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Ben is going to be on TV. Daniel didn’t even hear it from him; he heard it from Elena Delancey whose son is inexplicably in the air force and who took some flak in the leg and got stitched up at the 8055th and heard there was going to be a news reporter at Ben’s unit, so Daniel asked, and Hawkeye told him, because he always answers if you ask him.
Ben also emphasized, repeatedly, that he understands perfectly well if Daniel has no intention of watching it, but it’s going to be playing at eight o’clock if he wants to get everyone together for a big party. It’s sarcasm, practically dripping off the page like he’s used to since for some reason Ben doesn’t think everyone will drop everything to see him. Everyone does.
Wilfred and Ginny Clark have a television set, and their only daughter is one of Hawkeye’s best and oldest friends, so they have everyone over. Obligingly. They’re thrilled. Everyone’s practically bouncing off the goddamn walls like they don’t remember that Hawk can be kind of a downer sometimes. Like they don’t remember the various Thanksgivings he’s ruined for them, the black eyes he turned up to school with, the waterlogged clothes– Daniel pinches the bridge of his nose to regain his focus. Linda Bates shoves a large bowl of popcorn into his arms and indicates the middle seat on the sofa for him: center stage. He smiles and thanks her anyway.
“Good to see you, Doc,” Bob Tristan from the mechanic’s says with a hearty clap on his shoulder. “Ben on the big screen, huh?”
Wrong and wrong. That’s Hawkeye on the small screen to you. “Pretty big, yeah,” Daniel says. “What is that, twelve whole inches?”
“Don’t stick your foot in it, Dr. Pierce,” Amy says with a grin, coming to scoop a handful of popcorn up before tuning the television.
“How are you doing, Amy, you all right?” he asks her while the picture starts to come in.
“Yeah, Doc, I’m okay. I mean, teaching fractions is murder– well, maybe it’s more like justifiable homicide.”
“I’ll testify on your behalf. Hawk will, too. He’d probably perjure himself just to get a reaction.”
Actually, he probably wouldn’t. Though Ben’s love of truth versus his hatred for authority isn’t a grudge match Daniel would want to have to place a bet on. God, he can’t get his thoughts straight, his mind in focus. He’s kicking himself, but he almost doesn’t want to see Ben until he’s seeing him for real. Of course, he wants to see him more than anything in the world, and he’s about to have concrete proof that he’s basically doing okay. It’s not like they would just broadcast this footage if he was in any real trouble. Right?
It’s like it was only yesterday that he was this kid! This little kid with more energy than he knew what to do with, who lit up bright enough to power the city of Toronto when he made his friends laugh, who climbed trees and toppled out of them and cried his eyes out over his fractured wrist then did the whole thing again the next year because he didn’t get all the way to the top last time. Whatever it is, people have tried to beat it out of him, and for the longest time Daniel was just sure they never would, because they never had. But if anything was going to change him… Ben does not belong in a war zone, and Daniel doesn’t want him to be where he doesn’t belong.
When the program comes on everybody gets hushed like they’re about to watch the Russians launch a fucking dog into space. They’re about to watch some interviews with some tired, miserable people. (Okay, Daniel is curious to see this BJ that Ben hasn’t stopped writing about since he showed up.) He finds himself holding his breath along with the rest of them.
All of a sudden there he is, on the screen.
Oh, God. Hawkeye. My Hawkeye.
Everyone cheers. Everyone laughs at the fact that it’s his picture that comes up after they apologize for bad language. Everyone looks at him knowingly. Daniel smiles and gives an obliging wave. Thanks, ladies and gentleman, thank you very much. Their faces fall fast enough. He doesn’t actually think he’ll be able to bear this. He bears it. It’s Hawkeye.
“Do you see anything good at all coming out of this war?” the interviewer, Roberts, asks him. Everybody waits, breath bated, poised for Hawk’s clever rejoinder.
“Yeah, me, alive. That would be nice, if I could get out of this alive, that would be great.”
Nobody laughs. The mood needs a post mortem. But it’s him. It’s Hawkeye. God, it’s definitely Hawkeye.
“You’ve been here some time.”
“Somewhere between some time and eternity.”
Hawkeye, I love you. I hope you know I love you.
“Is there anything from home that you brought over here to set up for yourself, creature comforts?”
“I brought a– I brought a book over.”
“What book?” Oh, you’re not getting a straight answer from him. Not from my Hawkeye, you’re not.
“The dictionary. I figure it’s got all the other books in it. I like to read the dictionary.”
Daniel gets another clap on the shoulder for that from someone whose face he can’t see in the dark.
“What do you think the most difficult thing was that you had to adjust to over here?”
“I think it’s that everything is painted green.” The black and white and silvery gray Hawkeye on screen makes a small confused expression, like he’s pure authentically baffled by the concept of camouflage. “The food is green, except the vegetables of course. The only thing that’s not green is the blood- the blood is red, that’s what you get the most of here.”
It cuts away from him suddenly to the kid who must be Radar. Everybody’s stunned. Our Hawkeye? Our happy-go-lucky court jester? Dead-eyed discussing the rivers of blood that pour out of his patients every day while he’s powerless to stop it? That’s right, and don’t you forget it.
Well, there he was. That was Hawkeye. Daniel doesn’t really hear anything besides the blood rushing in his ears until he comes up again. Even though this isn’t the first time he’s heard his voice since he shipped out– he’d somehow gotten his hands on some tape a few months ago and sent an account of what sounded like a full rich day– there’s something about seeing it together with his picture that’s so surreal he almost doesn’t believe it. And something about the fact of seeing him talking while knowing he’s not talking to him, while knowing he never imagined him seeing this in the first place. Half the room is stunned along with him and the other is in denial. Then far too soon and after way too long he’s there again.
“What do you do when you’re not working?”
“Then I specialize in boredom.”
“There must be a good deal of that.”
“And let’s not forget fright.”
“Tell me about that.”
“The fright or the boredom? We have a special on boredom this week.”
“Tell me about the boredom.”
“You– you mean what do I do when I’m bored?”
“Yeah–”
“Uh, uh, well, um… I mostly do the same thing I do when I’m not bored, only I do it slower.”
He looks… almost vacant. Unrecognizably gloomy, and like he’s fighting against his mind itself to keep his wits about him. He looks distracted, unfocused. Daniel’s never seen him like that before. Usually his eyes are lasers, his gaze nominally deterministically piercing. He looks like he wishes he was anywhere else in the world, but he’s forcing himself not to drift away from reality. He must be the only one. Daniel frowns while the others lean forward, getting into it now the original shock has worn off.
This time Daniel forces himself to focus. These are the people Hawkeye loves most in the world right now, the least he can do is the courtesy of listening when they talk. And then he can’t help but let out a small sigh of relief when Radar is back, just relief that he’s even alive, and wonder at how he talks so passionately about his animals and compassionately about the people they meet. He doesn’t want to overdo it, but he can hear Hawkeye in some of the things the kid says, about trying to help, about the pain he feels when they only have enough for themselves.
And BJ… God, BJ seems like a good kid. Daniel remembers from one of Hawkeye’s earliest letters that the guy’s daughter was barely two months old when he got called up. Two months! Can you imagine? He got thirty good years with Hawkeye and that wasn’t nearly enough.
And the priest! Hawkeye always speaks so fondly of him and now Daniel knows why. Christ– sorry, Father– he teared up listening to him describe the doctors, describe Hawkeye and BJ and Trapper, hunched over their open patients for warmth. How can you even hear about that and not feel changed? He hopes Hawkeye recognizes him when he comes home; that’s what he has to worry about now.
“Do you get scared, frightened?” Roberts asks Hawkeye, the bravest coward in the world.
“Yeah, yeah, very frightened, very frightened.”
“What do you lean on then?”
It’s supposed to be me, you know.
“Mostly terror. There’s always terror to fall back on. You know what it’s like? It’s like a car accident, you know, when everything goes into slow motion and you suddenly see things for the way they really are and– and you say to yourself, ‘oh, so that’s what it’s like to have a bomb explode a few feet away from me–’”
Jesus Christ. That’s my baby and you’re dropping bombs on him? Who’s the bastard in charge of this thing? I swear to God I’ll kill him, I swear to God–
“Do you ever get hit here?”
“Oh, they’ve bombed the crap out of us a number of times. Uh, they’re, it’s, uh, it’s awful, the beams shake, and the– the dust falls into your patient, it’s– it’s not nice.”
“Any other times you were afraid?”
“At night,” Hawkeye says, looking so real and so angry that Daniel feels he could tear through the screen and bring him home with his bare hands. “Sometimes at the beginning of the night,” he quirks an eyebrow, “sometimes before dawn, when you realize that you’re not sleeping, and you suddenly begin to think of where you are and what could happen to you, and then you notice that the cot is shaking, and you wonder why the cot is shaking, and it’s because your heart is pounding.”
“Jesus Christ,” a woman perched on the arm of the couch murmurs.
Yeah, Daniel thinks. Jesus Christ.
He also wonders where Margaret is in all this, and what it means about the journalistic efforts that they haven’t heard from a single woman since the program started. Then, of course, Frank is obviously a non-starter, but Daniel doesn’t have a ton of time for this Colonel Potter either. Hawkeye hasn’t mentioned him much, if only to report that he’s regular army but he’s basically normal. BJ is a temporarily misassigned civilian and Daniel can see why Hawkeye likes him so much.
“How on earth do you keep your morale up?” Roberts asks Hawkeye, not knowing at all what he is definitely setting himself up for.
“I stopped having morale about six months ago. It’s not really morale that you have here, either, you know–”
“What is it?”
“It’s–”
“Pure survival instinct?”
“Yes, yeah, yeah. You know, it’s like an overcoat that I take out every once in a while and put on. See, what I do is I try to provoke other people into disbelief. And then when I see that disbelief in their eyes, then I know I’m here. Otherwise it’s like looking into a mirror and not seeing anything, you know, because everybody’s got that self-involved glaze over their eyes a little bit, they all have their own problems, you know. I think what it’s like is, it’s like what Milton Berle does for people; they just can’t believe it. And it gives them something to look at for a while, it’s kind of a public service.”
What the hell are you supposed to do when you know your kid is halfway around the world living like that? What the hell is anybody supposed to do when anybody’s kid is living like that?
“How do you manage to stay sane over here?”
Isn’t that the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
“Well, there are certain tricks to staying sane,” Hawkeye says, already knowing he is going to give the most nonsensical and obnoxious answer possible. Daniel cannot wait to see him and give him the world’s biggest hug.
You’re going to be okay, I know you are. You’re going to be okay, you’re going to be okay, you’re going to be okay.
“Uh, little things you can do,” Hawkeye goes on. “Uh, for instance, if you wear your underwear outside your pants for three days straight just to see who notices, that’s a very good way of staying sane.”
You bet your ass it is.
“Well, is there anything from home–”
But the show’s not over yet.
“Actually, another thing you could do is you could, uh, you get out in the road there where the jeeps are coming by and everybody stick your foot out in front of the jeep and the last one to pull his foot in is the sane one.”
“So callous,” Ron Grifftiths from the card store scoffs. Daniel thinks he could cry. He rolls his eyes so hard he finds himself locking eyes with Moira, the bookkeeper he would’ve married if he wasn’t still in love with Hannah, really, and her sympathetic gaze is enough to make him not walk out.
“Has this whole experience changed you in any way?”
“I may care about things more than I ever have before because uh… there’s so much more to care about. On the other hand, I really don’t give a shit what happens, uh, it’s, uh… it just doesn’t matter anymore. I mean, I’ve seen so many people to whom killing is a casual thing. Um, I don’t know how we manufacture people like that, but, it, uh, it seems to me that we’ll never run out of them.”
Who’s callous now?
“Do you want to say hello to anybody back home?”
Now, this is his big moment, complete with pats on the back and even a drumroll provided by a few sets of enthusiastic thighs.
“Yes, I’d like to say hello to Harry Truman, and I’d like to know why Bess hasn’t written me back.”
Oh, but he gets a good laugh with that one. All the tension in the room releases at once like steam from a boiled kettle, like a series of well-cracked vertebrae. So Daniel Pierce maybe raised the funniest man alive and maybe it’s no small feat and maybe it is.
“You really wrote her?”
“Yes, I wrote her a very heartfelt letter.” You did not, Daniel almost says out loud. Hawkeye has him smiling. Ten thousand miles away and he has him smiling.
“Maybe she’s too touched to respond yet, huh?”
“No, I think she doesn’t like me, I mean, that’s the only conclusion I can draw, I mean, I was very specific about what I liked about her, I even suggested a few things and she hasn’t written back. I mean, you’d think I’d at least’ve heard from Harry. Could’ve at least called me a son of a bitch. He’s done it for others.”
Whoops of laughter. Honest to God peals. Daniel rests his elbow on his thigh and his chin in his hand and hovers on the edge of a misty-eyed smile. Everybody thinks their kid is perfect but his really is, huh.
And he’s trapped there, and no one can save him, and every extra second he’s gone is a punch in the stomach, and that’s my kid that’s my kid that’s my kid. How does anybody live like this? But when life’s like this, what can you do but keep living?
They give Hawkeye the last word. It’s crazy. It rings in Daniel’s ears; he imagines it’s ringing in everybody’s.
“Hawk was the star of the show,” Linda says as Ginny flicks a light back on.
“Always was,” Daniel says quietly.
Well, good. He deserves it. Even if he probably hates it. Hawk’s always been confused about that, attention seeking right up until he wants everyone to leave him alone. Daniel figures it’s because people usually don’t know what it is they’re supposed to pay attention to, and it’s no use to have them focusing on the wrong things. He runs a pensive hand through his hair and cleans his glasses. Nobody knows what the hell to say, which is typical Hawkeye. It’s not until a few minutes later that Daniel realizes he got the first word, too. Every civilian’s experience with the war now bookended by Crabapple Cove’s own Hawkeye Pierce’s words of wisdom: It’s crazy.
And it is, isn’t it.
Daniel always said Hawkeye would lose his head if it wasn’t attached to him. Maybe it’s all a matter of how you look at things. Because it’s crazy. It really is.