It was a Tuesday, which meant absolutely nothing in Uijeongbu, save for the fact that it wasn’t Monday. The heat was already oppressive, the kind of stifling, suffocating humidity that made your dog tags feel like they were branding your chest. In the Swamp, Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce was engaged in his sacred daily ritual: attempting to distill a passable martini from surgical alcohol and despair.
“I’m telling you,” Hawkeye muttered, carefully adjusting the drip rate on his homemade still, “if we can just get the olive-to-gin ratio right, we can officially declare peace. I’ll send a bottle to Truman, I’ll send a bottle to Kim Il Sung. We’ll all sit around in our bathrobes and forget this whole miserable peninsula exists.”
Major Frank Burns, sitting on his perfectly made cot, aggressively polishing a boot that was already gleaming, sniffed in disdain. “You’re a disgrace to the uniform, Pierce. And that contraption is a violation of Army Regulation 42-B, Section 4. If the General were here…”
“If the General were here, Frank, he’d ask for a double,” Hawkeye interrupted, catching a clear drop of liquid in a tin cup. He took a sip and grimaced. “Needs more vermouth. Or maybe just less antifreeze.”
Before Frank could launch into a tirade about patriotism and the moral decay of draftee surgeons, the canvas flap of the Swamp was thrown open. Corporal Radar O’Reilly stood there, panting, his round glasses smudged with soot. He wasn’t holding his usual stack of requisition forms. Instead, he was clutching a terrified-looking guinea pig and a clipboard that was visibly trembling in his hands.
“Sirs!” Radar gasped, his voice cracking an octave higher than usual. “Colonel Potter says you gotta come outside right now! It’s an emergency!”
“What is it, Radar?” Hawkeye asked, slowly standing up. “Did the mess tent finally achieve sentience? I told them not to mix the powdered eggs with the creamed chipped beef.”
“No, sir! It’s… it’s the hills, sir. They’re… well, they’re not hills anymore. They’re mostly fire.”
Hawkeye and Frank stepped out of the tent, and the heat hit them like a physical blow. It wasn’t just the sun anymore. The wind had shifted, carrying with it a dry, blistering wind that smelled of burning pine needles, scorched earth, and impending doom.
Hawkeye looked up. The sky, usually a dull, dusty blue, had turned the color of a fresh bruise—a sickly, terrifying mixture of purple, black, and angry, glowing orange. The ridge line to the north, less than two miles away, was crowned in a roaring crest of flame.
“Good lord,” Frank whispered, dropping his polishing cloth. “The Chinese must be using a new incendiary weapon! It’s a communist plot to smoke us out!”
“Frank, you paranoid twit,” Hawkeye said, his eyes narrowed against the falling ash that was beginning to coat the compound like grey snow. “That’s not a weapon. That’s a brush fire. And unless you’ve got a hose that can reach a mile and a half, we are sitting in the world’s largest frying pan.”
Colonel Sherman T. Potter strode out of his office, his shirt completely unbuttoned, chewing furiously on an unlit cigar. He looked at the ridge, then down at his watch.
“Listen up, people!” Potter’s voice cut through the rising panic of the camp. “Mother Nature has decided to throw us a barbecue, and we are the main course! That wind is blowing twenty knots straight down the valley. We have exactly forty-five minutes before this camp is toast. We are bugging out! I want everything that can be packed, packed! Everything that can roll, rolling! And if it can’t roll, leave it for the ashes!”
Major Margaret Houlihan emerged from the nurses’ tent, her blonde hair already gathering flakes of soot. “Colonel! What about the post-op patients? We have three men with fresh abdominal wounds who can’t be bounced around in a jeep!”
“Put them in the ambulance, Major!” Potter barked. “Drive it like you’re carrying nitro! Pierce, Burns, get to the OR and pack the instruments. Do not leave a single scalpel behind, you hear me? We can’t sew people up with our fingernails.”
“Yes, sir,” Hawkeye said, the sarcasm entirely gone from his voice. He turned to Frank. “Come on, Frank. Let’s go save our toys.”
The camp erupted into organized chaos. The 4077th had bugged out before, usually dodging artillery fire or advancing infantry. But you could negotiate with an army. You could hide from a patrol. You couldn’t negotiate with a wall of fire that was currently eating a thousand acres of forest an hour.
Inside the OR, the heat was suffocating. Hawkeye and Frank were throwing clamps, retractors, and forceps into wooden crates.
“Careful with those!” Frank shrieked, swatting at Hawkeye’s hands. “Those are government property! You have to log them on the manifest!”
“Frank, if we don’t leave in ten minutes, the only thing they’ll be logging is our dental records!” Hawkeye snapped, slamming the lid on a crate. “Just pack the damn plasma!”
Outside, the roar of the fire was becoming deafening, sounding like a freight train barreling down on them. The sky was so dark it looked like midnight, illuminated only by the terrifying, flickering strobe of the approaching inferno.
Suddenly, a massive, thunderous CRACK echoed through the valley. The ground shook violently, throwing Frank to the floor of the OR.
Hawkeye rushed to the screen door and kicked it open. His heart dropped into his stomach.
A massive, blazing pine tree, its roots undermined by the fire, had just collapsed across the main dirt road leading south out of the compound. The only exit was entirely blocked by a burning barricade of timber, standing twenty feet high.
Hawkeye turned back to Frank, his face pale underneath a layer of black soot.
“Well, Frank,” Hawkeye said softly, listening to the roar of the flames closing in. “I hope you brought your marshmallows. Because we aren’t going anywhere.”
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
