The goofy grins vanished from Pierce and Hunnicutt’s faces faster than a dry martini evaporates in the Korean summer heat. In a microsecond, the insubordinate frat boys disappeared, replaced by hardened, hyper-focused surgeons.
Potter watched, momentarily stunned by the transformation. The Hawaiian shirt suddenly looked less like a joke and more like a desperate, vibrant shield against the incoming wave of olive-drab tragedy.
“Alright,” Potter barked, the old cavalry officer in him instinctively taking the reins. “Let’s see what you people are made of. Triage, on the double!”
The helipad was a symphony of roaring rotors and human agony. Stretchers were pulled from the metal bellies of the birds, carrying boys who looked young enough to still be trading baseball cards, now trading blood for dirt.
“Chest wound, sucking! Get him into OR one!” Hawkeye yelled, his hands already stained crimson before he even reached the scrub sink. “B.J., you take the belly over there! Frank, try not to kill anyone while you tie your shoelaces!”
“Insubordination!” Frank squeaked, holding a plasma bag upside down. Major Margaret Houlihan snatched it from his hands with a terrifying glare. “Out of the way, Frank! Move!”
Potter didn’t head to his office to unpack his saddle or his portrait of Mildred. He headed straight to the scrub room. He tied on his mask, the familiar smell of antiseptic and impending doom washing over him. It was a smell he had known in France, a smell he had known in the Pacific, and here it was again, unchanged, in this godforsaken corner of Asia. War, Potter mused, was the only human endeavor that never bothered to update its recipe.
He stepped into the Operating Room. It was a canvas-walled butcher shop, stiflingly hot and reeking of ether. He moved to an empty table next to Hawkeye’s.
“Need a hand, Colonel?” Hawkeye asked, not looking up from a complex bowel resection. “We usually charge a cover fee, but for Regular Army, we’ll settle for a promise to ignore our still.”
“Just pass me a number ten scalpel, son,” Potter said calmly, holding out his gloved hand to Nurse Kellye. “And let’s get to work. These boys aren’t paying us by the hour.”
For the next eight hours, Potter worked. And as he worked, he watched. He watched the mechanical brilliance of B.J. Hunnicutt. He watched the erratic, terrified flailing of Frank Burns, whom Potter quickly realized was a walking malpractice suit waiting to happen. But most of all, he watched Hawkeye Pierce. The man was a brilliant, bleeding-heart lunatic. He cracked terrible jokes over open chest cavities to keep the demons at bay, sewing up boys so they could be sent right back to the meat grinder.
Potter realized then what the generals at I Corps didn’t understand. This wasn’t a military unit. It was an orphanage. A collection of drafted civilians pushed to the absolute edge of human endurance, teetering on the brink of madness. They didn’t need a commander to bark orders or quote army regulations. Frank Burns did that, and they hated him for it. They needed an anchor. They needed a father.
“Clamp,” Potter said softly, his hands moving with the steady rhythm of a man who had seen it all. “Suture.”
By hour nine, the last piece of shrapnel was dropped into a metal basin with a dull clink. The room was silent save for the hum of the precarious electrical generator outside. Potter stripped off his bloody gloves, letting out a long, ragged exhale.
“Not bad, Colonel,” Hawkeye said, peeling off his mask, his face deeply lined with exhaustion. “You handle a knife like you actually know what it’s for.”
“I’ve been carving turkeys since before you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye, Pierce,” Potter smiled gently.
Just as a rare moment of mutual respect settled over the blood-stained room, the lights violently flickered. Once. Twice. Then, complete, suffocating darkness enveloped the OR.
“Radar!” Hawkeye’s voice echoed in the pitch black. “Tell me you didn’t trade the generator spark plugs for a crate of canned peaches again!”
A loud, terrifying crash erupted from the adjacent sterilizer room, followed instantly by Frank Burns screaming in a high-pitched, hysterical terror that sounded entirely un-military.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
