…It was plugged into a tape deck that belonged to Captain “Painless” Waldowski, the camp’s visiting dental officer, who had been brooding in his tent for three days straight after receiving a ‘Dear John’ letter from his fiancée back in Toledo.
“Painless?” Hawkeye muttered, staring at the spinning reels. “The guy pulls molars for a living, you’d think he’d be immune to a little localized agony.”
“Captain Pierce, sir!” Radar squeaked, frantically swatting Frank Burns’s hands away from the amplifier. “I can’t shut it off! The switch is jammed, and Major Burns is trying to pull the grounding wire with his teeth!”
“Stand aside, Corporal!” Frank shrieked, his face a contorted mask of military outrage. “This is a direct violation of Army Regulation 402-B regarding the broadcast of non-regulation pessimistic audio! It’s un-American! It’s subversive! It’s… it’s out of tune!”
“Frank, the only thing out of tune around here is your grasp on reality,” Hawkeye said, calmly stepping between Frank and the sparking machinery. “Leave the wire alone before you fry the only brain cell you have left that knows how to salute.”
“…and I can take or leave it if I please…” the disembodied voice crooned over the loudspeakers, echoing off the surrounding Korean mountains. It was an oddly soothing contrast to the deafening roar of the incoming Bell H-13 helicopters settling onto the helipad.
Colonel Sherman T. Potter strode into the office, still buttoning his uniform, his face like a thundercloud. “What in the name of Marco Polo’s trousers is going on here? Why is my camp sounding like a beatnik coffee house on a rainy Tuesday? We have choppers on the deck, people! Meatball surgery awaits!”
“Colonel!” Frank snapped to attention, nearly gouging his own eye out with a frantic salute. “Captain Pierce and Corporal O’Reilly are engaging in a communist sing-along! I demand they be court-martialed for attempting to lull the camp into a false sense of existential dread!”
“Horse hockey, Major,” Potter barked. “Radar, cut that infernal racket and get on the horn. I need O-negative blood, and I need everyone in the OR five minutes ago.”
“I can’t, Colonel!” Radar cried. “The input jack is welded shut! I think the cold snapped the release pin!”
Hawkeye sighed, looking at the tape deck. “Well, Colonel, it looks like we’re going to be operating to the soothing sounds of a man contemplating his own premature checkout. Frankly, it’s better than listening to Frank whistle ‘Yankee Doodle’ while he stitches.”
“Just get to the scrub room, Pierce. Burns, Houlihan, move it!” Potter ordered, rubbing his temples.
The scene shifted abruptly from the chaotic office to the blinding, sterile (or as sterile as a canvas tent in a mud pit could be) lights of the Operating Room. The smell of ether, iodine, and fresh blood hit them like a physical blow. The PA speaker in the corner of the OR was still faithfully broadcasting Painless’s tape on a loop.
“The game of life is hard to play… I’m gonna lose it anyway…”
“Clamp,” Hawkeye said, holding out a bloody, gloved hand. Nurse Kellye slapped the instrument into his palm. He worked with the practiced, mechanical rhythm of a man who had seen too much flesh torn apart by shrapnel. “You know, the kid has a point. The game is hard to play. Especially when the rulebook is written by generals sitting in a warm office in Washington, using us as the poker chips.”
“Oh, shut up, Pierce,” Major Margaret Houlihan snapped from across the table. She was assisting Frank, who was currently sweating bullets over a routine bowel resection. “Your constant lack of respect for the chain of command is sickening. These men are fighting for freedom!”
“Margaret, this kid on my table is nineteen,” Hawkeye replied, his voice losing its usual sarcastic edge, replaced by a cold, hard exhaustion. “He’s got a piece of a mortar shell in his liver. I don’t think he’s worried about the chain of command right now. I think he’s worried about whether he’s ever going to see a baseball game again.”
“I have the bleeding stopped,” Frank announced proudly, completely missing the emotional weight of the room. “And I did it without listening to this… this defeatist garbage on the radio!”
“Suicide is painless… it brings on many changes…”
“It really is a catchy tune, though,” Hawkeye mused, expertly tying off a bleeder. “I wonder if Painless wrote it himself. If he did, we should get him an agent. Or a psychiatrist. Possibly both, in that order.”
“He’s a dental officer, Pierce,” Potter said from the next table, his hands elbow-deep in a chest cavity. “He shouldn’t be singing about dying. He should be singing about flossing.”
As the hours dragged on, the surgical teams worked in a trance-like state. The endless parade of broken bodies continued to flow through the double doors. The song on the PA system, looping endlessly because no one had the time to go break the machine with a hammer, started to weave its way into the very fabric of the room. It stopped being annoying and became a dark, ironic lullaby for the damned.
It was a stark reminder of the fragile line between life and death that they walked every single day in this muddy hellhole. They were stitching boys back together, only to send them back out to be broken again. The lyrics spoke of a permanent escape, a painless exit from a world that had gone completely mad.
Suddenly, Hawkeye paused. He looked up from the abdomen he was closing.
“Wait a minute,” Hawkeye said, his eyes widening above his surgical mask.
“What is it, Hawk?” asked BJ Hunnicutt’s usual spot, but tonight it was just Hawkeye and Potter leading the line. “You leave a sponge in there?” Potter asked.
“No,” Hawkeye said, stripping off his bloody gloves. “The song. It’s been playing on a loop for four hours. Painless’s tape deck only has a 30-minute capacity per side.”
The entire OR fell silent, save for the rhythmic hiss-click of the anesthesia machines.
“Radar!” Hawkeye yelled toward the scrub room doors.
Radar poked his head in, looking pale. “Yes, sir?”
“Did you figure out a way to flip the tape from the office?”
Radar shook his head slowly. “No, Captain. The tape deck in the office stopped playing three and a half hours ago. The motor burned out.”
Hawkeye stared at the speaker in the corner of the ceiling. The acoustic guitar was still strumming perfectly.
“Then who the hell is broadcasting that song?” Hawkeye whispered.
At that exact moment, the double doors of the OR banged open. Two medics rushed in carrying a stretcher. On it was a soldier, his uniform soaked in blood, a massive chest wound bubbling with every shallow breath. And clutched tightly in his rigid, unconscious hand was an acoustic guitar, its wood splintered by shrapnel.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
