“…I don’t know who I am, Major, but I’m absolutely certain you have the bedside manner of a rusty bayonet.”
The Post-Op tent fell dead silent. Even the groans of the other recovering wounded seemed to pause out of sheer respect for the insult.
Frank Burns’ face cycled through the colors of the American flag before settling on a furious, mottled purple. He instinctively reached for his empty holster. “Insolence! Insubordination! I’ll have you court-martialed, soldier! I’ll have you shot for treason and then demoted!”
“Calm down, Frank, you’ll burst a blood vessel and I don’t have the patience to mop you up,” Hawkeye Pierce said, handing the kid a canteen cup of water. He turned to Margaret, whose nostrils were flaring dangerously. “You have to admit, Margaret, for a guy with no brain cells currently on speaking terms, his diagnostic skills are impeccable.”
“This is a mockery of army discipline!” Margaret hissed. “Colonel Potter will hear about this!”
“I already hear about it, Major. You two are louder than a dyspeptic howitzer.” Colonel Sherman T. Potter strolled into the tent, riding crop tucked under his arm, his seasoned eyes scanning the room. He walked up to bed four and looked down at the boy. The kid couldn’t have been older than nineteen. His eyes were wide, terrified, and completely empty of personal history.
“Report, Pierce,” Potter ordered, his tone softening just a fraction.
“Traumatic retrograde amnesia, Colonel,” Hawkeye sighed, the sarcastic armor dropping for a brief medical second. “Physically, he’s a lucky boy. A piece of shrapnel grazed his temporal lobe. It rang his bell pretty good, but no severe structural damage. Psychologically? The lights are on, but nobody’s got the forwarding address. He doesn’t know his name, his unit, or why he’s wearing olive drab in a mud puddle.”
“He’s a communist infiltrator!” Frank interjected, leaning in close. “He’s probably a spy sent to sabotage our surgical supply lines!”
“Right, Frank,” Hawkeye nodded gravely. “Because the Kremlin’s master plan is to infiltrate our camp and steal your secret stash of comic books and hair pomade.”
Potter rubbed his chin. “What’s the treatment, Hawkeye?”
“Time, mostly. A familiar smell, a sound, a taste. Sometimes the brain just unplugs the switchboard when it sees something it doesn’t want to process. The trauma forces a hard reset.”
“Well, get him out of my Post-Op as soon as he can walk,” Potter commanded. “We need the beds. Radar is checking with I-Corps to see if any units are missing a stray pup. Until then, Pierce, he’s your project. Just… try not to teach him too many of your bad habits.”
Over the next forty-eight hours, Hawkeye and the Swamp inhabitants took it upon themselves to ‘rehabilitate’ the John Doe, whom they had affectionately dubbed “Smitty.”
Hawkeye’s therapy involved dragging Smitty into the Swamp, sitting him in front of the makeshift still, and offering him a martini.
“Drink this,” Hawkeye ordered. “If you’re a civilized human being, you’ll complain about the lack of vermouth. If you’re a barbarian, you’ll ask for an olive.”
Smitty took a sip, grimaced, and coughed. “It tastes like iodine and despair.”
“He’s a poet!” Hawkeye rejoiced.
But despite the jokes, the tragedy of the situation hung heavily over the camp. Here was a boy stripped of his identity by a senseless war. He didn’t know if he had a mother worrying back in Ohio, a girl waiting in Brooklyn, or a dog sleeping on a porch in Texas. He was a blank slate, a ghost haunting his own body.
On the third day, Hawkeye was sitting in the mess tent, watching Smitty push a beige lump of what the Army legally called ‘creamed chipped beef’ around his tin tray.
Suddenly, the camp’s PA system crackled to life. Attention all personnel, incoming wounded. Choppers arriving in five minutes. Choppers arriving in five minutes.
The distant, rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack of Huey blades began to echo over the mountains. It was a sound that usually brought dread, adrenaline, and exhaustion to the 4077th.
But Smitty reacted differently. As the sound of the choppers grew louder, his hands began to shake violently. He dropped his fork. His breathing grew shallow and rapid. He stood up, his eyes locked onto the sky outside the tent, but he wasn’t seeing the Korean horizon. He was seeing a memory.
Hawkeye rushed over. “Smitty? Hey, kid, look at me. You’re safe. You’re in a hospital.”
Smitty didn’t hear him. He grabbed Hawkeye by the lapels of his surgical gown, his knuckles white, his eyes filled with absolute, unadulterated horror.
“The bridge…” Smitty whispered, his voice trembling. “They blew the bridge… They’re all in the water… Oh god, the water is red…”
Before Hawkeye could ask him what bridge, Smitty’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed dead away onto the muddy floor.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
