The sound of helicopter blades was a physical weight pressing down on the 4077th. Casualties were arriving, broken bodies of boys who were in high school just months ago. And right when they needed every ounce of painkiller the Army had begrudgingly supplied them, PFC Thomas “Jitters” Hayes was holding it hostage with a flick of his thumb.
Hawkeye sprinted from the scrub room, his hands still dripping with iodine, leaving soapy trails on his green trousers. Colonel Sherman T. Potter, moving with the surprising speed of an old cavalryman, was right behind him.
“What in the name of Sam Hill is going on here?” Potter roared over the noise of the choppers landing on the pad just fifty yards away.
“It’s Hayes, Colonel!” Radar squeaked, pointing frantically at the mesh window. “He says if we don’t call General MacArthur right now and give him a Section 8, he’s gonna burn the pain juice!”
“Son of a biscuit eater,” Potter swore, stepping up to the mesh. “Private! Put that lighter out right now! That’s a direct order from your commanding officer!”
Inside the dim tent, Jitters was hyperventilating, his chest heaving. “No! No! You’re gonna send me up to the line! I know it! You patch ’em up just to send ’em back to get shot again! I won’t do it! I’m crazy! You have to discharge me!”
Hawkeye pushed past Potter gently. “Let me, Colonel. An order is the last thing this kid needs to hear right now.” Hawkeye leaned his face against the screen, locking eyes with the terrified boy.
“Tommy,” Hawkeye said, his voice dropping the usual sarcastic edge. It was smooth, steady, the voice he used when holding a dying boy’s hand. “Tommy, look at me.”
“I’m crazy, Captain! I’m legally insane! Write it down!”
“I know you’re terrified, Tommy,” Hawkeye said softly. “You think you’re the only one who hates this draft? You think I want to be here, wrist-deep in somebody else’s spleen, while I could be in Maine eating lobster and chasing nurses? We’re all obsessed with getting out of here. Every single one of us.”
“But they’re dying out there!” Jitters screamed, the flame of the Zippo wavering precariously close to the crate. “I can’t be in this war! I can’t look at it!”
“If you burn that morphine, you’re going to make us look at it without being able to stop the pain,” Hawkeye said, his tone turning fiercely serious. “There are boys on those choppers right now, guys just like you, drafted from hardware stores and farms. They are bleeding, Tommy. And if you burn that medicine, they are going to scream in agony until they die. Is that what you want? To torture boys who are just as scared as you are?”
The words hung in the air, piercing through the boy’s panic. Jitters looked down at the lighter, then out at the helipad, where corpsmen were already hauling bloody stretchers toward the pre-op ward. The reality of the war was crashing into his perfectly constructed wall of fake insanity.
The flame shook. Jitters sobbed, a dry, racking sound. With a sharp click, he closed the Zippo.
“Open the door, son,” Potter said quietly.
A moment later, the padlock clicked, and the door swung open. Hawkeye immediately grabbed the young private by the shoulders, pulling him out while Radar rushed in to grab the morphine crates.
“Take him to the mess tent, give him coffee. Do not let Frank near him,” Hawkeye ordered a passing corpsman, before sprinting back toward the O.R.
The next twelve hours were a blur of blood, sweat, and the sickly sweet smell of ether. It was a “meatball surgery” session—patch them up fast, stop the bleeding, and move them to post-op to make room for the next one. The draft was no longer a political debate or a phobia; it was a physical reality laid bare on their operating tables.
Around hour ten, they were desperately short-handed. An orderly had passed out from exhaustion. Margaret looked around frantically. “We need hands in here! We need someone to haul these sponges and move the stretchers!”
Father Mulcahy pushed through the double doors, leading a very pale, very quiet Jitters. “I brought the private, Major. He insisted he wanted to help. He said he needed to see it.”
“He’s a malingerer!” Frank shouted over the din, clamping an artery. “Get him out of my O.R. before he infects the sterile field with cowardice!”
“Shut up, Frank,” Hawkeye and B.J. said in unison.
“Put on a mask and get over here, Hayes,” Hawkeye commanded, not looking up from his patient’s chest cavity.
Jitters, looking like a ghost in green scrubs, moved mechanically. He handed instruments, he carried away buckets of bloody gauze, he helped lift the shattered bodies of soldiers no older than himself. He watched Hawkeye frantically massage a boy’s heart, only to watch the monitor flatline. He saw the grim, stoic tears in Margaret’s eyes as she covered a face with a sheet.
The act was over. The obsession with the draft, the fake crazy routines, the rubber chickens—it all burned away in the harsh light of the operating room. He wasn’t faking anymore. He was absorbing the sheer, unadulterated trauma of the 4077th.
As the last patient was wheeled out, a heavy silence fell over the O.R., save for the hiss of the sterilizer. Frank, peeling off his bloody gloves, decided to twist the knife.
“Well, I hope you enjoyed the show, Private,” Frank sneered, pointing a finger at the exhausted kid. “This is what real men do while you cry in the mud and beg for a ticket home. You’re a disgrace.”
Jitters stood perfectly still. The terrified, manic energy was gone, replaced by a hollow, vacant stare. He slowly reached over to a tray of unsterilized surgical instruments. His hand, which had been trembling for two days straight, was now dead still.
His fingers closed around the handle of a heavy, metal rib spreader. He slowly turned toward Major Burns, his eyes utterly dead.
“Oh, dear God,” B.J. whispered, freezing in place.
Jitters raised the heavy metal tool, not with a frantic scream, but with an eerie, silent intent.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
