The cold rain of Uijeongbu had a peculiar way of seeping into your bones, bypassing the flesh entirely to freeze the marrow. But standing in the triage yard of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce wasn’t shivering from the cold. He was shivering from the sheer, crushing weight of the clipboard in Major Frank Burns’ hand.
“Pierce, you are holding up the line!” Frank’s voice was a reedy, nasal whine that somehow managed to cut through the deafening roar of the incoming Bell 47 helicopters. “Regulation 4-J clearly outlines the parameters for maximum surgical efficiency during a mass casualty event. You are required to—”
“Frank,” Hawkeye said, not looking up from the bloody mess on the stretcher before him. “If you quote one more regulation at me while this kid’s chest is trying to imitate a leaky sieve, I am going to take that clipboard, turn it sideways, and perform a colonoscopy on you without the benefit of anesthesia.”
Frank’s ferret-like face went purple. “That is insubordination! I am your superior officer, and I demand—”
“You demand nothing!” Hawkeye snapped, finally turning his gaze to his bunkmate. His eyes, usually bright with cynical humor, were dark and hollow. “Look at him, Frank! Really look at him!”
On the canvas stretcher lay Private First Class Tommy Miller. He was nineteen, though right now, covered in a tragic mixture of Korean mud and his own blood, he looked no older than a frightened child. An artillery shell had detonated too close to his foxhole. The shrapnel had done a horrific, abstract painting on his abdomen and chest cavity.
Hawkeye’s hands, clad in rubber gloves that were slick with red, hovered over the wounds. His mind, trained at the finest medical institutions back in a world that made sense, was racing through a desperate calculus. Massive internal bleeding. Lacerated liver. Probable perforated bowel. Both lungs compromised. To fix this—to even attempt to fix this and drag this boy back from the brink—would take a minimum of four, maybe five hours in the OR. It would require hundreds of clamps, pints of whole blood they barely had, and the undivided attention of the hospital’s best surgeon.
And directly adjacent to Tommy Miller, lined up like cars at a macabre drive-in theater, were three other men. One had a severed femoral artery; he had maybe twenty minutes left. Another was gasping through a tension pneumothorax. The third had a shattered pelvis.
If Hawkeye took Tommy into the OR, those three men would die in the mud. Period. The math was absolute. It was the brutal, unyielding arithmetic of agony.
Colonel Sherman T. Potter pushed his way through the throngs of running litter bearers, his face a map of weary lines. “What’s the bottleneck here, doctors? We’ve got two more birds coming in hot and the pre-op ward is bursting at the seams.”
“Colonel!” Frank barked, standing at attention so sharply he nearly slipped in the mud. “Captain Pierce is refusing to follow standard triage protocol! He is lingering over an expectant case while salvageable personnel are expiring!”
For once, Hawkeye didn’t have a witty comeback. He didn’t have a joke about Frank’s lack of a chin or his clandestine affairs with Major Houlihan. He just looked at Potter, a silent plea in his eyes. Tell me I don’t have to do this. Tell me there’s another way.
Potter stepped closer, his experienced eyes scanning Tommy’s catastrophic wounds. The old cavalryman had seen two World Wars before this police action. He knew death intimately; they were old acquaintances who nodded at each other in the street. Potter looked at the wound, then looked at the three dying men next in line. He didn’t say a word. He just looked back at Hawkeye, his expression softening into one of profound, paternal sorrow.
“Hawk…” Potter started, his voice barely a rumble over the wind.
“I can save him, Colonel,” Hawkeye lied. It tasted like ash in his mouth. “If I get him in there right now, if Margaret preps the blood, if I work fast…”
“You work fast, you’ll be working on a corpse in two hours,” Potter said gently. “And by the time you realize it, those three boys over there will be gone. You know the rules of triage, son. We do the greatest good for the greatest number.”
“It’s not good!” Hawkeye shouted, the rain plastering his dark hair to his forehead. “None of this is good! We’re playing God, Sherman! We’re sitting up here on our little Mount Olympus made of canvas and tongue depressors, deciding who gets to breathe tomorrow and who gets put in a zipper bag!”
Major Margaret Houlihan appeared beside Potter. Her uniform was remarkably crisp despite the chaos, her blonde hair tucked neatly beneath her cap. “Captain Pierce,” she said, her voice surprisingly devoid of its usual sharp edge. “We need OR 1. Now.”
Hawkeye looked down. Tommy’s hand, trembling and cold, reached out and grabbed Hawkeye’s wrist. The boy’s eyes, dilated and terrified, met the surgeon’s.
“Doc?” Tommy whispered, a bubble of blood forming on his lips. “Am I… am I going home?”
Hawkeye felt his heart shatter against his ribs. He swallowed hard, forcing a gentle, reassuring smile onto his face—a smile he had perfected over months of lying to dying men. He knelt in the mud, bringing his face close to Tommy’s.
“You’re going home, Tommy,” Hawkeye said, his voice a soft, steady murmur. “You’re going back to Iowa. Gonna eat your mom’s cherry pie. Gonna sit on the porch.”
“It’s cold, Doc.”
“I know, buddy. I know.” Hawkeye reached into the left pocket of his surgical gown. His fingers bypassed the green tags. They bypassed the yellow tags. They bypassed the red tags.
His fingers closed around the thick, stiff cardboard of a black tag.
“Major Burns is right, Colonel,” Hawkeye said, his voice hollow, robotic. He stood up, breaking the eye contact with the boy. He tied the black tag to the zipper of Tommy’s flak jacket. The symbol of the damned. Expectant.
To be left to die.
Frank smirked. “Finally coming to your senses, Pierce. Orderlies! Move these three salvageable patients into pre-op! Leave this one for the chaplain.”
Hawkeye didn’t look at Frank. He didn’t look at Margaret or Potter. He turned his back on Private Tommy Miller and walked mechanically toward the scrubbing sinks, the ghost of the boy’s touch still burning like acid on his wrist. He had just condemned a man to death to save three others. The math was perfect.
So why did he feel like a murderer?
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
