says finally, too brightly.
Oliver levels him a look of reproach which doesn’t make Hawkeye so much as flinch. “Don’t joke about that.”
“Who says it’s a joke? Find me the nearest MP and I’ll swear to it if that’ll get me home quicker.”
Either Hawkeye is an idiot with no sense of self-preservation, or he has somehow figured out Oliver’s next probing thrust and is answering the question before it’s even asked. Oliver can’t decide which is more likely—although really, Hawkeye comes off as an idiot either way, making queer jokes alone under a tree in a new country with a strange man. Hopefully he’s a better surgeon than he is a critical thinker.
“Two of us in the swamp—that’s where you’ll be bunking—me and Trapper, you can make that sort of joke around,” Oliver says. Whether Hawkeye is indeed a homosexual or simply anticipating Oliver’s moves, he can’t really want to be arrested and shipped home in disgrace. “The third man, Frank Burns? He’ll have you court-martialed for real if he hears it.”
“You and Trapper, huh?” Hawkeye says, zeroing right in on the point.
So Hawkeye has figured him out. Oliver briefly wonders what gave it away.
But he can’t afford to be as reckless as Hawkeye can, so he only says, “there’s a nurse. Ginger Bayliss. We have an arrangement.”
He isn’t about to divulge the exact nature of that arrangement until he knows whether Hawkeye’s supposed homosexuality is more than just a ploy. There is more than one way a fourth surgeon in the Swamp could ruin the careful home Oliver has built for himself here.
Hawkeye whistles, low and impressed. “The army’s done a better job of integrating than I thought.”
“Trapper is white.”
That’s the big one. There is a pause as Hawkeye digests this, broken only by the roar of the rain.
“A significantly better job than I thought,” Hawkeye says.
Against his better judgment, Oliver feels some of the tension he’s held in his shoulders ever since Henry announced the arrival of a new surgeon unspooling. For the first time in days he feels able to relax, leaning carefully back against the trunk of their sheltering tree—still dry for now, not that it makes much of a difference. It’s beginning to look like Hawkeye Pierce might just be a trustworthy person. At the very least, he’s no Frank Burns, and not Frank Burns is something to work with.
Hawkeye, privy to none of Oliver’s anxious calculations over the course of their drive, is fixated on something entirely different.
“So, this Ginger and this Trapper. Are they both as good looking as you?”
Oliver can’t help but be flattered—perhaps it was wishful thinking rather than a calculated ploy that led Hawkeye to hint at his sexuality after all. That would still indicate that Hawkeye has all the sense of an overeager puppy, which may end up creating Oliver a whole host of new problems no matter how pure Hawkeye’s intentions.
“You’re not my type,” he says, keeping his cards close to his chest. He’ll leave up to Hawkeye’s interpretation whether Trapper is his type. “You’d have better luck looking somewhere else. Discreetly.”
“Would Ginger or Trapper be a better starting point?”
This man is incredible, Oliver thinks. Impossible and intriguing and more than likely infuriating, but incredible. Oliver will be happy to watch it all from a distance and leave wrangling him to Trapper and Ginger, though he suspects Ginger will find him more tiring than amusing.
“Trapper,” he admits.
Hawkeye beams at him. His smile is like a ray of sun breaking through the clouds, and if Oliver were a betting man, he’d give it two weeks before Trapper caves in the face of that smile. Ginger might take five.
“You, my dear captain, are a gentleman and a scholar. I look forward to working with you.”
Provisionally—very provisionally—Oliver feels the same.