“Operation Whitewash?” I laughed, though it sounded more like a dry heave. “What’s next, Colonel? Operation Gaslight? Operation ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Not Up to Our Knees in Blood and Mud’?”
“Keep your voice down, Pierce,” Potter hushed, his eyes fixed on the frosted glass of his office door. Two large shadows loomed outside. Men in trench coats. In Korea. You only wear a trench coat in a combat zone if you’re trying to hide a lack of a soul.
“This is outrageous!” Major Houlihan sputtered, though her strict adherence to military protocol seemed to be warring with her own sense of reality. “The United States Army does not falsify documents. It must be a clerical error. A very… dark, thorough clerical error.”
“Oh, wake up, Margaret!” I snapped, grabbing the football I had tucked under my arm. “They didn’t just spill a bottle of ink! They erased a man! They decided that a Black neurosurgeon saving white boys’ lives didn’t test well with the demographic back in Peoria, so they snipped him right out of the reel!”
Frank Burns snorted. “Well, perhaps they realized he wasn’t qualified! I always said his sutures were entirely too… jazzy.”
I turned to Frank, incredulous. “Frank, ten minutes ago you said he didn’t exist! Now you’re critiquing his suturing technique? You just proved my point!”
Frank blinked, his ferret-like face scrunching up in confusion as his own paradox hit him. “I… I was speaking hypothetically! As a patriot!”
A sharp knock on the door rattled the glass. Before Potter could answer, the door swung open. Two men walked in. They weren’t wearing standard fatigues. They wore immaculate Class A uniforms, devoid of any unit patches. The man in front, a Major with eyes as cold as a frozen scalpel, stepped forward.
“Colonel Potter. I am Major Thompson, Department of Historical Rectification, G-2 Intelligence,” the man said. His voice was completely flat, devoid of any human cadence.
“Historical Rectification?” Potter echoed, leaning back in his chair. “That’s a ten-dollar term for a two-cent job, Major. What can the 4077th do for you? As you can see, we’re a bit busy trying to put local farm boys back together.”
“We are conducting a routine audit of unit records and personal effects, Colonel,” Thompson said, his cold eyes scanning the room. They landed on me. Specifically, they landed on the leather football tucked under my arm. “It has come to our attention that anomalous artifacts may be present in this camp. Artifacts belonging to non-existent personnel.”
“Non-existent?” I stepped forward, holding the football up like a lantern. “You mean Captain Oliver Harmon Jones? You mean Spearchucker? The guy who pulled shrapnel out of three spines in one shift last August?”
Thompson didn’t blink. “Captain Pierce, I believe you are suffering from combat fatigue. There is no record of a Captain Jones in the United States Medical Corps stationed in Korea. It is a statistical and demographic impossibility according to the network… excuse me, the framework of our deployment strategy.”
“The network?” I barked, catching his slip of the tongue. “Who’s running this war, Major? The Pentagon, or a bunch of television executives in Hollywood trying to ensure the audience doesn’t get uncomfortable?”
“That is borderline treason, Captain,” Thompson warned smoothly. He extended a gloved hand. “I will be confiscating that sporting equipment. It is un-issued contraband.”
“Over my dead body,” I said, taking a step back.
“That can be arranged, administratively speaking,” the second suit chimed in from the doorway.
Potter stood up, placing both hands flat on his desk. The paternal horseman was gone; the hardened World War I cavalry officer was back. “Gentlemen. You are standing in my hospital. I don’t care if you’re from G-2, G-3, or the wizard of Oz. You do not come into my camp and threaten my chief surgeon. And you do not tell me who has and hasn’t bled in my O.R.”
Thompson’s jaw tightened. “Colonel, you are interfering with Operation Whitewash. We have orders signed by General ‘Network’ himself. This erasure is mandatory for the preservation of historical continuity.”
“Whose history?” I yelled. “Because in the real world, in this mud, a Black man was here, holding a retractor, cracking jokes, and keeping kids breathing! You can black out his name on a piece of paper, but you can’t wipe him from the mud!”
“Captain Pierce is right,” a quiet voice said. We all turned. It was Radar. He was shaking, clutching his clipboard, but he was standing tall. “I remember him. He showed me how to throw a spiral. He said my arm was like a wet noodle, but I had heart.”
Thompson sighed, a sound of profound bureaucratic boredom. “Very well. If you refuse to surrender the anomalous items voluntarily, we will have to sanitize the camp by force. MP’s!”
Two heavily armed Military Police officers stepped into the doorway, their hands resting on their sidearms.
“We are placing the Swamp under quarantine,” Thompson announced. “Every letter, every journal, every memory will be audited. You will forget Oliver Harmon Jones, Captain. Even if we have to scrub your brain with wire brushes.”
The MPs moved in, reaching for me. I clutched the football to my chest, the only physical proof that a man had existed, as the sterile, terrifying machinery of the military bureaucracy prepared to rewrite reality itself.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
