Richard Hooker - MASH - A Novel About Three Army Doctors

“I thought he was bein’ awful nice,” Spearchucker said.

“We might be able to do it to them again,” Henry said, still glowing.

“Never again,” Hawkeye said. “They’re on to us now.”

“Gentlemen,” the Duke, slumped next to Hawkeye, said, “I got an announcement to make. Y’all have just seen me play my last game.”

“You can retire my number, too,” Trapper John said.

“Mine, too,” Hawkeye said.

“Anyway, men,” Henry said, “I told you so.”

“What?” Hawkeye said.

“That Hammond,” Henry said. “He doesn’t know anything about football.”

For the next two days, Henry spent his spare time distribu­ting the profits of the betting coup to the financial backers of the Red Raiders. The way the money had been bet—half of it before the game at two to one and the rest at halftime at four to one—meant that the ultimate payoff was three to one, so when Henry stopped off at The Swamp on the second after­noon and handed each of the occupants his original $500 and then $1,500 more, the recipients were more affluent than they had been in a long while.

“And no place to spend it,” the Duke said.

“Send it home,” the colonel advised.

“No,” Hawkeye said. “I got a better idea.”

“What?” Henry said.

“You keep all the money, and send us home.”

“No chance,” Henry said.

“But why, coach?” Duke wanted to know. “With the time the Hawk and me put in before they sent us to y’all, we been over here longer than anybody but you.”

“That’s right,” Hawkeye said, “and it ain’t fair.”

“Excuse me,” Trapper John said, getting up, “but I’ve heard this before and I don’t want to hear it again.”

“I’ll go with you,” Spearchucker said. “I can’t stand the sight of suffering, either.”

“Soreheads!” the Duke called after them. “Just because we get out before y’all!”

“Seriously, Henry,” Hawkeye said, “the Duke and I are scheduled to get shed of this Army in March. That’s only a little over three months away. Now, ever since we’ve been stuck out here at the tag end of nowhere we’ve watched a procession of our contem­poraries come and go. Singles and doubles hitters, strike-out artists, long down the fairway or off into the woods, it didn’t matter what they were, because they all got rotated back to stateside duty four—five months before they were to get sprung.”

“That’s right,” Henry said.

“But why?” the Duke said.

“I know why,” Hawkeye said. “It’s because the Army always gets even.”

“What do you mean?” Henry said.

“I mean,” Hawkeye said, “that the Duke and I are two of the three biggest screwups over here, or four if you count Roger the Dodger …”

“I don’t count him,” Henry said. “I don’t even think of him, and if that sonofabitch comes around here again I’m gonna have him shot on sight.”

“Anyway,” Hawkeye said, “you gotta admit it. We screwed up, so now the Army, defender of democracy and symbol of justice, is gonna take it out on us.”

“No,” Henry said. “You’re wrong. You won’t believe it, but it’s not a punishment.”

“Then what is it?” the Duke said. “It feels like a punish­ment.”

“It’s ironic,” Henry said, “but it’s because you two, like Trapper John, came here with more than average training and experience. You’ve done a good job when the chips were down, and now we can’t afford to waste you. If you went home now you’d be of no use to anyone but your wives. Therefore, we’ve got to keep you here until your enlistments expire.”

“Ain’t that the damndest thing?” the Duke said.

“In short,” Hawkeye said, “we screwed up in the wrong area. If we had dubbed it along in the working time and never given it the goddamn college try, we’d be back at some stateside hospital, living with our wives and behaving like officers and gentlemen? Is that right?”

“Yeah,” agreed Henry with a broad grin.

“I couldn’t stand a stateside Army hospital,” the Duke said. “Too many jerks.”

The next morning the two appeared in front of Colonel Blake’s tent. When the colonel came out in answer to their calls, they announced that the Spearchucker had arranged for them both to be given $25,000 bonuses by the Philadelphia Eagles and they were leaving immediately for the City of Brotherly Love. They then departed by jeep, and were neither seen nor heard from for three days. Colonel Blake, of course, was aware that the other two occupants of The Swamp knew where they were and could have them back in two hours if a hint of heavy work arose.

Four days after they returned, the two, whose previous escapade had been ignored by Henry, appeared once again in front of their colonel’s tent. Once again he went out to meet them.

“So where do you wise bastards think you’re going this time?” he inquired.

“Paris,” replied Hawkeye.

“Yeah,” said the Duke.

“That’s very interesting,” said Henry. “What for?”

“We gotta get the Duke fixed,” explained Hawkeye. “It’s an emergency. He’s been nice to me and Trapper and Spear­chucker for three days in a row, and we think he’s turnin’.”

“Well,” said Colonel Blake, “that certainly is an emergency, and we can’t have that sort of thing around here, but why don’t you just take him down to Seoul? It’s so much closer.”

“Why, Colonel,” replied Hawkeye, “you can’t be serious. Just two days ago you gave the enlisted men a lecture on how they should not get it in Seoul because there is so much neisserian infection. What applies to enlisted men must cer­tainly apply to officers, and we do not wish to set a bad example. We hear that there is not too much of it in Paris, so that’s where we are going.”

With that they jumped into their jeep and disappeared for what turned out to be another three days. This time their colonel realized that, for the good of the organization it for no other reason, he would have to curtail the extracurricular excursions of his two transients. At the same time he realized that, as the two sweated out the termination of their enlist­ments and grew more itchy by the day, he needed some means of keeping them busier and thus happier in their home away from home. He might have prayed for an increase in battle casualties, but he was too fine a human being for that, so he prayed for any other answer, and the next morning it appeared in two parts, named Captains Emerson Pinkham and Leverett Russell.

Captains Pinkham and Russell were replacements for two of Henry’s surgeons who, having been nursed along to the point of being able to accept major responsibility, had unac­countably but not unexpectedly been whisked away. Henry greeted them, oriented them and then invited them to meet him and various members of his staff late that afternoon for cocktails at the so-called Officers’ Club.

It was a pleasant, but in some ways disturbing, social occasion and confrontation. Trapper John, Spearchucker, Ugly John and the others who were not on duty found Captains Pinkham and Russell highly presentable. They were intelligent, polite, seemed to possess normal senses of humor and on the subject of surgery talked impressively. This last should not have surprised nor disturbed the veterans, for the surgical world changes rapidly and almost all surgical residents talk well, but the veterans had been so far removed from the mainstream of their profession for so long that, as the recruits expounded on new approaches and new techniques, at least several of the listeners wondered if, when they did get home, they would have to start all over again,

“Well,” Henry said, as he, Trapper John and Spearchucker headed toward the mess hall at the party’s end, “they seem all right. Good men.”