“O’Reilly! I know you’re in there hoarding government property! Open up or I’ll have you court-martialed for treason!” Major Frank Burns kicked the wooden frame of the door, though his thin frame lacked the physical power to do any actual damage.
Inside, Radar panicked. He shoved the heavy film canister under a pile of requisition forms for tongue depressors and quickly grabbed a random clipboard, trying to look busy. He unlocked the door just as Frank was winding up for another ineffective kick, causing the Major to stumble forward into the room.
“Ah-ha!” Frank yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Radar. “What were you doing behind a locked door, Corporal? Communicating with Pyongyang? Stealing my personal supply of foot powder?”
“N-no, sir, Major Burns,” Radar stammered, saluting so fast he nearly poked his own eye out. “I was just… uh… auditing the inventory, sir. We are dangerously low on… rubber bands.”
Frank narrowed his eyes, his ferret-like face twitching with suspicion. He stalked around the office, picking up papers and sniffing the air like a bloodhound on a terribly misguided scent. “Rubber bands, eh? A likely story. I’ve got my eye on you, O’Reilly. You’re too quiet. Too innocent. It’s the quiet ones who always end up being subversives.”
Finding nothing obviously treasonous, Frank adjusted his uniform, puffed out his chest, and marched out of the room, muttering something about reporting the entire camp to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Radar let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He couldn’t keep the reel here. It was too dangerous. Frank was an idiot, but an idiot with a paranoia complex could eventually stumble onto the truth.
That night, under the cover of a heavily overcast, moonless sky, Radar snuck the film canister out of the office and made his way to the abandoned supply tent at the far edge of the compound. This tent was mostly used to store broken stretchers and rusted medical equipment waiting for parts that would never arrive.
Using his unmatched skills as the camp’s supreme scrounger, Radar spent three hours building a monstrosity of a machine. He cannibalized the lens from a broken microscope, the motor from a ruined jeep windshield wiper, and the bulb from a high-intensity surgical lamp. With a bit of jury-rigged wiring and a lot of electrical tape, he had created a functioning, albeit incredibly dangerous, film projector.
He hung a pristine white bedsheet against a stack of crates, loaded the 35mm reel into his makeshift device, and flipped the switch.
The machine whirred to life, smoking slightly, before a beam of intense light pierced the darkness of the tent. On the bedsheet, the numbers 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… flashed in rapid succession. And then, there it was.
His past.
Radar sat on an overturned bucket, hugging his teddy bear tightly, as the moving pictures danced across the fabric. He watched the 1970 cinematic version of the 4077th. He saw the darker, grittier reality. He saw the original Hawkeye and Trapper John playing golf in the mud. He saw the original Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan. And then, he saw himself.
There he was, Gary Burghoff, playing Radar O’Reilly. He looked exactly the same. The same glasses, the same nervous energy, the same uncanny ability to predict the future.
Tears welled up in Radar’s eyes. It was a profound, existential loneliness. He was a bridge between two dimensions. The military bureaucracy was so vast, so incredibly inept, that they had literally recycled him into a new television universe without giving him a discharge paper from the movie. The anti-war message hit him with the force of a howitzer: war is a machine that just keeps spinning, replacing the cogs when they wear out, but keeping the fundamental nightmare exactly the same.
“What in the name of Harry Truman’s haberdashery is going on in here?”
Radar leaped three feet in the air, knocking over his bucket. Standing in the entrance of the tent, silhouetted against the night, was Colonel Sherman T. Potter. The veteran commander’s face was stern, a half-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth.
“Colonel! Sir! I… I was just…” Radar scrambled to turn off the projector, but his hand burned on the overheated casing of the surgical lamp. “Ouch!”
Potter stepped into the tent, ignoring Radar’s frantic stammering. The Colonel’s eyes were locked on the makeshift screen. The film was currently showing a sweeping shot of the camp, followed by a close-up of the cinematic Radar handing a clipboard to a very different-looking commanding officer.
Potter stood completely still. The flickering light washed over his craggy, weathered face. He took the cigar out of his mouth.
“Son,” Potter said, his voice unusually soft, devoid of its usual booming authority. “Is that… is that you on that sheet?”
“Yes, sir,” Radar whispered, looking at his boots.
“And who in the blazes are those other fellas?” Potter asked, stepping closer to the screen. “That’s the Swamp, sure as a Sunday sermon. But those aren’t my boys. That’s not Pierce. That’s not Hunnicutt. And that sure as hell ain’t Henry Blake.”
Radar swallowed hard. “They’re… they’re the old crew, sir. From before.”
“Before what?” Potter demanded, his brow furrowing in deep confusion. “Before I got here? I saw Henry’s file. I know what he looked like. That ain’t him.”
“No, sir. Not before you got here. Before… before the network picked us up, sir.”
Potter turned to look at Radar, a mixture of profound concern and utter bewilderment in his eyes. He thought the boy was suffering from severe battle fatigue. The psychological toll of the Korean War broke men in strange, unpredictable ways.
“Radar,” Potter said gently, placing a fatherly hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’ve been working too hard. The stress, the casualties… it makes a man see things. You’re hallucinating, son.”
“I’m not hallucinating, Colonel!” Radar pleaded, pointing a trembling finger at the screen. “Look closely! Look at the date on the clapperboard at the start of the reel! It says 1970! But we’re in 1952! Don’t you see, sir? The faces change, the actors change, but I’m stuck here! I’m the only one who crossed over!”
Potter looked back at the screen. The scene had shifted to a bloody, chaotic sequence in the OR. The carnage was identical to what Potter saw every single day. The blood, the desperation, the futility. It was all exactly the same.
Potter’s eyes slowly widened. He noticed something terrifying. The cinematic footage showed a young soldier dying on the table. It was a kid with a distinctive birthmark on his cheek.
Potter’s blood ran cold. He had pronounced that exact same kid dead just three days ago in their own OR.
“Dear God,” Potter whispered, his military composure finally cracking. He turned back to the trembling corporal. “Son… how many times have we fought this war?”
Before Radar could answer, the film reel jammed. The intense heat from the surgical lamp focused on a single frame of celluloid. Within seconds, the film bubbled, melted, and burst into bright, violent flames, consuming the only physical evidence of Radar’s cinematic past in a flash of blinding fire.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
