“A truce,” Hawkeye mumbled, washing the blood off his hands in the scrub room. Beside him, B.J. Hunnicutt was furiously scrubbing his nails, his mustache twitching with exhaustion. “The headline on the paper those kids brought in. It said ‘Truce Imminent. Troops Home by Christmas’.”
“Hawk, they’ve been printing that same headline since the Chinese crossed the Yalu,” B.J. said, rinsing his hands. “It’s just Army PR. They want the boys to think they’re bleeding for a finish line.”
“No, Beej, you don’t understand.” Hawkeye grabbed a towel. “I asked the corporal on the stretcher what year it was. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said 1954. B.J., we didn’t even get here until 1950! If it’s 1954, we’ve missed entire elections! I could be thirty-five years old and not even know it!”
Hawkeye pushed through the swinging doors of the OR, ignoring the chaotic symphony of hissing sterilizers and clinking instruments. He bypassed the Swamp entirely and marched straight toward the commanding officer’s tent.
He didn’t bother knocking. He burst into Colonel Sherman T. Potter’s office.
“Colonel, we have a chronological emergency!” Hawkeye announced.
Potter didn’t flinch. He was sitting at his desk, carefully applying a stroke of burnt sienna to a canvas on his easel. “Pierce, unless somebody’s aorta is currently detached from their heart, my office is a sanctuary of peace, quiet, and mediocre oil painting. What in the name of jumping Jupiter is a chronological emergency?”
Hawkeye walked over to Potter’s desk and pointed a finger at the small, tear-off calendar sitting next to a picture of Mildred. “Look at that calendar, Colonel.”
Potter sighed, putting his brush down. “It says December 24th. Christmas Eve. What of it?”
“Now open your desk drawer. The bottom right one. The one where you keep the surplus requisition forms from last command.”
Potter frowned beneath his mustache, but humored his chief surgeon. He pulled open the drawer, rustled through some papers, and pulled out another calendar. He squinted at it. “December 24th, 1951.”
“Exactly!” Hawkeye clapped his hands together. “Now, Colonel, you are a man of vast experience. A veteran of two World Wars. A man who knows how many days are in a year. How long have we been fighting this police action?”
“Three years,” Potter said slowly, the realization dawning on him as he looked from the 1951 calendar to the current one. “Give or take a few months.”
“Three years. Thirty-six months. And yet, this camp is preparing to celebrate its fourth Christmas. The math doesn’t work, Colonel! The Army has shoved 48 months of misery into a 36-month bag. We are living in a temporal paradox!”
Potter leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach. He looked tired. Not just physically tired, but a deep, soul-weary exhaustion that came from watching too many young boys die.
“Pierce,” Potter said quietly. “Sit down.”
Hawkeye blinked, surprised by the gentle tone. He sat.
Potter poured two fingers of scotch into a glass and slid it across the desk. “You think I haven’t noticed? You think I don’t know that my granddaughter was born three years ago, and yet I’ve sent her five different birthday presents?”
Hawkeye stared at the glass. “You know? Then why aren’t we doing anything about it? Why aren’t we screaming at I Corps?”
“Because, Hawk,” Potter said, taking a sip of his own drink. “The Army doesn’t run on time. It runs on paper. And on paper, a soldier needs a holiday to keep from putting a rifle in his mouth. On paper, Christmas boosts morale by fourteen percent. So, if the Pentagon decides we need a morale boost in July, they will issue a general order declaring it December. And we will hang up the damn tinsel.”
“But it’s insane,” Hawkeye whispered. “It makes the war feel like… like it’s never going to end. Like we’re just stuck here, patching up the same kids, fighting the same battle over the same hill, forever.”
“War is insane, Captain,” Potter said softly. “It stops time. For the boys who die on our tables, time stops permanently. For us? It just stretches. It stretches until yesterday feels like a decade ago, and tomorrow feels like it’s never going to come. We are in purgatory, Pierce. And in purgatory, the calendar is just a suggestion.”
Hawkeye took the shot of scotch. The liquid burned down his throat, grounding him in the harsh reality of the moment. He looked at Potter’s painting. It wasn’t a landscape or a portrait. It was a painting of the OR doors, slightly ajar, with a blinding, terrifying white light shining through them.
“So what do we do, Colonel?” Hawkeye asked, his voice stripped of its usual sarcasm.
“We do what we always do,” Potter said, picking up his brush again. “We put on the red suits. We drink the terrible eggnog. We pretend, for one night, that peace on earth actually means something. And then…”
Before Potter could finish the sentence, the PA system crackled to life.
“Attention all personnel. Attention. This is Radar. Incoming wounded. Choppers and meatball surgery. Oh, and… Merry Christmas, I guess.”
Hawkeye stood up slowly. The eternal loop was calling.
As he reached the door, Potter’s voice stopped him. “By the way, Pierce. Frank found something in the supply tent. Something I Corps sent by mistake. You might want to intercept it before he uses it to execute someone.”
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
