Richard Hooker - MASH - A Novel About Three Army Doctors

Then two things happened. First, the fighting and therefore the surgery slacked off. Second, Colonel Henry Blake was sent to Japan for temporary duty at the Tokyo Army Hospital and replaced for the three weeks by Colonel Horace DeLong, another Regular Army doctor whose permanent assignment was at the Tokyo Army Hospital.

The period of hard work and the heat had put tempers on edge. About midnight, soon after Colonel DeLong arrived, a soldier was brought in with shell fragment wounds involving his belly and chest. The chest wounds weren’t major but still required that a drainage tube be inserted in the chest for re-expansion of the lung. The abdominal wounds were major, but routine for the organization—the kind of case demanding a sensible plan of preoperative preparation, well controlled anesthesia, reasonably rapid, technically careful surgery, and an awareness, as Captain Hawkeye Pierce had learned again in the case of Captain William Logan, of how easy it is to miss one little hole in the bowel when there are ten or twelve.

Hawkeye Pierce was the gunner again in this one. He saw the X-rays, looked at the patient, knew what had to be done and when would be the best time to do it. He and Ugly John figured this would be about 3:00 a.m., after the patient had had some blood, after the closed thoracotomy had had its effect, and after the patient’s pulse and blood pressure had stabilized.

By one-thirty there were indications that the patient was coming around and that 3:00 a.m. was a fairly shrewd call. At one-thirty, Hawkeye Pierce stepped into the Painless Pol­ish Poker and Dental Clinic to pass the time until the knife dropped. At one-forty-five Colonel DeLong entered the Clinic and carried on as became his rank.

“Captain Pierce,” he stated, “you have a seriously wound­ed patient for whom you are responsible. I find you in a poker game.”

Hawkeye knew the Colonel had years and overall experi­ence on him, but he also knew that few people had the reflexes for this kind of surgery unless they’d been doing it day in and day out for a while. He understood the Colonel’s unhappiness but, choosing to be unpleasant and uncooper­ative, he answered, “You betcher ass, Dad.”

“What?” said the Colonel.

“Gimme three,” said Hawkeye to Captain Waldowski.

The Painless Pole gave him three.

“Pierce,” yelled Colonel DeLong, “the soldier requires emergency surgery.”

“You betcher ass, Colonel.”

“Well, Captain, are you going to take care of your patient, or are you going to play poker?”

“I’m going to play poker until 3:00 A.M. or until the patient is adequately prepared for surgery. However, if you’d like to operate on him yourself right now, be my guest, Colonel. I get the same pay whether I work or not.”

The Colonel just stood there. Hawkeye held a pair of aces, didn’t draw anything worth while, waited till the bet came to him and dropped out, knowing by then that the Painless Pole had filled either a straight or a flush.

The Colonel still stood there. Hawkeye lit a cigarette and ignored him. The Colonel said, “Pierce, I want to talk to you.”

Hawkeye said, “Look, Delong, my mood and my tenure of office in this organization add up to I don’t want to talk to you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another Regular Army croaker, and you all give me the red ass except maybe Henry Blake. Why don’t you either take the case yourself or join me at three o’clock?”

Ignored by the poker players who were more interested in the game than in the side show, Colonel DeLong retreated. At two-forty-five Hawkeye left the game. The patient was taken into the operating area. Ugly John started putting him to sleep.

“Send for Colonel DeLong,” Hawkeye told a corpsman.

The Colonel arrived and joined Hawkeye at the scrub sink. Hawkeye was beginning to feel a little contrite.

“Colonel,” he said, “at one-thirty this guy had had less than a pint of blood, and he’d lost two or three. His pulse then was 120, and his blood pressure was about 90. Now, at three o’clock, he’s had three pints of blood. His pulse is 80 and his blood pressure 120. His collapsed lung is expanded. He’s had a gram of Terramycin intravenously. We can operate on him safely. We should do it quickly, but we don’t have to do it frantically or carelessly.”

The operation went the usual route. Numerous holes had to be repaired, and one piece of small bowel had to be removed. After an hour all the apparent damage had been corrected.

“Now, Colonel,” said Hawkeye, “I’m going to sandbag you. Do you figure we’re ready to get out of this belly?”

“Obviously you don’t think so, and I don’t know why,” admitted Colonel DeLong.

“Well, Dad, we haven’t found any holes in the large bowel. They’ve all been in the small bowel, but the smell is different. I caught a whiff of large bowel, but it ain’t staring us in the face, right?”

“Right,” the Colonel said.

“So if it ain’t staring us in the face it’s got to be retroperi­toneal,” Hawkeye said, meaning that the perforation had to be in a portion of the large intestine hidden in the abdominal cavity. “Therefore, and from the look of the wounds, I figure he’s got a hole in his sigmoid colon that we won’t find unless we look for it.”

They looked for it and found it. The Colonel was im­pressed. They closed the hole, did a colostomy and closed the belly.

Afterwards, over a cup of coffee, the Colonel said, “OK, Pierce, that was a nice job, but you must realize that I can’t afford to tolerate the rudeness and insubordination you dem­onstrated when I tried to talk to you during the poker game.”

“So don’t afford it,” suggested Hawkeye.

“Pierce, you don’t like me, do you?”

“For Christ’s sake, Colonel,” exploded Hawkeye, “why don’t you go to bed? Right now I don’t even like myself, and all I need to set me off is to be bugged by a Regular Army medical officer.”

The Colonel went to bed. There wasn’t much else he could do.

Two days later there was no work at all. The heat per­sisted. It was too hot to drink. It was too hot to sleep. It was too hot to play baseball. It was too hot to play poker. The Swampmen made a halfhearted effort at rehabilitation. They’d been reading some Somerset Maugham stories about Malayan rubber plantations. At 9:00 a.m. they got their ice cube tray out of the refrigerator in the laboratory. Soon they were sitting in chairs in front of The Swamp holding tall glasses of Pimm’s #1 Punch and making believe they were Malayan rubber plantation foremen. Whenever a Korean houseboy came into sight, they yelled at him to get to work and start turning out the rubber, and they were thus laco­nical­ly passing the time when Colonel DeLong sauntered by.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he greeted them.

“You just out from home?” asked Trapper John.

“No, I’ve been in Tokyo for some tune.”

“Y’all married?” asked the Duke.

“Yes.”

“Bring your wife with you?” asked Hawkeye.

“Of course not.”

“I say, I wish I knew how you fellows get away with it,” said Trapper. “We three have our brides along, and it’s pure grief. They can’t stand the beastly climate, and they won’t let us commingle with the native girls. You don’t know how lucky you are!”

“I believe I’ll wander down to the pool for a dip,” said Hawkeye. He got his air mattress from the tent and headed for the river. The others followed, leaving the Colonel standing with his mouth open.

“Oh, I say, Colonel,” Trapper called back to him, “perhaps you’d join us for a set or two of doubles later, after the heat has abated?”

So they went to the river, swam a little and slept a little. By 3:00 p.m., Hawkeye Pierce was awake, pensive and bored. He lay belly down and naked on his air mattress, peering into the murky water below.