The operating room of the 4077th held its collective breath. Frank Burns shrank back against the scrub sink, his face draining of color, suddenly realizing that pushing a psychologically fragile man in a room full of sharp instruments was a tactical error.
Jitters held the heavy rib spreader aloft. His eyes were dark, devoid of the frantic spark that had defined his arrival. He looked right through Frank.
“Private,” Hawkeye said, his voice a low, steady rumble. He didn’t move fast. He just took one step forward. “Put it down, Tommy.”
Margaret Houlihan, surprisingly, didn’t shout for the MPs. She looked at the boy, truly looked at him, and saw what Hawkeye had seen hours ago. The kid was broken. The draft had cracked him, and the O.R. had shattered him into a million pieces.
“Hayes,” Margaret said, her voice unusually soft, carrying a maternal weight that stunned Frank more than the weapon did. “The surgery is over. You did a good job. You helped us. Now, put the instrument in the tray. It needs to be sterilized.”
Jitters blinked. The spell seemed to break. He looked at the bloody metal in his hand as if he had no idea how it got there. A violent tremor wracked his body, his knees buckled, and the rib spreader clattered loudly onto the concrete floor. He sank down against the wall, pulling his knees to his chest, and began to weep—not the theatrical wailing of his fake insanity, but the silent, agonizing sobs of a boy whose soul had been bruised beyond repair.
“Get him to post-op. A quiet cot,” Hawkeye instructed a corpsman gently. He turned to Frank, his eyes blazing with a cold fury. “If you ever speak to a patient like that again, Frank, I won’t stop him next time.”
Two days later, the mud of Uijeongbu was drying in the afternoon sun. The compound was quiet, recovering from the marathon surgical session.
Inside Colonel Potter’s office, the air was thick with the smell of cigar smoke and bureaucracy. Potter sat behind his wooden desk, reviewing a manila folder. Hawkeye stood near the door, arms crossed.
“Well, Pierce,” Potter sighed, rubbing his tired eyes. “The psychiatric evaluation came back from Seoul. Sidney Freedman had a long talk with our boy Hayes.”
“And?” Hawkeye asked, though he already knew the answer.
Potter tossed the file onto the desk. The red ‘APPROVED’ stamp was stark against the white paper. “Section 8. Honorable discharge due to severe combat stress reaction and acute psychological trauma. He’s going home.”
Hawkeye walked over to the window, watching Jitters sitting on a bench outside, waiting for the jeep to take him to the airstrip. The kid was holding a duffel bag, staring blankly at the Korean hills. There was no joy in his eyes. No relief. Just emptiness.
“The great irony of the United States military,” Hawkeye murmured, leaning against the window frame. “The kid came in here obsessed with faking crazy to beat the draft. He put on a comedy show. And in the end, it was the reality of the war that actually drove him out of his mind.”
“It’s a tragic paradox, Hawk,” Potter said quietly, pouring two fingers of scotch into a glass and sliding it across the desk. “A man tries to act insane to avoid a crazy situation, only to find out that the situation is far more insane than anything he could ever pretend to be.”
Hawkeye took the glass, the amber liquid catching the light. “We patched up the bullet holes, Colonel. But what are we supposed to do about the invisible ones? The draft pulled a kid out of a hardware store, brought him here, and broke him. And now we just mail the pieces back to Ohio.”
“We do what we always do, Captain,” Potter said, raising his own glass. “We document it, we sign the paperwork, and we wait for the choppers to bring us the next batch of collateral damage.”
Hawkeye looked back out the window. The jeep pulled up. Jitters climbed in slowly, not looking back. He was getting exactly what he wanted—a ticket out. He had survived the draft. But looking at the hollow shell of the boy in the passenger seat, Hawkeye knew that Tommy Hayes was never really going to leave the 4077th.
Hawkeye raised his glass to the departing jeep. “To sanity, Colonel. Wherever it went, I hope it sends a postcard.”
He downed the scotch, the burn familiar and harsh, just like the war that kept raging on outside their canvas walls.
