Richard Hooker - MASH - A Novel About Three Army Doctors

“Where are those M.P.’s?” he screamed. “You guys are confined to your tent until they come for you from Seoul.”

“Y’all mean the Shore Patrol?” asked Duke innocently.

Henry shook. His mouth moved but no words came.

“What M.P.’s, Henry?” inquired Hawkeye. “Somebody screw up? We been in bed all day. Bring us up to date.”

“Grab them!” yelled Henry, forgetting in his frenzy that no one else was present at the moment except nurses.

Nobody moved.

“Y’all heard your Cuhnnel,” said Duke to the nurses. “Grab us.”

“I’ll try anything once,” said Trapper John.

“I’m hornier than a three-balled tom cat,” agreed Hawk-eye. “Clear the tables for action.”

At this point Dago Red walked in.

“Come with me,” he ordered, pushing and shoving them out of the mess hall and herding them back to The Swamp. There, disillusioned and disappointed, he scolded, pleaded and insisted that they apologize to Shaking Sammy.

“Red,” said Hawkeye, “I’m perfectly serious now. I’m not going to apologize to Shaking Sammy. I despise quack doc­tors, and for the same good reasons I despise quack sky pilots and all the screwballs on the fringe of the do-gooding busi­ness. So forget it.”

Before the discussion got any further, the rumor of Canadi­ans attacking 55 was borne out. Ambulances and helicopters disgorged dozens of wounded. The Swampmen forgot the problems arising from human sacrificial ceremonies and went to the OR. To no one’s surprise, no one tried to stop them. For the next four days they worked with little letup, and no mention was made of the sacrificial ceremony of the previous Sunday.

After five days the worst was over, the preop ward was cleaned out, and no new casualties were coming. The Swampmen had a drink at nine-thirty on a bright warm morning and put on their cleanest clothes. They borrowed handcuffs from the supply sergeant. They got three of their enlisted men friends to cuff them together and guard them with rifles. They sat huddled on the ground in front of Colonel Blake’s tent, passed a bottle back and forth, and chanted their version of “The Prisoner’s Song.”

If we had the wings of a Colonel, We’d fly to the high Pyrenees, And open an open air laundry, Specializing in Blake’s B.V.D.’s.

Colonel Blake came out to see what was going on.

“Hey, Henry!” yelled Hawkeye. “Can officers get broads into Leavenworth?”

In times of stress Colonel Blake sometimes stuttered.

“You c-c-crazy bastards, get the h-h-hell out of here. They don’t have any replacements for you, but if you don’t get out of my sight so h-h-help me C-C-Christ I’ll have you s-s-shot.”

Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski, of Hamtramck, Michigan, and Dental Officer of the 4077th MASH, was a very good dentist. He took care of the tusks of hundreds of troops, most of whom, before they met him, would have preferred to storm a gook bunker barehanded rather than go to a dentist. He wired fractured jaws and extracted teeth with a dexterity that few of the medical personnel had ever witnessed at home. That he should be called The Painless Pole was so obvious that no one would own up to being the originator of the nickname.

The Painless Pole ran the only truly popular Dental Clinic in the Far East Command, or at least in Korea. This clinic had a real poker table. It had a small portable pool table, a record player, a large supply of beer and other potables, and also one dental chair. At times of maximum surgical-military stress there were short intervals when the perpetual poker game might cease for a few brief hours. This was rare, however, for even when work was most intense, the poker game would often be the same. The players might change every fifteen minutes, but there were always players. Some were trying to relax enough to sleep. Some were trying to wake up. At any given time, a few of the players were likely to be patients. Perhaps they were waiting for Painless to get out of the OR; perhaps they were bleeding from an extraction and passing the time until the hemorrhage was definitely controlled. Other participants were wanderers from here and there who knew they could always find a game at the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic.

As a consequence, Captain Waldowski was widely known in the area and the most popular man in the outfit. Unlike most of the medical officers, he had been in private practice prior to being drafted. Unlike most of the medical officers, he had actually made a living, a state of grace almost inconceivable to his associates. He liked everyone, and was seldom without company.

His greatest hobby and interest, however, aside from man­aging the Poker and Dental Clinic, was women. As he was unmarried, it would have been perfectly natural for him to play the local nurses and patronize the flesh emporia in Seoul, but he passed these up much as a major league ballplayer would pass up a sandlot baseball game. Back home in Hamtramck, his reminiscences made clear, he had the highest lifetime batting average in the history of the league. At the present time he was engaged to, as best he could remember, three young lovelies, and while this sort of talk is so common in any military organization that it is automatically written off as malarkey, in his case it could not be written off, even by the most skeptical.

The Painless Pole, beyond any shadow of a doubt, was the best-equipped dentist in the U.S. Army Dental Corps. He was the owner and operator of the Pride of Hamtramck. Officers and enlisted men from the entire area frequently visited the 4077th MASH, supposedly to take advantage of the shower facilities, but actually they came in hope of catching a glimpse. In fact, Dr. Waldowski’s dental assistant, a Corporal Jones, significantly enhanced his lowly wages by informing certain troops in advance of the Captain’s intention of bath­ing. In the shower, popeyed officers and enlisted men viewed the Pride wistfully, and one day a corporal from Mississippi spoke for them all.

“Ah’d purely love,” he said, “to see it angry.”

Unfortunately, about once a month, the Painless Pole underwent a period of depression lasting no less than twenty-four hours and seldom more than three days. The usual activities of the Clinic continued, but except when forced to work, Walt just lay in his sack and stared at the walls. Radar O’Reilly, of course, was able to predict the advent of these episodes several days in advance, so that the clients of the Clinic were fore­warned, but it was Hawkeye Pierce who spread the first word of what turned out to be Captain Waldowski’s most serious seizure.

On this afternoon Hawkeye had been working continuously for twelve hours and, having finally finished and found it to be bathing time, he had gone to the shower tent. He undressed slowly. His stethoscope fell out of the rear pocket of his fatigue pants, and he hung it on a nail along with the pants. He stepped under the shower, luxuriated in its warmth, relaxed and dreamed dreams of Crabapple Cove. Returning to reality, he walked back to the bench where he had left his clothes. He found Captain Walter Waldowski, The Painless Pole, sitting on the bench. All the Dental Officer had on was Hawkeye’s stethoscope and a look of great alarm. He was listening to the Pride of Hamtramck.

“What’s the matter, Walt?” asked Hawkeye.

“I think it’s dead,” Walt answered and, in a trance, he walked to the nearest shower with the stethoscope still dan­gling from his ears.

That evening The Painless Pole entered The Swamp and sat down. He was given a drink, which he accepted with indiffer­ence.

“I thought you guys oughta know,” he announced.

“Know what?”

“I’m going to commit suicide.”