…Mulcahy slowly set his Bible down on an empty Mayo stand. He didn’t turn the other cheek. Instead, he took one deliberate step toward Major Burns, his right hand balling into a fist of divine retribution.
The sound of knuckles connecting with the fleshy cartilage of Frank Burns’ nose was surprisingly loud, a wet thwack that temporarily silenced the chaotic symphony of the operating room.
For a span of three seconds, the 4077th OR existed in a vacuum. Hawkeye froze, his scalpel hovering a millimeter above a torn spleen. Captain B.J. Hunnicutt blinked rapidly behind his surgical mask, trying to process the visual impossibility before him. Major Margaret Houlihan let out a gasp so sharp it threatened to inhale her surgical mask entirely.
Frank Burns staggered backward, his eyes rolling up toward the corrugated tin roof, before his knees buckled. He collapsed into a heap of soiled scrubs and wounded pride against the scrub sinks, a thin trickle of blood instantly springing from his left nostril.
“Holy Mother of…” Hawkeye breathed, breaking the silence. He looked at Mulcahy, who was now staring at his own trembling fist as if it belonged to a stranger. “Padre, I’ve always admired your sermons, but I never knew you had such a compelling delivery.”
“Major Burns!” Margaret shrieked, finally snapping out of her shock. she rushed to Frank’s side, kneeling in the muck. “You brute! You savage! Striking a superior officer! Striking a surgeon while he is performing vital military duties!”
“He was… he was being incredibly uncharitable, Major,” Mulcahy stammered, his voice lacking its usual soothing tenor. It was raspy, laced with a terrifying blend of adrenaline and immediate, crushing guilt. He looked down at the nineteen-year-old corporal on the table. The boy had passed out from the pain, oblivious to the fact that his chaplain had just turned into a prizefighter.
Colonel Sherman T. Potter pushed his way through the swinging doors, his hands scrubbed and dripping, his face a mask of exhausted authority. “What in the name of jumping Jupiter is going on in here? I could hear the banshee wailing from the scrub room!” He looked at Frank on the floor, then at Margaret fussing over him, and finally at the priest holding his knuckles.
“Colonel,” B.J. said casually, not taking his eyes off his patient’s chest cavity. “It appears the meek have decided not to wait to inherit the earth, but are actively taking territory starting with Frank’s face.”
Potter’s eyes narrowed. “Padre. My office. Now. Soon as I finish patching up this boy’s femur, we are going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting, and I use that term with absolute literal intent.”
“Yes, Colonel,” Mulcahy whispered. He picked up his Bible, suddenly feeling the weight of it a thousand times heavier. He stripped off his surgical gown, the ties feeling like a noose around his neck, and walked out of the OR into the chilling Korean night.
The mud of Uijeongbu squelched under his boots. The distant, rhythmic thud of artillery fire in the valley sounded like a giant heartbeat. Mulcahy walked into the Colonel’s office, poured himself an incredibly uncharacteristic two fingers of Potter’s private bourbon, and stared at the map of the Korean peninsula on the wall. It was covered in pins. Red pins. Blue pins. Pins that represented thousands of souls being fed into a meat grinder that no amount of prayer seemed able to jam.
Half an hour later, Potter walked in. He looked older than his years. He hung up his coat, walked over to the desk, and eyed the glass in the chaplain’s hand.
“I’m not going to court-martial you, John,” Potter said tiredly, sitting down heavily in his canvas chair. “Frank is insisting on a firing squad, but I told him I’d settle for making him clean the latrines with a toothbrush. He declined. However, I cannot have my spiritual leader throwing haymakers in the middle of meatball surgery.”
“I am so deeply sorry, Sherman,” Mulcahy said, staring at the amber liquid. “It wasn’t just Frank. It’s… it’s all of it. I stand there, day after day. I watch these boys, these children, get torn apart. Hawkeye puts them back together. B.J. puts them back together. Even Frank, heaven help us, puts them back together. And what do I do? I offer them platitudes. I tell them God has a plan while they bleed out holding their own intestines. I am utterly useless here.”
“That is premium grade, grade-A horse hockey,” Potter said firmly. “You keep their souls intact, Padre. The surgeons fix the plumbing; you fix the spirit.”
“The spirit is leaking out onto the floor, Colonel, and I have no clamps to stop it!” Mulcahy’s voice rose, cracking with emotion. “Faith feels like a very blunt instrument in a place that requires a scalpel.”
Before Potter could respond, the unmistakable, high-pitched whine of the camp P.A. system clicked on. Corporal Radar O’Reilly’s voice, usually timid, echoed with sheer panic.
“Attention! Attention all personnel! We have… uh… we have a situation. A civilian transport just crashed through the front checkpoint! It’s… oh man. Colonel Potter, Captain Pierce, we need everybody out here. Now!”
Mulcahy didn’t wait for permission. He bolted out the door, Potter right behind him.
In the center of the compound, illuminated by the harsh glare of jeep headlights, a battered, bullet-ridden two-and-a-half-ton truck had slammed into the camp’s water tower support. Steam hissed from the radiator.
But it was what was in the back of the truck that froze the blood of every doctor, nurse, and enlisted man who came running from the mess tent and the Swamp.
The back of the truck was filled with children. Korean orphans. Dozens of them. They were screaming, covered in dust, and many were bleeding. Slumped over the steering wheel was a heavily wounded American G.I., his uniform soaked in dark blood.
Hawkeye and B.J., still wearing their blood-stained OR aprons, rushed to the cab. Hawkeye checked the driver’s pulse and slowly shook his head. “He’s gone. Bled out driving them here.”
“Get these kids to triage! Now!” Potter bellowed, the fatigue vanishing from his voice, replaced by pure command. “Margaret, wake up the relief nurses! Radar, get on the horn to I Corps, tell them we have a mass civilian casualty situation!”
The camp exploded into organized chaos. Mulcahy found himself in the center of the storm. He wasn’t praying now; he was lifting terrified, sobbing children out of the truck, carrying them toward the mess tent which was rapidly being converted into a secondary triage center.
He carried a small girl, perhaps five years old, into the bright light of the tent. As he set her down on a mess hall table, she let out a piercing shriek. Mulcahy looked down. A jagged piece of shrapnel was deeply embedded in her upper thigh. The makeshift tourniquet around her leg was soaked through, and bright arterial blood was pulsing rapidly with every heartbeat.
“Hawkeye!” Mulcahy yelled, looking around frantically. “Captain Pierce! I need a doctor over here! Now!”
Hawkeye was across the room, up to his elbows in a young boy’s chest cavity, desperately trying to reinflate a collapsed lung. “I’m a little tied up, Padre! Put pressure on it!”
“It’s an artery, Hawkeye! She’s losing too much! Where is B.J.? Where is Frank?”
“B.J. is operating in the Swamp! Frank is still nursing his nose and claiming a concussion!” Hawkeye yelled back, sweat pouring down his face. He looked over his shoulder at the priest, his eyes wide and desperate. “Padre, listen to me! There is no one else! If you don’t stop that bleeding right now, she won’t make it five minutes!”
Mulcahy looked at his trembling hands. The hands that held the host. The hands that had struck a man in anger an hour ago. He looked at the pale, fading face of the little girl.
“I don’t know how!” Mulcahy screamed over the din of the crying children.
“Then you’d better learn fast, Father!” Hawkeye shouted back. “Grab a hemostat from the tray next to you! Open the wound! Find the source of the river and build a damn dam!”
Mulcahy stood paralyzed for a fraction of a second. The smell of hell was everywhere. But the little girl’s hand reached out and weakly gripped his muddy stole.
Father John Patrick Mulcahy closed his eyes, said the shortest prayer of his life, and reached for the surgical tray.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
