When Radar opened the door from the Post-Op, a cold wet wind met him in the face. The compound had been silent for nearly ten minutes now, after the enemy retreated to the West and the last shudders of shellfire and gunshots died out. But it was not a peaceful stillness, it was silence full of tension, as if every shadow and every trench concealed a desperate sniper. As Radar looked out the last gleam of twilight gave way to darkness. He squinted, watching two corpsmen approach a dark shape on the ground, like a heap of sandbags. They stooped and hoisted it onto a litter---a body.
Radar shook himself; the flow of wounded to the camp may have stopped, but there was a lot of work to do. It was better to keep moving than to stay still too long, like the way his Uncle Ed always said that thinking too much wasn't good for anyone. Radar used to think that Uncle Ed only said that because he quit school at grade six, but now he understood.
He didn't want to think. Thinking just brought him the certainty that something terrible was going to happen.
He hurried out, mindful of debris and craters where shells had torn the ground. Colonel Potter would want a report on the state of repairs---or disrepair, as the case may be, and the whole camp was a mess; he passed the supply tent and saw the door was skewed open and white boxes of bandages and medicine littered the ground. But the Colonel would understand if he needed to check on his animals first.
He knew something was wrong before he even got to the quiet corner where he'd set up his cages. Feeling sick to his stomach he hurried to the shadowed rubble where his cages were once stacked.
"Oh no," he breathed.
The cages had all toppled over. He knelt down and saw that his two rabbits and his mouse Daisy were okay, but beside them were three empty cages, the wire and wood frames having split open. "Oh no," he said again. He looked around, but his missing animals had probably been loose for hours.
"Buster? Here Buster..." He searched along the ground for a minute, but he knew it was a long shot. Where would I go if I were a baby raccoon? The Swamp, he decided. Little animals were probably living there already.
The Swamp was in bad shape, the roof of the tent was sagging and burnt and probably in pieces. He pushed open the charred door and fumbled his way through in the dark, an uneasy sense of dread building in his chest.
"Rita?" he called to his pet chipmunk.
Then his foot caught on something and he fell forward, slamming against a post and a loud crack pierced the air. He hit the floor and debris rained on him, pieces of tent and wood crashing down all around him. He lay there, unhurt but dazed, hearing shouting outside as if from very far away.
"The Swamp's collapsed!"
"Radar's in there!" That was Klinger's voice, Radar recognized sluggishly. He found himself thinking of how time seemed to stop when a shell hit in the compound, how falling dust and debris seemed to take hours to drift down.
There was shuffling and movement around him as men lifted beams and tarp, and then Radar felt something lifted off his back.
"Radar! Are you okay? You hurt anywhere?" Klinger helped him sit up and checked him over.
"I'm okay..." he rubbed dirt and ash from his face and realized his glasses were missing, and began to scrounge around for them.
"You sure you're all right?"
"Yeah, I think so…" He had a knack for finding his glasses from amongst a clutter of junk in the dark, it was a skill from his childhood. His hand closed around the wire frame and he pulled them out from under a cot. They were bent and both lenses were shattered, but he put them on anyway. Klinger helped him as he stood and took a few clumsy steps. He felt that uneasy feeling of waiting in his chest again.
"Hey Klinger...listen...I think we're going to get more wounded or something, you know? I've got to tell to the Colonel..."
"I think you'd better go lie down for a while," Klinger said. Radar didn't seem to notice that his glasses were at a ridiculous angle across his eyes.
"No, I got to go talk to the Colonel. Listen, will you make sure someone cleans up the supply tent? We haven't got much left…"
"I'll take care of it, don't worry. Go on."
Radar stumbled out of the Swamp---or what was left of the Swamp---and nearly bumped into Colonel Potter who was rushing over from the morgue truck. Radar squinted at him.
"Radar, are you all right? I was signing off Lacey's body, I heard the Swamp collapsed on you."
"Oh yes, I'm fine sir. But..." He rubbed at his dirt-smudged face again, wondering how to explain to the Colonel the dread he felt, a warning sign as certain as storm clouds. "I've been thinking, sir, you know...maybe the fighting's going to come back our way, so maybe we shouldn't send for the nurses to come back or anything."
"Well, HQ says the coast is clear, Radar. Why don't you go inside and get some rest? Nearly being buried alive would make anyone a little jumpy. Can you see okay without your glasses?"
"My glasses, sir?"
Colonel Potter gently took Radar's glasses from his face and showed him the broken lenses. "You'll have to requisition a new pair."
"Oh," Radar replied numbly, and shivered in cold wind.
Hawkeye sat alone in Pre-Op. He'd just finished his last surgery and Potter had said that no more wounded were expected. It was done, he was finished. He leaned forward, staring at the surgical mask in his hands. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, a burning in his eyes, and his back ached worse than he could remember, but still he twisted the strings of his mask around his fingers until they hurt, as if he could heal guilt through pain.
What the hell was he going to do now?
Colonel Potter came in quietly, standing before Hawkeye as though in thought.
"We need to talk, don't we," Hawkeye said in a low, dead voice. He didn't trust himself to look up; Potter's boots shifted as the Colonel stripped off his bloodied shirt.
"I'd say so. Are you up to it?"
Hawkeye sighed and couldn't form an answer except to lob his mask across the room. Just then Charles stumbled in from the OR and the mask nearly hit him before it dropped neatly into the laundry sack. But Charles was apparently too tired to notice, pulling off his gown with a disgusted grunt.
"Let's go to my office, son," Potter said and still Hawkeye couldn't look at him, but followed with his head bowed.
Ever since he was a boy and his father sat him down for a serious-sounding talk, Hawkeye always made sure he was the first to speak. It delayed the inevitable, and maybe shifted the balance of power just one iota in his direction. He'd done the same thing when his father was about to tell him that his mother died.
"I want to look at the body," he said.
"Lacey's been shipped out already. HQ wants one of its own surgical brass to do the autopsy. But don't start looking for another job; you're a good surgeon, I'd testify to that, and so would anyone who's come through this camp. Personally, I think he had some secondary condition that no one knew about, and listen Pierce, you simply couldn't have known."
A good surgeon. The words pained him, an ache in his empty belly and a hollow feeling where his rage and indignation used to be. He sat down in front of the Colonel's desk and put his head in his hands.
"You're taking this pretty hard, son. I prescribe rest. This thing will be worked out before you know it."
Potter touched him on the shoulder and made to leave, and Hawkeye murmured, "Do you think the cook can bake me a cake with a saw in it?"
"You won't need it." The Colonel pushed the door open and Hawkeye heard him say quietly, "Not unless you know something I don't."
Moments passed in silence as Hawkeye sat alone, a few desperate thoughts running a maddening loop in his head. When the office door opened again, it was BJ who slipped inside.
"The Mess is low on supplies, so I got us some canned delicacies." He held out a tin of pork and beans, which Hawkeye barely glanced at. BJ put it down beside him, sat on the edge of the Colonel's desk, and dug into his own canned dinner.
"Don't snub my cooking, Hawk. I might get sore at you."
Hawkeye sighed grievously. "I'm surprised you can even stand to look at me."
"I never hold grudges. It takes too much effort."
"Beej," Hawk finally said quietly, not looking up, "I've never hated anyone as much as I hate myself right now."
He was shaking his head, one hand pressing hard against his eyes, and BJ was unsurprised to see the final tremor break across his shoulders. It was a silent sob he'd become accustomed to in Korea, like distant shellfire in the dead of night.
BJ put down his tin and fork and, without a word, put his hand on his friend's back. Hawkeye sniffled, a few silent tears escaping, clenching his hands hard enough to hurt. He seemed to be forcing himself into stillness, forcing back the tears and the scream that was lodged painfully in his throat.
When the trembling stilled BJ squeezed his shoulder and said simply, "Come on, Hawk. Let's go check on the Swamp."
"I don't know how safe it is in there, Major," Klinger said, ducking as Zale tossed a section of burnt wood out of the Swamp.
Charles, standing in the glare of jeep headlights, waved his hand dismissively. "Really, Corporal, do you think I am a man so concerned with my own safety that--"
"Is that Charles' voice I hear? It can't be," BJ said, walking up to the Swamp.
"I've never seen him be so courageous," Hawkeye replied. "I wonder what's at stake."
"Very funny, gentlemen, now if you'll excuse me…" He ducked through the singed doorframe and started hunting around his cot. "Ah ha!" he exclaimed and appeared again with his red pillow and bed linens, dirty, but apparently undamaged.
BJ burst out laughing. "Charles Emerson Winchester III, heroic fetcher of blankets."
"What's it like in there, Charles?"
"Filthy, deplorable, squalid…"
Hawkeye smiled. "Ah, home sweet home." He went in to see for himself, followed closely by BJ, and Charles put his bedclothes safely on the jeep and joined them as well. Inside, the fire damage was mostly limited to the wooden frame; Charles' bookshelf and nightstand were badly blackened, as was the table upon which the still had stood. The still itself was in too many pieces to count. The glass beakers had shattered and bits of tubing were scattered on the floor.
BJ busied himself making sure his footlocker, where he kept letters from home, had escaped unharmed. Hawkeye tossed a bit of glass haphazardly on the floor.
"What a waste."
Then he picked his way to his cot and found it lying on its side. He uprighted it, brushed off the worst of the ash and debris and sat down heavily. Meanwhile Charles was rooting through his own footlocker, and pulled out a bottle of cognac.
"Gentlemen, I realize your palates are accustomed to drinking swill, but perhaps on a night like this, some cognac would not go amiss." And he proceeded to pour out a good measure of his prized drink into three glasses.
"Thanks, Charles," Hawkeye said, and they raised their glasses for a silent moment, with no fitting toast for the occasion.
Hawkeye drank, hearing a soft patter of rain begin to fall on the compound. Soon it hastened to a torrent and drenched the roofless Swamp, and Hawkeye thought it was oddly refreshing, as if he'd like to stand there all night, getting soaked to the bone and not caring about a damn thing.
BJ opened sleep-bleary eyes in the middle of the night, vaguely wondering if it were morning already. He turned over, decided it was still far from dawn, and nearly gave himself back to sleep when he realized that Hawkeye wasn't in his cot. It was probably nothing, but on this night of nights he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep unless he checked on his bunkie. He got up, sardonically wondering how he'd ever manage to sleep when he got to back to San Francisco.
He wandered into Post-Op, which was dimly lit and quiet but for one soldier's murmuring to Father Mulcahy, who appeared to be asleep, sitting up beside him. Mulcahy was supposed to be filling in the night shift nursing duty but a quick scan of the room showed all was in order.
Next he went through Radar's office, noting Radar sleeping with his blankets tangled all around him and hanging half off the cot, as if he were having a restless night. BJ moved on to Potter's office, seeing a light was lit within. Hawkeye was sitting at the Colonel's desk, writing.
"Can't sleep?" BJ asked by way of greeting.
"I've forgotten how."
"What are you writing?"
Hawkeye turned the paper so BJ could see it. Dear Dad was written at the top. "My last letter as a free man."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm turning myself in."
To Be Continued! Reviews are very welcome. Thank you to everyone who took the time to review!