MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

by Richard Hooker

  The balloons on Ugly’s intratracheal tubes, like all balloons, kept blowing out. The supply of new tubes was limited or nonexistent, for reasons never quite clear, so it was up to Captain Black to keep them in constant repair. There was only one source of new balloons.

  Every week or ten days the PX received a shipment of the various things PX’s receive shipments of. This always caused a line to form, and the line always included most of the nurses. At the head of the line, however, would be Ugly John Black. As the PX opened for business, Ugly John would step up and announce in a loud, clear, purposeful voice: “I’ll take sixty rubber contraceptive devices. I hope to hell they’re better than the last batch. They all leaked.” Then he’d turn around and look austerely at the interested throng, few of who knew what he did with sixty such items a week.

  When not working or blending intratracheal tubes and contraceptives into efficient units, Ugly was known to have a drink or two. In these situations, he usually wound up in The Swamp and vented his spleen upon the entire medical profes­sion of the British Empire.

  “Those lousy bastards!” he would yell. “There isn’t a god­damned one of them would shake hands with his grandmother. He’d rather knock her on her ass with half a grain of morphine and then drown her with a cup of tea.”

  Such a man was bound to be held in high esteem by the Swampmen and was considered a warm and welcome friend. Actually, the incident involving Hawkeye and Ugly John was a minor one—at least, as it concerned them—but it was the first sign of things to come.

  In The Swamp, every problem case ever done at the 4077th was discussed, dissected and analyzed from every possible angle and in every conceivable detail. The Deluge had left much for discussion, and two nights after its end the Swamp-men were thus engaged when the door opened and a corpsman stuck his head in.

  “Hey, Hawkeye,” he said, “they want you in the OR.”

  “I’m not on duty. Tell them to go fry their asses.”

  “The Colonel says to get your ass over there.”

  “OK.”

  Over in the OR, two of the night shift had the typical difficult war surgical problem with major wounds of chest, abdomen and extremities. The abdominal wounds alone made it a bad risk, and there was little margin for error. They needed help and advice. Hawkeye scrubbed up and was briefed by Ugly John.

  “So how much blood,” Hawkeye wanted to know, “did they give him before they started operating?”

  “One pint,” said Ugly.

  “For Chrissake, John, why in hell do you let these cowboys start a case like this on one pint?”

  “Well,” Ugly started to say, “they …”

  “Look, goddamit,” Hawkeye went on. “You know as well as I do he should have had another hour and at least three pints before they brought him in here. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?”

  “I can’t do everything around here,” Ugly said. “I’m just the goddamned anesthesiologist.”

  “That doesn’t stop you from thinking, does it?”

  “The surgeons said he was ready,” Ugly said. “These guys have been doing OK, so I haven’t been arguing with them …”

  “Then don’t argue with me,” Hawkeye said.

  “So you’re right,” Ugly said, “but I’ll tell you this. You’re getting pretty hard to live with, Pierce.”

  “And that kid on the table may be pretty hard for someone to live without,” Hawkeye said.

  Then he got into the case and took it over. He concluded it as quickly as possible. He used every trick he’d learned in ten months of war surgery, and then he called in Dago Red to put in a fix.

  “Please, Red,” he said, “bring him in.”

  Too much is too much. Despite all efforts and fixes, the boy died an hour after surgery.

  Father Mulcahy led Captain Pierce to Father Mulcahy’s tent, gave him a cigarette and a canteen half full of Scotch and water. Lying on Red’s sack, Hawkeye dragged on the butt, swallowed the drink and said, “Red, my curve’s hanging, and I lost the hop on my fast ball.”

  “Speak English, Hawk. Maybe I can help you.”

  “Listen to Losing Preacher Mulcahy,” Hawkeye said. “You’d like to get me snapping the mackerel, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, come off it, Hawk,” Dago Red said. “You know me too well to say something like that.”

  “Yes, I do, Red. I’m sorry. I seem to be a little overex­tended these days, but I’ll get over it. I can be a little nutty now and then, but I ain’t a nut.”

  “I know you’re not,” Dago Red said, “but you people in The Swamp have got to get over the idea that you can save everyone who comes into this hospital. Man. is mortal. The wounded can stand only so much, and the surgeon can do only so much.”

  “Red, that lousy can’t-win-’em-all philosophy is no good. In The Swamp the idea is that if they arrive here alive, they can leave alive if everything is done just right. Obviously this can’t always be, but as an idea it’s better than fair, so spare me all the rationalizations.”

  “Hit the sack, Hawk,” Father Mulcahy said. “You still need sleep.”

  Hawkeye hit the sack, but the sleep he found was troubled and restless. At nine o’clock the next morning he entered the life and abdomen of Captain William Logan.

  Captain William Logan, the still fairly youthful manager of a large supermarket, had joined the Mississippi National Guard soon after his release from five years of service in World War II. When the Mississippi National Guard was summoned to Korea, Captain Logan had left the supermar­ket, his wife, his new set of Ben Hogan matched clubs and his three kids to go with them.

  Captain Logan, Major Lee, who was an undertaker, and Colonel Slocum, who owned the Cadillac distributorship, were all from the same town. They belonged to the same Masonic Lodge and the same country club. Colonel Slocum, Major Lee and Captain Logan were very disturbed the morning the gooks lobbed one in on Captain Logan’s 105mm howitzer battery, and Captain Logan’s abdomen got in the way of a couple of shell fragments.

  When Hawkeye Pierce operated on Captain Logan he had had enough sleep, and too much of everything else. He removed a foot of destroyed small bowel and re-anastomosed it, that is, reunited the ends of the remaining intestine. When done, he thought that the anastomosis might be too tight but he elected to leave it. That was a mistake, but only one of two.

  For the next eight days Captain Logan did poorly. Each day he was worse. Hawkeye watched him, worried and worked, and every time he turned around he encountered Colonel Slocum and Major Lee who wanted to know how things were going.

  “Not too well,” Hawkeye kept telling them.

  “Why not?” they asked.

  On the eighth day, they asked three times why things weren’t going too well.

  “Because, goddamn it, I did a lousy anastomosis,” Hawkeye informed them.

  On the ninth day, Hawkeye took Captain Logan, now desperately ill, back to the OR. He fixed the inadequate anastomosis, discovered at the same time that he had missed a hole in his rectum, did a colostomy, and five days later Captain Logan, much improved and out of danger, was evacuated. This was Saturday, and on Saturday night people from everywhere came to the tent which served as an Officers’ Club for the 4077th.

  Hawkeye Pierce, having learned a valuable lesson, having retrieved Captain Logan from the brink but still disgusted with himself, entered. Standing at the bar with a bottle of fine Scotch whiskey were Colonel Slocum and Major Lee, who beckoned to him.

  Hawkeye’s spirits plummeted even lower. His head hung. “The bastards are going to beat me up,” he thought, “and they got a right to.” He walked to the bar and joined them.

  “Captain Pierce,” Colonel Slocum said, handing him a drink, “there’s something we want to tell y’all.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “We want to tell y’all that it makes us men up on the line feel mighty good to know that there are doctors like you around to take care of us if we get hurt.”

&nbs
p; Hawkeye was dumbfounded. He took a big pull on the Scotch and said, “For Christ sake, Colonel, don’t you realize that I blew this one? I almost killed your buddy with bad surgery. I got him out of trouble, but he never shoulda been in it!”

  “We been watchin’ you, Pierce,” Colonel Slocum said, with Major Lee at his side nodding assent. “Y’all worried about that man like he was your own brother, and he’s OK now. That’s all we need to know. We don’t even care if you’re a Yankee. Have another drink, Hawkeye!”

  “Jeezus!” Hawkeye said. He put his glass down on the bar, turned his back on Colonel Slocum and Major Lee, and walked away from them and out the door.

  It was three days later that Trapper John and the Duke caught the kid named Angelo Riccio, out of East Boston.

  Private Riccio didn’t look too bad. He was alert. His pulse was a little rapid. His blood pressure was strong enough at one hundred over eighty. He had a variety of shell fragment wounds, only one of which seemed important.

  Duke Forrest, coming in to work the night shift and drifting down the line of woun­ded, had been unimpressed by Angelo until he saw the X-ray. Angelo’s heart looked too big. Examining the wounds again, Duke decided that one of the shell fragments could have hit the heart, causing hemorrhage into the pericardium, which surrounds and contains it.

  Duke found Trapper John in the mess hall, watching a movie he had already seen twice in the States. Trapper came. He looked at the X-ray, and he and Duke sat down next to Angelo.

  “How do you think the Sox’ll make out this year?” Trapper asked the kid.

  “Without the big guy they got nothin’,” said Angelo, “and the big guy’s over here somewhere.”

  “That’s right,” Trapper said. “Does that make you feel good, knowing that even a guy like that is over here?”

  “Are you kiddin’, Doc?” Angelo said. “I wouldn’t wish this kind of thing on a dog. I’d feel much better if he was back over there bustin’ up a few ball games for us.”

  “Well, he will be again,” Trapper said, “and you’ll be there to see him.”

  “Where you from, Doc?” Angelo asked.

  “Winchester.”

  “You know my cousin, Tony Riccio? He’s about your age.”

  “Sure I know him, Angelo. He caught for Winchester High.”

  “Yeah,” Angelo said. “The Sox were interested in him, and then he threw out his arm.”

  Old Home Week ended.

  “Angelo, we’re going to operate on you,” said Trapper.

  “OK,” Angelo said, “so operate on me. You’re the Doc.”

  Trapper and Duke operated on him. Trapper lined it up ahead of time. “He’s got blood in his pericardium. Before we open it we’ve got to have control of the vena cavae. We’ve got to have plenty of blood. Once we get to the heart we’ve got to close the holes quick or we lose.”

  They did it all as right as they could, but when they opened the pericardium everything went to hell. The shell fragment had made several small holes in the right atrium. Trapper and Duke handled it better than any other two people in Korea could have, but they and Angelo needed three or four more minutes.

  Angelo died. He would never see Ted Williams step to the plate again, and half an hour later Dago Red found Trapper John Mclntyre wandering around in the dark, took him to his tent and gave him a can of beer. Then he went in search of Duke Forrest and found him alone in The Swamp. The Duke had already opened a can of beer, but he wasn’t drinking it. He was crying into it.

  “And a Yankee, too,” the Duke said, to cover his embar­rassment when he looked up and saw Dago Red. “You know somethin’? The way I’m goin’ I shouldn’t even be operatin’ on Yankees.”

  It was obvious that something had to be done for the Swampmen. It was obvious, of course, to Dago Red, and it was obvious to Colonel Blake who realized that he had a serious problem on his hands—his problem boys were too exhausted and too dispirited to create their usual problems. It was also obvious to Radar O’Reilly who, tuned in as he was to everyone, was the most empathic member of the 4077th MASH, and who came up with two solutions.

  The first of these was Dr. R. C. Carroll. Dr. R. C. Carroll had arrived at the Double Natural about five weeks before, was from deepest Oklahoma and somehow, while acquiring a medical education and two years of post-graduate training, had remained curiously unexposed to certain elements of human existence. Trapper John, most urbane of the Swamp-men, had put the handle on Dr. Carroll.

  “I thought I lived with the two biggest rubes in Korea,” Trapper John said, “until this jeeter came along.”

  “Jeeter” became his name. Being new in the outfit he was not yet a member of the inner circle that gathered regularly at The Swamp for a drink before supper, but he did drop in occasionally. One afternoon, during the depth of the depres­sion that followed The Deluge, he knocked on the door and was bade to enter. The Swampmen were alone.

  “Excuse me,” Jeeter said, “but Corporal O’Reilly said you fellas wanted to see me,”

  “Radar,” said Hawkeye, who had been mooning into his martini, “must have his wavelengths mixed.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to Captain Pierce,” Trapper John said, handing Jeeter a water glass filled with a martini he had mixed for himself. “Sit down and have a drink.”

  “What is it?” Jeeter inquired.

  “A martini, more or less,” Trapper said.

  “It looks like water,” Jeeter said.

  “That’s right,” Trapper said, “and it’s sort of like water, but you don’t drink it when you’re thirsty.”

  “Right,” the Duke said.

  “Oh,” Jeeter said.

  Perhaps Jeeter was thirsty. He finished the drink in five minutes and indicated his need for another. Trapper gave him another, although somewhat reluctantly.

  “You know somethin’?” Jeeter said.

  “What?” the Duke said.

  “Ah only been here a little over a month,” Jeeter said, “but ah’m hornier than a bitch in heat.”

  “Good,” the Duke said.

  “Yeah,” Hawkeye said. “That just indicates you’re healthy.”

  “Oh,” Jeeter said.

  “So what’s your problem?” Hawkeye said.

  “Well,” Jeeter said, “what do ah do?”

  “Did you ever think of the nurses?” Hawkeye said.

  “All the time, but ah figured they were all took or didn’t put out.”

  “I’ll give you a word on nurses, Jeeter,” volunteered Cap­tain Pierce. “They’re human, just like us.”

  “Oh,” Jeeter said.

  “Some of them do all of the time, some of them do some of the time, and observation over a period of many months convinces me that very few of them are queer.”

  “Oh,” Jeeter said, halfway through his second martini now, “but how do ah go about it?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Trapper. “Captain Pierce, here, seems to be the big authority.”

  “Well,” Hawkeye said, warming to the assignment, “there are two methods. One is the simple, staid, stateside, hack­neyed, civilian approach where you devote all your spare time for a week, softening the broad up with drinks, eating with her, taking her to Seoul on her day off, to our so-called Officers’ Club on Saturday night, getting her stoned and then escorting her to a tent or down to the river with a blanket.”

  “Oh,” Jeeter said.

  “But if you go with the blanket,” Hawkeye said, “under no circumstances should you proceed more than ten yards north from the O Club because you might place the blanket on top of a mine. An exploding mine may give the protagonist and his partner the impression that he’s Thor, the God of Thun­der, but actually it’s the worst form of coitus interruptus.”

  “Right,” the Duke said.

  “And, of course,” Hawkeye said, “this method doesn’t guarantee success. You may strike out. The flower of feminin­ity you select may require not one but two weeks of cultiva­tion, and then you run
into the law of diminishing returns. Our leading tacticians recommend a week at the outside for this method.”

  “Oh,” Jeeter said, indicating a desire for martini number three, “but what’s the second method?”

  “The second method is quicker and statistically almost as sound. You talk to the broad for a few minutes in some social situation, preferably over a drink, and you say, ’Honey, let’s go somewhere and tear off a piece.’ Either she says OK, or she takes off like a candy-assed baboon. The big plus of this method is that you either score fast or lose fast, and if you lose you can go on to the next blossom without further waste of time, effort and good booze.”

  “But which do you recommend?” asked Jeeter.

  “Well, I don’t really know,” said Hawkeye. “This is mostly theory with me. What do you think, Trapper?”

  “Well,” Trapper said, “maybe he should announce his avail­ability. Most of them will be in the mess hall swilling coffee, so let’s go eat.”

  Jeeter, by now finding even ambulation a difficult exercise, was assisted to the door of the mess hall. Most of the nurses were indeed present, and Jeeter, silhouetted in the doorway but with the Swampmen out of sight on either side of him, made his announcement.

  “Ah’m gonna screw every goddam nurse in the place!” he proclaimed loudly.

  “Starting with Hot-Lips Houlihan,” Trapper John whis­pered to him.

  “Startin’ with Hot-Lips Houlihan!” Jeeter shouted.

  The Swampmen did not follow him in. They went back to The Swamp, had a short one and ate later. The next morning Jeeter knew only that he felt terrible and, after Colonel Blake had chewed him out, that he was in disgrace. It remained for Roger the Dodger Danforth, in a matter of hours, to take him off the hook.

  Roger the Dodger Danforth was a surgeon at the 6073rd MASH, twenty-five miles to the East. Roger and Ugly John Black had trained together in the States, so Roger and the Swampmen were all well acquainted. In fact, they shared a mutual disrespect for most things held dear by others and a mutual respect for each other, and although Roger the Dodger was not considered, by observers of both phenomena, to be a greater menace than the three members of The Swamp, he was held to be at least their equal.