“Get him on table three!” Potter barked, instantly snapping out of the eerie silence that had overtaken the OR. “Pierce, you take him. Margaret, assist. Frank, finish closing up that leg.”

Hawkeye moved to the table, his eyes locked on the shattered guitar resting precariously on the soldier’s chest. “Someone get Les Paul’s lumber out of the sterile field before Frank tries to court-martial it for being out of uniform,” Hawkeye ordered.

A medic gently pried the broken instrument from the boy’s grip and set it on a side table. As he did, Hawkeye noticed a thick, insulated wire trailing from the guitar’s acoustic pickup, snaking down the stretcher, and terminating in a military-issue field radio transmitter strapped to the boy’s belt.

“…and you can do the same thing if you please…” the speaker in the corner hummed softly.

“He… he wired his guitar into his unit’s comms,” Radar whispered, standing in the doorway, staring wide-eyed. “He must have been broadcasting on an open frequency. When the PA system picked up the ambient radio waves after the tape deck blew… it patched him straight through to our speakers.”

“Fascinating technical achievement, Corporal,” Hawkeye said, his voice completely devoid of humor as he grabbed a scalpel. “Now go find me four units of O-negative so I can make sure Marconi here lives long enough to get a Grammy. Scalpel.”

Margaret slapped the blade into his hand. For once, she wasn’t yelling about regulations. She looked down at the boy’s face. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen. His face was covered in a mix of dirt, grease, and the pale, waxy sheen of severe hemorrhagic shock.

“Chest tube, Margaret. We need to reinflate that right lung before he drowns in his own blood,” Hawkeye instructed, working rapidly.

“It’s a localized chest wound,” Margaret observed, her voice tight, professional. “Looks like shrapnel. Narrow entry, but it tore through the intercostal muscle.”

“He was playing,” Hawkeye said suddenly.

“What?” Margaret asked, handing him a clamp.

“Look at his fingers,” Hawkeye nodded toward the boy’s left hand, which hung limply off the side of the table. The tips of his fingers were heavily calloused, but more tellingly, they were sliced open, bleeding fresh red blood that didn’t match the dried, dark blood on his uniform. “He was holding chords when the shell hit. The shrapnel took out the neck of the guitar and his hand at the same time.”

Frank Burns scoffed from the next table. “Serves him right. Playing a guitar in a combat zone. Probably gave away his unit’s position to the enemy. Dereliction of duty, I say!”

Potter didn’t even look up from his surgery. “Major Burns, if you say one more word that doesn’t pertain to human anatomy, I will personally assign you to latrine duty until the next ice age. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Frank squeaked.

Hawkeye dug deep into the boy’s chest cavity, his fingers searching blindly through the warm, slick blood for the source of the bleeding. The song on the PA seemed to swell, filling the canvas room.

“The sword of time will pierce our skins… it doesn’t hurt when it begins…”

“Talk about on the nose,” Hawkeye grunted, finally clamping down on a pulsing artery. “Got it. Suction, Margaret. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

As the blood cleared, the damage became apparent. It was bad, but fixable. However, the physical wound wasn’t what was bothering Hawkeye. It was the psychological one. He looked up at the speaker, then back down at the boy.

“Why this song?” Hawkeye murmured, almost to himself, as he began the meticulous work of stitching the torn vessels. “You’re sitting in a foxhole, freezing to death, waiting for someone to blow you up. Why write a song about giving up?”

“Maybe he wasn’t giving up, Pierce,” Potter said softly from across the room. “Maybe he was just trying to find a way to take the power back.”

Hawkeye paused, a needle suspended mid-air. “Take the power back?”

“When everything around you is chaos, when the army tells you when to sleep, when to eat, and when to die… maybe singing about checking out on your own terms is the only way a kid can feel like he has a choice,” Potter explained, his wise, tired eyes meeting Hawkeye’s. “It’s not about actually doing it. It’s about knowing you could.”

Hawkeye looked back down at the boy. The bleeding had stopped. His vitals, called out in a monotone by the anesthesiologist, were stabilizing. The kid was going to make it. He was going to wake up in a hospital bed in Tokyo, missing a chunk of his lung and a few fingertips, but he was going to breathe.

“Well,” Hawkeye sighed, tying the final knot. “I hope he appreciates the irony. He sings about a painless suicide, and we drag his ass back to life through the most painful process imaginable. Meatball surgery.”

“Close him up, Captain,” Margaret said softly. Her eyes were strangely bright.

An hour later, the last of the wounded were wheeled into Post-Op. The sun was just beginning to rise over the jagged peaks of Uijeongbu, casting a sickly grey light over the 4077th.

Hawkeye walked out of the OR, stripping off his blood-soaked gown. The freezing morning air hit him, but he barely felt it. He walked over to the mess tent, desperate for a cup of coffee that tasted like battery acid.

As he approached, he saw Radar standing near the garbage cans, holding the splintered remains of the acoustic guitar.

“What are you doing with that, Radar?” Hawkeye asked, his voice hoarse.

“I don’t know, sir,” Radar admitted, looking at the broken wood. “I unhooked his radio transmitter so the PA would finally shut up. But… I didn’t want to just throw the guitar away. It feels… disrespectful, you know?”

Hawkeye walked over and gently took the broken neck of the guitar. He looked at the severed strings, curling like dead vines.

“Keep it, Radar,” Hawkeye said quietly. “Put it in his personal effects. When he wakes up, tell him the doctors at the 4077th saved his life. But tell him… tell him we liked his song.”

Radar nodded, clutching the broken instrument to his chest. “Yes, sir.”

Hawkeye turned and walked toward the Swamp, the silence of the morning feeling heavier than the roar of the choppers. The PA system was finally quiet. But as he pushed the tent flap open, he could still hear the melody echoing in his own head, a permanent ghost in the mud of Korea.

“Suicide is painless… it brings on many changes… and I can take or leave it… if I please.”

Hawkeye poured himself a large glass of gin, sat on his cot, and raised the glass to the empty tent.

“To choices,” he whispered, and drank it down.