“The trees!” the kid screamed, his voice cracking with a terror that seemed too ancient for his nineteen years. “Charlie’s in the trees! The napalm… it’s burning the jungle!”
Hawkeye froze, the scalpel hovering a millimeter above the boy’s shattered abdomen. Charlie? Jungle? He looked across the table at Margaret, whose stern blue eyes flickered with a rare moment of profound confusion.
“Hold him down!” Margaret ordered, though her voice lacked its usual venomous bite. She leaned her weight onto the boy’s shoulders. “Father, we need some help over here!”
Father Mulcahy, who had been administering last rites to a soldier in the corner, rushed over, his face pale. He gently placed his hands on the boy’s forehead. “Easy, son. You’re safe. You’re at the 4077th.”
“It’s everywhere,” the boy rasped, his grip on Hawkeye’s scrubs tightening with Herculean strength. His eyes looked right through Hawkeye, staring at a ghost that hadn’t even been born yet. “They’re broadcasting it… on the television. People are watching us burn during dinner. It’s a meat grinder, Doc. Ten years… twenty years… it doesn’t stop. The jungle just eats us.”
“More pentothal, Shirley, before this kid predicts the end of the world,” Hawkeye snapped, his usual wisecracking demeanor evaporating into the oppressive, unseasonable heat of the tent.
The nurse quickly injected the sedative into the IV line. The boy’s thrashing slowed, his grip loosening, until he slipped back into the merciful dark.
“Well,” Frank Burns snorted, adjusting his mask with a sanctimonious sniff. “Clearly a classic case of combat cowardice manifesting as delirium. ‘Charlie’? ‘Television’? The boy is a malingerer, trying to get a Section 8. I’ll be reporting this to General Mitchell.”
“Frank,” Hawkeye said quietly, not looking up from the wound he was now meticulously closing. “If you report that boy, I will personally replace your stethoscope with a live hand grenade and pull the pin.”
“Is that a threat, Captain?” Margaret barked.
“No, Major, it’s a medical prescription for a severe case of cranial-rectal inversion,” Hawkeye fired back. He stepped away from the table, stripping off his bloody gloves. “Next patient.”
For the next twelve hours, the O.R. was a symphony of agonizing routine. Saws, clamps, the hiss of the autoclave, the dull thud of discarded shrapnel dropping into metal pans. Yet, despite the exhaustion that settled into their bones like lead, Hawkeye couldn’t shake the boy’s words.
A war watched on television. A jungle. Korea wasn’t a jungle. It was a frozen wasteland in the winter and a dusty oven in the summer. It was a “police action.” But as Hawkeye stepped out of the O.R. and into the blinding afternoon sun, the camp felt different. The air was suffocatingly humid. The distant roar of artillery sounded less like cannons and more like the rhythmic, heavy thumping of rotary blades—choppers, bigger and louder than their little H-13s.
“Colonel Potter,” Hawkeye said, falling into step beside the older man. Potter was chewing on a cigar, his face lined with the weariness of three different wars.
“Pierce. Good work in there today. You look like you went ten rounds with a meatpackers’ union.”
“Colonel, that kid in O.R. 3. Private Miller. Have you seen his file?”
Potter paused, pulling the cigar from his mouth. “Radar brought it to my office about an hour ago. Strange thing, Pierce. Half of it is blacked out. Classified. Says he was part of some long-range reconnaissance patrol down south. But the coordinates…” Potter frowned. “They don’t match the peninsula.”
“What do you mean they don’t match?”
“I mean, according to the longitude and latitude, that boy was wounded about two thousand miles south of here. Somewhere in Indochina.”
Hawkeye stopped dead in the mud. The phrase Indochina hung in the air, heavy and loaded. The French were fighting there now. It was a mess. A quagmire. But American boys weren’t there. Not yet.
“Colonel, the kid was talking about napalm. He called the enemy ‘Charlie.’ He said the war was on television. He talked about it like it was an endless loop.” Hawkeye ran a hand through his hair. “I know we’re in the middle of a surrealist nightmare here, but since when do our patients start having prophetic visions of the next disaster before we’ve even finished this one?”
Potter sighed, looking out over the camp. For a brief, terrifying second, the olive-drab tents seemed to blur, replaced by the deep, dark foliage of a tropical rainforest. The illusion vanished as quickly as it came.
“Wars bleed into each other, Hawkeye,” Potter said softly. “The uniforms change, the geography shifts, but the blood is exactly the same color. Keep an eye on the boy. Army Intelligence is sending a man tomorrow to ‘debrief’ him.”
“Debrief him or silence him?” Hawkeye asked cynically.
Before Potter could answer, the PA system crackled to life.
“Attention all personnel,” Radar’s voice echoed across the compound, sounding strangely hollow. “Incoming wounded. And… uh… folks, you might want to look up. It’s raining. But the rain is… it’s black.”
Hawkeye looked up at the sky. A thick, dark ash was falling from the clouds, smelling violently of chemical accelerant.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
