The martini glass shattered against a rock, a tragic waste of perfectly good, bathtub-brewed gin. But as my father always said back in Crabapple Cove, you can always distill more liquor, but you can’t distill a new anesthesiologist. Especially one who owes you forty bucks in poker debts.
I lunged forward, tackling Captain “Painless” Paulson just as the black capsule touched his chapped lips. We went down hard in the signature, three-inch deep Uijeongbu mud. It was cold, it smelled like despair and diesel fuel, and it got right up my nose.
“Get off me, Pierce!” Paulson wheezed, thrashing under my grip. For a guy who hadn’t slept since Tuesday, he had the surprisingly wiry strength of a desperate man.
“Not a chance, Paulson! You haven’t filed the proper requisition forms for a suicide,” I grunted, prying his fingers open and flicking the black capsule into the weeds. “The army is very particular about how it breaks its toys. You can’t just do it yourself. It’s a union violation.”
Frank Burns, who had been watching this entire mud-wrestling match with the horrified fascination of a nun at a burlesque show, finally found his nasal voice. “Captain Pierce! Unhand that officer! This is a disgrace! I’m putting both of you on report for… for fraternizing in the muck!”
I rolled off Paulson, wiping a streak of Korean topsoil from my forehead. “Put a sock in it, Frank. The man was about to swallow a poison pill, which I’m pretty sure is against regulations, even in your beloved rulebook.”
Frank puffed out his chest, resembling a remarkably indignant pigeon. “Self-inflicted casualties are a court-martial offense! It shows a blatant disrespect for government property! You, Captain Paulson, are government property!”
“That,” Paulson whispered from the mud, staring blankly at the grey sky, “is exactly the problem.”
I hauled Paulson to his feet and slung his arm over my shoulder. We hobbled toward the Swamp, the canvas-walled sanctuary of sanity—or insanity, depending on the time of day—that I shared with the rest of the medical misfits.
Inside the Swamp, the air was thick with the smell of stale cigars and lingering trauma. I dumped Paulson onto his cot. He just lay there, staring at the ceiling, unblinking.
“Alright, Painless,” I said, pulling up a chair and pouring two fingers of our finest homemade gin into a semi-clean mug. “Let’s have it. And don’t tell me it’s the food. We all know the food is a violation of the Geneva Convention, but we cope. We mock it, we feed it to stray dogs, we don’t eat black pills over it.”
Paulson slowly turned his head. “It’s not the food, Hawk. It’s the meat grinder. I put them under. You cut them up. They wake up missing pieces of themselves, or they don’t wake up at all. Day after day. Chopper after chopper. Through the early morning fog, I see things… I see boys who shouldn’t be here, losing everything. The sword of time is going to pierce our skins eventually, Hawkeye. War just speeds up the clock. I’m tired. I just want it to be over. Suicide is painless. It brings on many changes. I can take or leave it if I please… and I please.”
The poetry of his depression was staggering. He wasn’t just sad; he was philosophically bankrupt. He had looked into the abyss of the 4077th, and the abyss had handed him a scalpel and told him to get to work.
I took a sip of the gin. It burned on the way down, a sharp reminder that I was still alive. “You listen to me, Paulson. We are all dangling by a very thin thread of sanity here. My thread happens to be woven from bad jokes and 90-proof alcohol. Yours used to be a morbid sense of humor about novocaine. You can’t just snap the thread because the view down below is ugly. We need you. These kids need you to make sure they don’t feel the saw.”
“I can’t, Hawk,” he said, closing his eyes. “I’m already dead inside. I just want my body to catch up.”
I sat back, the wheels in my head spinning faster than a chopper blade. Reasoning with him wasn’t going to work. He was operating on a frequency of pure existential dread. If I couldn’t pull him back into the light, maybe I had to meet him in the dark.
“Okay,” I said quietly.
Paulson opened his eyes, confused. “Okay?”
“Okay. You want to die? Fine. But you’re not doing it alone in the mud like a sick dog. You’re a member of the 4077th Swamp. We do things with panache.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about giving you the send-off you deserve. A going-away party. A final farewell. We’re going to throw you a wake, Paulson. The greatest wake this miserable peninsula has ever seen.”
Before he could protest, the canvas flaps of the Swamp parted, and Colonel Sherman T. Potter walked in, looking like a man who had eaten a bowl of nails for breakfast and found them lacking in iron. Behind him, as always, was Company Clerk Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly, carrying a clipboard roughly the size of a shield.
“Pierce,” Potter barked, his voice commanding enough to make the tent poles stand up straighter. “Major Burns tells me you’re assaulting fellow officers and throwing perfectly good glassware into the mud. Explain yourself before I have you cleaning bedpans with your toothbrush.”
“Colonel,” I stood up, assuming a stance of mock military bearing. “I wasn’t assaulting Captain Paulson. I was simply preventing him from committing a gross violation of military protocol. He was attempting to die without filing the proper paperwork.”
Potter’s eyes narrowed, shifting from me to the miserable lump that was Paulson on the cot. The old cavalry officer had seen enough war to recognize a broken spirit when he saw one. His gruff exterior softened just a fraction of an inch.
“Is this true, son?” Potter asked, his voice dropping to a gravelly murmur.
Paulson didn’t speak. He just gave a small, pathetic nod.
Potter sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Horse hockey. Just what we need. Another casualty, and this one hasn’t even been shot yet. Radar, get Major Houlihan down here. And tell Father Mulcahy to stand by.”
“Wait, Colonel,” I interjected, stepping between Potter and the door. “Religion and regulations aren’t going to fix this. The man is suffering from a terminal case of reality. I have a… prescribed treatment plan.”
“Does it involve an unauthorized still, a questionable moral compass, and a complete disregard for Army regulations?” Potter asked, arching an eyebrow.
“It’s like you can see right into my soul, sir.”
Potter looked at Paulson again, then back at me. “I’m giving you twenty-four hours, Pierce. If he’s not back on the duty roster by tomorrow morning, I’m shipping him to a psychiatric ward in Tokyo. And I might just send you with him.”
“Sir, yes sir,” I saluted.
As Potter and Radar left, I turned back to Paulson. I walked over to my footlocker and dug around beneath my stash of contraband cigars and slightly damp comic books. I pulled out a small, unmarked amber glass bottle. It contained a powerful, fast-acting sedative we used for extreme cases of surgical trauma.
“What’s that?” Paulson asked, his voice trembling slightly.
“This, my melancholic friend,” I said, holding the bottle up to the dim light, “is the black capsule you were looking for. Well, a liquid version anyway. It will put you into a sleep so deep, you’ll think you’re shaking hands with the grim reaper himself.”
I poured a generous dose into the mug of gin.
“You’re going to give me exactly what I want?” Paulson asked, staring at the mug with a mixture of fear and profound relief.
“I’m giving you a painless exit,” I lied, my face a mask of solemnity. “Drink up, Paulson. Your shift is over.”
He took the mug with shaking hands. He didn’t hesitate. He downed the mixture in one gulp. Within seconds, his eyes rolled back, his body went limp, and he slumped back onto the cot, out cold.
The sedative would keep him under for exactly twelve hours. He wasn’t dead. But when he woke up, he was going to wish he was, because Hawkeye Pierce was about to show him that life—even in this mud-soaked purgatory—was entirely too ridiculous to leave behind.
I walked to the door of the tent and bellowed at the top of my lungs, “Trapper! Radar! Get in here! We’ve got a funeral to plan!”
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
