Richard Hooker - MASH - A Novel About Three Army Doctors

Frank ran to Colonel Blake and complained. Colonel Blake came to The Swamp.

“Pierce,” he asked, “what ails you?”

“Well,”, said Hawkeye, “the guy from the Sox who looked me over once said that, in addition to having a very weak throwing arm, I’d never hit big-league pitching.”

“Jesus,” said Henry, “you are crazy. Anyhow, you leave Burns alone. I know what you mean about him, but surgeons of any kind are hard to find. Leave him alone, or it’s gonna be your ass.”

“Yes, my leader,” agreed Hawkeye meekly, as Henry stormed out.

That night when Hawkeye went to work he encountered Frank.

“Hey, Frank,” he said, “one of my kid brothers just got out of jail. I wrote him and told him to go out to Indiana and burn down your thirty-five-thousand-dollar house.”

Again, Frank ran to Colonel Blake who visited Hawkeye in the morning.

“Pierce, have you flipped?” he demanded.

“Whadda ya mean?” asked Hawkeye, who had forgotten all about it.

“I heard what you said to Frank last night about your brother burning his house down.”

“Which brother? I got six.”

“The one who just got out of jail.”

“Well, for Chrissake, Henry, I can’t keep track of things from here. It could be any of them. They all sort of rotate in and out. Forget it. None of them could find Indiana on the best day he ever had.”

When Hawkeye, for the moment and to placate Colonel Blake, let up on Captain Burns, it was Duke Forrest who took over, again in behalf of the enlisted men. This time it was in behalf of Private Lorenzo Boone, the dunce of the Double Natural.

In his nineteen years, Private Boone had been exposed to very little, so his real abilities were difficult to assess. He couldn’t seem to do anything right, which may have been why the Army assigned him to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, where he was given the job of third assistant bedpan jockey in the postop ward. Inept though he was, he did try hard, and he improved with time.

For a while Private Boone was assigned the simple job of computing the liquid intake and output of the more severely ill patients. This was really quite easy. Most of the patients received only intravenous fluids for intake, and they all had catheters in their bladders, so there was no problem in measuring the urinary output. In accordance with medical custom, Private Boone was supposed to measure these quanti­ties in cubic centimeters (cc’s), of which there are one thousand to a quart.

After a few days, the intake figures recorded by Private Boone became open to the question. Several patients were alleged to have taken only one cc, two cc’s, or in extreme cases four or five cc’s in a given twenty-four-hour period, and no output at all was recorded. The ensuing revelation that Private Boone thought cc’s stood for cups of coffee solved part of the problem but did little to increase his efficiency.

It was shortly after this that Captain Burns was taken ill. In fact, he was so indis­posed that he spent three days in his tent and, although the nature of his illness was never widely known, its origins were as follows:

Captain Burns was addicted to a common failing in the surgical dodge: if a patient died, he claimed it was (1) God’s will or (2) someone else’s fault. One day he spent six long, hard hours operating on a severely wounded soldier, who’d been in deep shock throughout most of the procedure. Half an hour after surgery, the patient died in the postoperative ward. His final gesture was to vomit and aspirate some of the vomitus.

Private Boone, on his own initiative, quickly brought in a suction machine. It was not functioning, but neither was the patient as Captain Burns appeared and observed Private Boone’s futile efforts.

“Boone,” he said, “you killed my patient!”

Private Boone turned white. He walked away and went to a dark corner and cried. The Captain said he’d killed a man, and the Captain was a doctor and he ought to know.

Duke Forrest caught it. To Captain Burns he said, “Frank, may I speak to y’all outside for a moment?”

Korean nights can be dark. Often you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Captain Burns never saw the hand that broke his nose, split his lip, or the knee that made him terribly uncomfortable for three days to come.

Trapper John was next in line to take on Captain Burns, and it had to do with cardiac massage. Cardiac massage is manual compression of a heart that has stopped. It is done through a hole hastily made in the chest in the hope, usually forlorn, that the heartbeat will resume and the patient will recover. The administrator of cardiac massage compresses and releases the heart between the fingers of one hand with a rhythm designed to approximate the normal heartbeat, and Captain Frank Burns was, without doubt, the leading cardiac masseur in the Far East Command.

At breakfast one morning Trapper John Mclntyre, leaving the mess hall, encountered Captain Frank Burns entering the mess hall. Trapper John traveled a fast right to Frank’s jaw, and Frank dropped on the sand floor like a poleaxed steer.

This was the second time within a month that Frank had been assaulted by a Swampman. The first time had been clandestine, but this was public, and again an irate Henry entered The Swamp.

Standing over Trapper John, who was sipping a beer in his sleeping bag, Colonel Blake yelled his usual question. “What’s wrong with you, anyhow?”

“I’m wondering the same thing, Henry,” replied Trapper. “I hear the son-of-a-bitch got up. I guess I’ve lost my punch.”

Trapper rolled over and ignored Henry.

“You wanta know what it’s all about, Henry?” volunteered Hawkeye.

“Yeah, I sure do!”

“Well, you remember, yesterday morning was pretty busy.”

The most minor injury was a kid with a shell-fragment wound in his right thigh. It didn’t look like much. Frank decided to get him out of the way so they could get on with the others. As usual, he didn’t think. He took the kid in with a pressure of eighty over fifty, had them give him anesthesia, and started to debride the wound. It turned out the kid’s femoral artery was lacerated and he bled a lot. Then he had a cardiac arrest, and Frank rubbed his heart. It came back, he stopped the bleeding and got some blood into him, and by midafternoon he looked OK. By the time we came on duty last night the kid was in shock again. Trapper took over, figured he was bleeding from the chest wound Frank made, got his pressure up, and opened his chest again to stop the bleeding.

“Now the kid’s OK,” Hawkeye said, “but because that bastard Burns didn’t observe a few basic principles, the boy almost died. Instead of cussing himself out for almost losing a patient, Frank thinks he’s a big hero because he did a successful cardiac massage. Therefore Trapper John adminis­tered a knuckle sandwich.”

It took a femme fatale, however, to restore peace, more or less, to the 4077th MASH. She was Major Margaret Houlihan, new Chief Nurse, and one June morning she emerged, not out of a scallop shell like Botticelli’s Venus, but out of a helicopter. She was tallish, willowish, blondish, fortyish. She had a nice figure. In fact, she was a nice-looking, forty-year-old female.

Within the prescribed twenty-four hours following her ar­rival, Major Houlihan made a point of seeking out the boss of each shift and attempting to discuss nursing problems with him. Captain Burns was in starched fatigues and his most gracious mood, but he mentioned several nurses whose per­formance was inadequate and made a variety of sug­gestions for improvement. The Major was quite impressed with Cap­tain Burns.

She was less impressed with Captain Pierce. She found him in the mess tent in soiled fatigues having a late breakfast. She introduced herself, and Hawkeye invited her to join him over a cup of coffee.