MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

by Richard Hooker

  “Thank God,” Colonel Blake would say, after Roger the Dodger’s visits, “that that sonofabitch isn’t assigned here, too.”

  On the day following Jeeter’s pronunciamento in the por­tal of the mess hall, Roger the Dodger arrived about noon. Hawkeye had just finished amputating the leg of the only cus­tomer of the morning—a Korean who had thought himself immune to minefields—and he had gone to the mess tent for a light lunch.

  “Where are the boys?” he asked Dago Red.

  “Roger the Dodger is here,” Dago Red said. “He and Ugly and your boys are over in The Swamp, and may the Lord have mercy on us all.”

  “Second the motion,” Hawkeye said, “and I better have a large lunch.”

  After the large lunch, Hawkeye headed for The Swamp with an equal mixture of anticipation and reluctance. Halfway across the ball field that separated The Swamp from the mess tent he was greeted by Roger the Dodger, who stood in the doorway of The Swamp with a glass in his hand and yelled: “Hi, Hawkeye, you old shitkicker! Screw the Regular Army! How they goin’?”

  “Finest kind,” Hawkeye said.

  “Have a drink,” Roger the Dodger invited. “Brung two bottles of my own.”

  “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” Hawkeye wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” Roger the Dodger said. “All I know is, last night I had a call from some goddam Colonel O’Reilly who said to come …”

  “Who?” Hawkeye said.

  “I don’t know,” Roger the Dodger said. “The only O’Reilly you got in this outfit is some corporal looks like a goddamn weathervane. What difference does it make? Have a drink.”

  “I just might,” Hawkeye said.

  They all had several, and a glow of amiable incandescence began to suffuse The Swamp. All might have gone well, except that Roger the Dodger, apparently the recipient of a call to take this light out into the world, insisted on stepping to the door every fifteen minutes to yell: “Screw the Regular Army!”

  Daily at 3:00 p.m., and for an hour, the showers at the 4077th MASH were reserved for the nurses. The nurses, some past the first bloom of youth, some not on diets, had to pass The Swamp en route to and from their ablutions, and it was a portion of this processional that crossed the field of vision of Roger the Dodger on one of his trips outdoors to exhort the populace to violation.

  “All the nurses,” Roger the Dodger yelled now, “are ele­phants!”

  Then he switched the call to: “All the elephants have clap!”

  “And Hot-Lips Houlihan,” Trapper John suggested, “is the head mahout, and must be held responsible.”

  “And Hot-Lips Houlihan,” Roger the Dodger yelled, “is the head mahout, and must be held responsible!”

  That had the expected result. For the past two hours Colonel Henry Blake had been sitting in his tent listening to the exhortations and hoping against hope. He had called in Father John Patrick Mulcahy and, over beers, they had discussed possibilities.

  “Frankly,” Colonel Blake had said, “I’m scared. Any com­manding officer with half a brain wouldn’t let this go on.”

  “I disagree with you, Colonel,” Father Mulcahy had said. “Something had to break, and I was afraid it was going to be our friends over there.”

  “I know,” the Colonel said. “The other day that Duke called me ’sir.’ At any moment I’ve been expecting Hawkeye Pierce to salute me. They’re not well, I tell you. They’ve been pressed too hard, and that’s why I let that Roger the Dodger in there again. Something’s got to happen.”

  “And it’s about to,” Father Mulcahy said as the two, aghast, heard Roger the Dodger invoke the name of the Chief Nurse. “I think I’ll go over to my place, or would you rather I stay?”

  “No,” Colonel Blake said. “It’s all my fault, so I’ll handle this Amazon alone.”

  Father Mulcahy had no sooner departed than Major Margaret Houlihan arrived. She arrived right from the show­ers, the ends of her hair still wet and the strap of her shower cap trailing from one end of her rolled towel. She was irate, and try as he might, Henry could not tune her out.

  “This isn’t a hospital,” he heard his Chief Nurse screaming at him. “It’s an insane asylum, and you’re to blame …”

  “Now, just a minute, Major,” Henry started to say. “You …”

  “Don’t you minute-major me,” his Chief Nurse went on. “If you don’t stop those beasts, those THINGS, that one they call Trapper John from addressing me as Hot-Lips and stir­ring up those others, I’m going to resign my commission and …”

  “Oh, goddammit, Hot-Lips,” Henry heard himself saying, “resign your goddamn commission, and get the hell out of here!”

  Five minutes later, Radar O’Reilly was awakened from a sound sleep. He was awakened by a telephone conversation between Major Houlihan and General Hammond, in which Major Houlihan was pouring out a lively story of a military hospital with everything out of control. This was followed by a conversation between General Hammond and Colonel Blake, in which Radar heard General Hammond say: “Hen­ry, for Christ’s sake, what the hell’s going on up there? You get down here tomorrow morning at 0930, and your story better be a goddamn good one.”

  Radar hastened to The Swamp. By now Roger the Dodger, having added another chapter to his legend, had departed for his hospital, leaving the Swampmen and Ugly John to clean up the carnage. Radar filled them in on what he had heard.

  “You know, Henry might really be in trouble,” Hawkeye said, after Radar had finished his report and left. “That damn fool nurse has finally become a real menace.”

  “That’s right,” the Duke said.

  “Trapper,” Hawkeye said, “why do you always have to call her ’Hot-Lips’?”

  “I don’t always have to call her ’Hot-Lips.’ This morning I was nice to her. I called her ’Major Hot-Lips’.”

  “What’ll we do?” asked the Duke.

  “Well,” Trapper said, “I guess that if I hadn’t called that bomber ’Hot-Lips’ and then treed her with Jeeter and Roger the Dodger, the General wouldn’t be on Henry’s ass. There­fore, I’ll go down and square it with the General.”

  “We’ll go with you!” chorused Forrest and Pierce.

  They made an appointment with the General for nine o’clock the next morning but appeared in his outer office at eight-thirty. They were wearing fatigues that had that lived-in look, without insignia, and they sat down on the bench that ran along one wall. Three quite attractive members of the Women’s Army Corps—a lieutenant and two sergeants— occupied the working space of this outer part of the General’s sanctum.

  “Well,” Trapper John said, after a few minutes, “shall we?”

  “Why not?” Hawkeye Pierce said.

  Each of the Swampmen produced from the recesses of his clothing a bottle labeled Johnny Walker Black Label. Earlier, back at the Double Natural, these bottles had been filled with tea by Sergeant Mother Divine, and now Duke Forrest rose from the bench and approached the WAC lieutenant.

  “Y’all got any paper cups, honey?” he asked politely.

  Confused, the lieutenant produced paper cups. The cups were filled, and cigarettes were lighted.

  “Think the broads might like some tea?” wondered Trapper John in a stage whisper.

  “They ain’t broads,” answered Hawkeye. “They’re two sergeants and a lieutenant.”

  “Which are higher, sergeants or captains?” inquired the Duke. “Do we outrank them?”

  “I dunno,” said Trapper.

  “Even if they outrank us, they might like some tea,” said Hawkeye.

  Duke rose again, the complete southern gentleman.

  “Pardon, ladies, but would y’all care for some tea?”

  “No, thank you,” the lieutenant answered frostily.

  The Swampmen sipped their tea in silence. Suddenly, the silence was shattered by Trapper John: “I bet generals get plenty.”

  The lieutenant shot from behind her desk.

  “W
ho are you people?” she demanded in great indignation.

  “Don’t get overheated, honey,” Hawkeye said. “We’re just a bunch of screwups from up the line. We gotta see the General at nine o’clock, civilian time, to chew him out.”

  “The General is supposed to see three medical officers at nine o’clock,” she snapped, regaining a trace of composure.

  “That’s us, ma’am,” spoke up Duke Forrest. “If you ladies don’t happen to feel well, we’d admire to give y’all an examination.”

  Despite the rigid training required to reach officer and upper enlisted rank in the WAC, the lieutenant and her troops were totally unprepared for this sort of situation. They desert­ed in the face of the enemy.

  “Must be a coffee break,” observed Hawkeye.

  After a few minutes of idle chatter, the Swampmen found time hanging heavy. Hawkeye produced a pair of dice and a crap game started.

  At eight fifty-nine General Hammond arrived. As he walked through the outer sanctum toward his inner sanctum he was annoyed to find his secretarial force gone, and the spectacle of three disheveled crapshooters and three bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label annoying him even more.

  “Hiya, General, how they goin’?” Hawkeye inquired.

  The General stood transfixed.

  “The Duke’s trying to make a four,” Trapper John in­formed the General.

  “Little Joe,” Duke begged the dice.

  “Duke can’t make fours,” Hawkeye assured the General. “He’ll crap out in a minute and we’ll be with you.”

  Duke sevened and stood up. “Nice to see y’all, General,” he said. “Y’all sure got it knocked—three nice lookin’ WAC’s workin’ for y’all, and comin’ to work in the middle of the mornin’.”

  “We got here early,” Trapper John explained, “because we spent the night in a whorehouse, and we had to get out before the day shift took over. Have a shot of tea?”

  He offered his bottle to the General. The General remained transfixed.

  “Come in,” he finally commanded. Followed by the Swampmen, the General stalked into his office. Safely behind his desk, the General scowled at them.

  “I’ve heard about you people,” he said, “but I didn’t really believe it. Now I do.”

  “You got some nice looking stuff working in your office, General,” Hawkeye said.

  “Shut up!” roared the General.

  “General,” Trapper said, “I’d like to change the tenor of this interview and be very serious. We’ve been in every hospital you have. The 4077th is the best you’ve ever had, and the biggest reason is Colonel Henry Braymore Blake. It was me that got that dizzy nurse mad when Henry had already had more than any of us needed. Do anything you want with us, but you’d be a damn fool to get rid of your best MASH commander because Hot-Lips Houlihan doesn’t like her name.”

  The General grunted, took a nervous sip of water and lit a cigarette.

  “Do you men really mean it?”

  “General,” said Hawkeye, “we know what we’re talking about. We’ve seen more of the inside of these places than you have. We wouldn’t be going out of our way for a Christless Regular Army Colonel if we didn’t mean it! Begging your pardon, of course, General. I forgot.”

  “I’ll bet,” said the General, thinking hard now. “Suppose I replaced Henry with someone else? What would happen?” “The guy’d never last,” Trapper John informed him. “Positively not,” Hawkeye said. “Right,” the Duke said.

  “OK,” said the General. “I appreciate your coming. Don’t worry about Henry.”

  The Swampmen scurried out one door, just before a harassed, scared and premature Henry, seemingly hurrying to his own execution, burst through another.

  “Glad to see you, Henry,” the General greeted him. “I probably shouldn’t have made you come all the way down here. Fact is, I’m bored with the company around here. I wanted someone to have a couple of drinks and some lunch with.”

  “But what about Major Houlihan?” gulped Henry.

  “You mean Hot-Lips?” asked the General. “Screw her.”

  “N-n-no th-thanks, G-General,” replied Henry.

  11

  the temperature at noon, day after day, was between 95° and 100°. The temperature at midnight, night after night, was between 90° and 95°. As the tempo of the war picked up again, the wounded soldiers kept corning by ambulance and helicopter, and the Double Natural was too busy and too hot.

  Surgery in the steaming heat beneath the tin roof of the Quonset hut was hard on the surgeons and not good for the patients. Both lost fluids and electrolytes. Captain Ugly John Black, the anesthesiologist, claimed that after any long case the patient, who’d been receiving the appropriate intravenous fluids, was usually healthier than the surgeon. Sleep for the weary workers was absolutely necessary but nearly impos­sible, particularly for the Swampmen, who were working the night shift and trying to sleep during the day. They gave up any idea of sleeping in The Swamp. Instead they went to the river a few hundred yards north, launched air mattresses, and slept half submerged, in the shade of the railroad bridge where the gentle current kept them wedged against the pilings.

  Then two things happened. First, the fighting and therefore the surgery slacked off. Second, Colonel Henry Blake was sent to Japan for temporary duty at the Tokyo Army Hospital and replaced for the three weeks by Colonel Horace DeLong, another Regular Army doctor whose permanent assignment was at the Tokyo Army Hospital.

  The period of hard work and the heat had put tempers on edge. About midnight, soon after Colonel DeLong arrived, a soldier was brought in with shell fragment wounds involving his belly and chest. The chest wounds weren’t major but still required that a drainage tube be inserted in the chest for re-expansion of the lung. The abdominal wounds were major, but routine for the organization—the kind of case demanding a sensible plan of preoperative preparation, well controlled anesthesia, reasonably rapid, technically careful surgery, and an awareness, as Captain Hawkeye Pierce had learned again in the case of Captain William Logan, of how easy it is to miss one little hole in the bowel when there are ten or twelve.

  Hawkeye Pierce was the gunner again in this one. He saw the X-rays, looked at the patient, knew what had to be done and when would be the best time to do it. He and Ugly John figured this would be about 3:00 a.m., after the patient had had some blood, after the closed thoracotomy had had its effect, and after the patient’s pulse and blood pressure had stabilized.

  By one-thirty there were indications that the patient was coming around and that 3:00 a.m. was a fairly shrewd call. At one-thirty, Hawkeye Pierce stepped into the Painless Pol­ish Poker and Dental Clinic to pass the time until the knife dropped. At one-forty-five Colonel DeLong entered the Clinic and carried on as became his rank.

  “Captain Pierce,” he stated, “you have a seriously wound­ed patient for whom you are responsible. I find you in a poker game.”

  Hawkeye knew the Colonel had years and overall experi­ence on him, but he also knew that few people had the reflexes for this kind of surgery unless they’d been doing it day in and day out for a while. He understood the Colonel’s unhappiness but, choosing to be unpleasant and uncooper­ative, he answered, “You betcher ass, Dad.”

  “What?” said the Colonel.

  “Gimme three,” said Hawkeye to Captain Waldowski.

  The Painless Pole gave him three.

  “Pierce,” yelled Colonel DeLong, “the soldier requires emergency surgery.”

  “You betcher ass, Colonel.”

  “Well, Captain, are you going to take care of your patient, or are you going to play poker?”

  “I’m going to play poker until 3:00 A.M. or until the patient is adequately prepared for surgery. However, if you’d like to operate on him yourself right now, be my guest, Colonel. I get the same pay whether I work or not.”

  The Colonel just stood there. Hawkeye held a pair of aces, didn’t draw anything worth while, waited till the bet came to him and dr
opped out, knowing by then that the Painless Pole had filled either a straight or a flush.

  The Colonel still stood there. Hawkeye lit a cigarette and ignored him. The Colonel said, “Pierce, I want to talk to you.”

  Hawkeye said, “Look, Delong, my mood and my tenure of office in this organization add up to I don’t want to talk to you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another Regular Army croaker, and you all give me the red ass except maybe Henry Blake. Why don’t you either take the case yourself or join me at three o’clock?”

  Ignored by the poker players who were more interested in the game than in the side show, Colonel DeLong retreated. At two-forty-five Hawkeye left the game. The patient was taken into the operating area. Ugly John started putting him to sleep.

  “Send for Colonel DeLong,” Hawkeye told a corpsman.

  The Colonel arrived and joined Hawkeye at the scrub sink. Hawkeye was beginning to feel a little contrite.

  “Colonel,” he said, “at one-thirty this guy had had less than a pint of blood, and he’d lost two or three. His pulse then was 120, and his blood pressure was about 90. Now, at three o’clock, he’s had three pints of blood. His pulse is 80 and his blood pressure 120. His collapsed lung is expanded. He’s had a gram of Terramycin intravenously. We can operate on him safely. We should do it quickly, but we don’t have to do it frantically or carelessly.”

  The operation went the usual route. Numerous holes had to be repaired, and one piece of small bowel had to be removed. After an hour all the apparent damage had been corrected.

  “Now, Colonel,” said Hawkeye, “I’m going to sandbag you. Do you figure we’re ready to get out of this belly?”

  “Obviously you don’t think so, and I don’t know why,” admitted Colonel DeLong.

  “Well, Dad, we haven’t found any holes in the large bowel. They’ve all been in the small bowel, but the smell is different. I caught a whiff of large bowel, but it ain’t staring us in the face, right?”