Richard Hooker - MASH - A Novel About Three Army Doctors

That night they decided to push their luck. The moon was bright, making helicopter flying possible, so the chopper pilots of the Air Rescue Squadron were enlisted. Hawkeye and Duke, with pictures, traveled by jeep to prearranged points where troops were in fair quantity. They announced the availability of personally autographed photographs of Jesus Christ, and their timing was perfect. At each point, as the sales talk ended, a brilliant phosphorus flare would be lit, and a helicopter would appear. Spread-eagled on a cross dangling beneath the chopper and illuminated by the eerie light of the flare was the loinclothed, skinny, bearded, long haired, and pretty well stoned Trapper John.

Any good act swings. The pictures sold. Back in The Swamp at 1:00 a.m. the loot was counted again. They had six thousand five hundred dollars.

“Let it go at that,” said the Duke. “We got what we need.” The next day Hawkeye Pierce arranged for five thousand dollars to be sent to his father, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, Sr., along with a note:

Dear Dad:

This five thousand dollars is for my friend, Ho-Jon,

to go to Androscoggin College. Look after him and the

money until I get home.

Within the next month Hawkeye received two letters. The first was from his father:

Dear Hawkeye:

I deposited five thousand dollars in the Port Waldo Trust Company for Ho-Jon. How come you can send some foreigner to college and leave me to bail your brothers out of jail? I always encouraged you to go to school, and now look what happens. Your brother Joe got took up for drunken driving. Mother is well.

The second letter was from the Dean of Androscoggin Col­lege, Dr. James Lodge:

Dear Hawkeye:

We have received Ho-Jon’s application, and his record appears to be outstanding, although somewhat unusual. The letter accompanying his application was particularly impressive and influenced our decision to accept him. My suggestion that you might have written it for him was quickly squelched by members of the English Depart­ment who remember you.

Yesterday a truckful of lobster bait, departing from campus roads, drove directly to the front door of the ad­ministration building. A large gentleman, who identified himself as your father, disembarked and gave us one thousand dollars on account for Ho-Jon. We killed a pint of Old Bantam Whiskey which he happened to have with him. Today I have a big head, and the building smells like a lobster boat. Nevertheless, we look forward to Ho-Jon’s arrival.

Very truly yours,

The money left over bought clothes and tickets for Ho-Jon. On August 20, 1952, he concluded his duties as Swampboy. He arrived at Androscoggin College on September 10. Soon after, Hawkeye Pierce’s old fraternity, assured by Hawkeye that Ho-Jon’s prep school education had included martini mixing and crapshooting, pledged him.

Trapper John McIntyre had grown up in a house adjacent to one of suburban Boston’s finest country clubs. His parents were members, and, at the age of seventeen, he was one of the better junior golfers in Massachusetts.

Golf had not played a prominent role in Hawkeye Pierce’s formative years. Ten miles from Crabapple Cove, however, there was a golf course patronized by the summer resident group. During periods when the pursuit of clams and lobsters was unprofitable, Hawkeye had found employ­ment as a caddy. From time to time he had played with the other caddies and, one year, became the caddy champion of the Wawenock Harbor Golf Club. This meant that he was the only one of ten kids who could break ninety.

In college Hawkeye’s obligation to various scholarships involved attention to other games, but during medical school, his internship and his residency he had played golf as often as possible. Joining a club had been out of the question, and even payment of green fees was economically unsound. Therefore he developed a technique which frequently allowed him the privilege of playing some public and a number of unostentatious private courses. He would walk confidently into a pro shop, smile, comment upon the nice condition of the course, explain that he was just passing through and that he was Joe, Dave or Jack Somebody, the pro from Dover. This resulted, about eight times out of ten, in an invitation to play for free. If forced into conversation, he became the pro from Dover, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, England, Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee, or Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, whichever seemed safest.

There was adequate room to hit golf balls at the Double Natural, and with the arrival of spring Trapper and Hawkeye had commissioned the chopper pilots to bring clubs and balls from Japan. Then they had established a practice range of sorts in the field behind the officers’ latrine. The Korean houseboys were excellent ball shaggers, so the golfing Swamp-men spent much of their free time hitting wood and iron shots. They began to suspect that if they ever got on a real course they’d burn it up, at least from tee to green, but that possibility seemed as remote as their chances of winning the Nobel prize for medicine.

The day after The Second Coming of Trapper John, however, a young Army private, engaged in training maneu­vers near Kokura, Japan, had, when a defective grenade exploded, been struck in the chest by a fragment. X-rays revealed blood in the right pleural cavity, which contains the lung, the possible presence of blood within the pericardium, which surrounds the heart, and a metallic foreign body which seemed, to the Kokura doctors in attendance, to be within the heart itself.

Two factors complicated the case: (1) there was no chest surgeon in the area and (2) the soldier’s father was a member of Congress. Had it not been for the second complication, the patient would have been sent to the Tokyo Army Hospital where the problem could have been handled promptly and capably.

When informed immediately of his son’s injury, however, the Congressman consulted medical friends and was referred to a widely known Boston surgeon whose advice in this mat­ter would be the best available. The Boston surgeon told the Congressman that, regardless of what the Army had to say, the man to take care of his son was Dr. John F. X. Mclntyre, now stationed at the 4077th MASH somewhere in Korea. Congressmen make things move. Within hours a jet was flying out of Kokura and then a chopper was whirling out of Seoul, bearing X-rays, a summary of the case, and orders for Captain Mclntyre and anyone else he needed to get to Kokura in a hurry.

Unaware of all this excitement, Trapper John and Hawkeye were hitting a few on the driving range when the chopper from Seoul arrived. They first heard, then saw, it approach­ing, but as they were off duty and it was coming from the south, anyway, they ignored it. Trapper, still taken with his new image, had not gotten around to shaving his beard or having his hair cut, and he was bending over and teeing up a ball when the pilot, directed to them, walked up. “Captain Mclntyre?” the pilot said.

“What?” Trapper John said, straightening up and turning to face his visitor.

“God!” the pilot said, stunned by his first look at the man whose importance had set a whole chain of command from generals down to clerk-typists into action.

“His son,” Hawkeye said. “Would you like to buy an autographed picture for … ?”

“You’re Captain Mclntyre?” the pilot said. “That’s what the Army calls me,” Trapper said. “Take off your shirt, stick out your tongue and tell me about the pain.”

Completely bewildered now, the pilot silently handed over the white envelope containing orders and the explanatory letter from General Hamilton Hartington Hammond and with it the large brown manila envelope containing the X-rays of the chest of the Congressman’s son. Trapper read the first and handed them over to Hawkeye and then, as Trapper held the X-rays up to the sunlight, the two looked at them.