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Hawkeye jerks awake with a start from a very strange dream. He expects to be in his cot, but finds himself in a sleeping bag on the floor of a tent. His head brushes against the sloping canvas. He swallows and hears himself breathing heavily.
“You okay, Hawk?” BJ asks him from over on his side, where he’s kneeling and packing some supplies in an olive drab bag.
“Hm? Yeah. I, uh… I just had the wildest dream.” He combs through his hair with his fingers, pushing it out of his eyes. His forehead is damp with sweat. “You were there.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. We were still here, I mean, still in Korea and everything, but it was like… we were older.”
“Older?”
“Yeah, and like, Potter was still our CO, but something was… we were… doctors! We were doctors, in some kinda hospital unit.”
“Were we any good?” BJ laces up his Chuck Taylors and starts rolling up his sleeping bag.
“Huh? Yeah. We were the best, I think.” They were. Hawkeye can still smell metal in the air from the operating room, unsure if it was from the instruments or the blood. He sees mutilated bodies when he blinks. “Jesus.”
“Excellent.”
“What?”
“That we were the best.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess so.” Hawkeye rubs at his eyes and feels decidedly miserable.
He gets out of his sleeping bag and starts packing up, getting ready. He feels around in the bottom of his bag for the two letters he keeps with him at all times, the one from his father and the one from Tommy. Tommy. Hawkeye sits back on his heels and runs his thumb over the return address.
“Looking at that letter again?” BJ asks.
“Yeah. Lucky bastard’d just started journalism school, kept him from getting caught in the draft.”
“Serves you right for being dumb enough to try and save up some money first.”
“Tell me about it.” Hawkeye shoves the letter back down, and pulls on his combat boots.
The company is trying to get rid of him. Hawkeye is sure of it. He and BJ have been out scouting these woods for three days and come back with a big fat zilch. With less than zilch, actually, since they’re actively confused about what they’re supposed to have found out here, having come upon neither hide nor hair of friend nor enemy in the past seventy-two hours. So they’re turning on their heels and heading back for camp ready to shrug their way through a tongue lashing from Potter.
“They’re trying to get rid of me,” Hawkeye says as they start their trek back home.
“Uh-huh.”
“They’ve been trying to get rid of me ever since they couldn’t get rid of me.”
“How’s that?”
“No, nothing.”
Just that he doesn’t think he’s been the same since they locked him up in Tokyo. Just that he doesn’t know why they didn’t ship him off to a loony bin back in the states. Just that he doesn’t know why they keep him around if they so clearly want him gone.
“They were dumb as hell to send us out on this reconnaissance mission. I’m not a reconnaissance man.”
“No, you’re a renaissance man.”
“Means ‘rebirth’ after all.”
“Right. Maybe you really are a doctor. Maybe you’ve been reborn as a soldier.”
“Wouldn’t that be just my luck.”
BJ nudges him with his elbow while they walk. “Tell me more about the dream.”
“Huh?”
“Your dream! You’re still thinking about it. Tell me what happened.”
“Oh, that.” Hawkeye scratches the back of his head. “It was… I think we were fighting.”
“The war’s gotta move pretty fast to get by you, Hawk.”
“No, not us, us . You and me.”
“Oh, us, you and me.”
“Yes, us. There was… I was trying to take out this guy’s appendix– some top brass, a general or colonel or something– and it was something like an appendix, and I was just so dead set on getting into this operating room, and you kept getting in my way.”
“Wonder why that was.”
“It was like… I think maybe he wasn’t really sick. I think I was just trying to get him out of commission.”
“For good? Like you were gonna sedate him and what, kill him?”
“No! Nothing like that. Oh my god. I just… I felt like I should take something from him.”
“Revenge fantasy.”
“Something like that.”
They walk in silence for another minute or so, before BJ nudges him again.
“So, what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you get to him? Over my dead body and everything?”
“God, don’t say that.” Hawkeye thinks. “I can’t remember. I was just… I was back in our tent. You were standing over me. And you… put your hand on my shoulder. And I looked up… and then I woke up.”
“Hm,” BJ says, nodding. “I guess I just love you unconditionally.”
“Well, who could blame you?”
Hawkeye’s cheeks feel flushed; he wonders if they’ve gone as red as they feel. This place is doing a number on him.
“I told you they’re out to get me.”
“Who is, Hawk?”
“Them! They are! The, the, the brass, the top dogs, the one-percent. The so-called peace negotiators who I guess are doing a pretty good job since if it’s peace we’re hurtling toward, it’s pretty so-called. They’re trying to get rid of me, I just know it.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause I’m a thorn in their side. I’m giving the red, white, and blue a black eye. I’m a disgrace to my uniform.”
“True enough.”
“They do what they have to do to get rid of guys like me.”
“How?”
“By sending me out here into the middle of nowhere where I don’t even speak the language to get shot up by people who we don’t even know who each other are and–”
“But they do that to everybody.”
“Well, if they’re doing it to everybody then they’re doing it to me.”
“But they can’t be trying to get rid of all of us. Then who would fight the war?”
“In that case, they’re definitely trying to get rid of me.”
“Okay, Hawk,” BJ says, but it sounds serene, not condescending. Hawkeye knows condescending and that’s not it.
It’s just that people take every opportunity to tell him he must be out of his mind. And the thing is, he doesn’t think they’re wrong. But in the end, he talks too much sense to actually get shipped home in a straightjacket or locked up in a rubber room. He’s so sane he’s crazy and he’s so crazy he’s made it back around to sane again.
“It’s just I don’t feel cut out for this, is all,” Hawkeye says.
“Nobody does.”
“I don’t know,” Hawkeye says. “Some people enlist.”
“Maybe they think they’re cut out for it, but they’re wrong. It’s been known to happen.”
Hawkeye nods. He feels around in his pocket for his packet of cigarettes and lights one. If he were going to pick a vice he prefers drinking to smoking and he prefers sex to smoking and drinking but drinking is harder to do on the move and sex is even harder than smoking and drinking.
“Smoking may be hazardous to your health,” BJ advises.
“War’s no picnic, either.”
“That’s where you’re right, slim.”
“How would you like a swift kiss in the mouth?”
“Let’s say you’re right.”
“I often am.”
“What do you wanna do about it?”
Hawkeye takes a few drags on his smoke while he thinks.
“There’s a gulf about a hundred feet wide between what I can do and what I ought to. What I can do and what ought to be done, anyway.”
“What’s that, Hawk?”
“It’s the people in charge who have no regard for human life, you know? No empathy– well, fuck empathy– they don’t even have any sympathy! They just have… lines on a map. Hills. Dales. I don’t know. And what have I got? What can I do?”
“I don’t know, Hawk, what have you got?”
“You’re a great scene partner, you know that? A foil, a straight man, an interlocutor. Asking just the right questions at all the right times.”
“My mother sent me to interlocution school.”
“Cute.”
“So what have we got? In our repertoire, our reservoir, our utility belt.”
“What have we got… not much, by the looks of it. The tents on our backs and the clothes on our fronts.”
“It’s our fronts where the trouble is.”
“Aye, there’s the rub.”
“Hamlet.”
“I take mine runny with spinach and feta.”
“That’s omelet.”
“That's breakfast. You know Shakespeare’s wife?”
“Sure.”
“If Anne hath-a-will, Anne Hathaway.”
“And where there’s a war, there’s a will.”
“About eighty thousand of them.” Hawkeye stops suddenly in his tracks and puts a hand out across BJ’s chest to stop him, too. “We– Beej, what can we do? We should quit! We should go on strike, why don’t we just– what’s it called? Defect?”
“Desert?”
“Right, right, right. We should desert! Why have I never seriously considered this before? It’s seriously the only considerable option. It’s considerably the only serious one.”
“Hawk, we’ll get caught, and court-martialed. Or worse.”
“Worse? What could be worse?”
BJ pauses. “I suppose we will be getting our just desserts.”
Hawkeye bumps him on the arm. “See, now you’re getting it. The next squad we see– I bet you five dollars the next squad we see, we convince them to desert with us.”
“What?”
“How are they gonna fight the war, then, huh? If everybody just lays down their weapons, what then?”
“Yeah, okay. I’m surprised you haven’t marched us all the way to Panmunjom by now.”
“Believe me, it’s not like the thought hasn’t crossed my mind.”
They wander for what feels like hours. When Hawkeye closes his eyes he sees the jagged silhouettes of indigenous trees and he sees that when he opens them, too. They sit on logs in a small clearing eating decade old tuna fish out of a can.
“Do you feel like we’ve been going around in circles?” Hawkeye asks BJ.
“Rhetorically?”
“No, really.”
“I mean do you mean in our rhetoric? Or in our, you know. Flight pattern.”
“Flight pattern,” Hawkeye says with a slight sarcastic sneer.
“I think it’s both,” BJ supplies.
“Yeah?”
“Lather, rinse, repeat.”
“Yeah.”
They pick back up the trek, the trudge, the drudge.
“It’s just that I don’t feel cut out for this place,” Hawkeye says again. It’s just that in another world he’d be able to stand the sight of blood but in this one he can’t. The dream was so vivid and he felt sick from the blood but not from the blood.
“The world is better for it,” BJ answers.
“Sure.” Hawkeye pats his pockets down in search of some sticks of gum. He finds them and offers one to BJ who takes it. “You know I’ve never fired my gun?”
BJ blinks at him. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s true. I haven’t.”
“Me neither.”
“What?”
BJ shrugs. “I just fake it.”
Hawkeye stops in his tracks, mouth slightly open. BJ doesn’t notice and keeps walking. After a few moments Hawkeye jogs to keep up with him.
“How do you get away with it?” Hawkeye asks him.
“How do you?”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“Well… I didn’t. And now I don’t.”
“I’m on tenterhooks, Hawk.”
He pauses. “Well, it was kind of a whole thing. There were MPs involved.”
There were MPs involved, one restraining each of Hawkeye’s arms while he bawled, and screamed, and thrashed, while a third made mad grabs at the pistol in Hawkeye’s hand which seconds before he’d been aiming flush against his temple.
There were MPs involved when Hawkeye yelled I’LL DO IT. I’LL BLOW MY BRAINS OUT BEFORE I AIM THIS FUCKING THING AT ANOTHER HUMAN PERSON and there were MPs involved when Henry Blake scrambled to shoot a sedative into his rigid tricep and there were MPs involved when it didn’t take.
“MPs?” BJ asks.
“Yeah.” Hawkeye shrugs. “And a stint in Tokyo over it. And I guess they’re right.”
“Oh?”
“A soldier who won’t shoot a gun? That’s pretty crazy.”
“Crazy,” BJ repeats. “That’s one word for it.”
“Yeah.”
BJ looks up at him like he hung the moon. “Hawkeye, I think you’re my hero.”
“If you kiss me I’ll throw up.”
BJ grins and playfully shoves him. Hawkeye rolls his eyes and shoves him back. He really wouldn’t mind if BJ tried to kiss him. If he were less tied up trying not to get killed every day he could probably find a lot of time to be hung up on BJ Hunnicutt.
Hawkeye kicks a stick on the ground and laughs to himself. In the damn dream he’d conjured up a whole alternate universe for him and BJ to suffer eternal damnation together in and he’d still managed to conjure him up a wife to be faithful to.
BJ of San Francisco and the shotgun wedding and size thirteen Chucks. BJ who didn’t even try to use Erin as a dodge when his number came up. Hawkeye turns Fitzgerald passages over and over in his mind when he thinks about BJ. BJ the beautiful fool. BJ the beautiful fool who catches him staring.
“What, Hawk?”
“Nothing. My shorts are riding up on me. I was thinking about that pair of my underwear that you stole.”
BJ laughs in surprise. “Hawkeye, I wouldn’t be caught dead in your underwear.”
Hawkeye laughs even louder at that, until he notices BJ frantically shushing him.
“What, what?”
“D’you hear that?” BJ says.
“What? The sound of my ego shattering? The gentle tick-tick-tick of my knock-off watch? The–”
“No, you maniac. Voices.”
“If you’re hearing voices, maybe you’re the crazy one.”
“Footsteps. I think we’ve got company.”
“The company of a company. Are they their footsteps or ours?”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“Potter can tell from the timbre of the footfalls.”
“Do I look like Potter to you?”
“In the right lighting.”
“Shut up, Hawkeye.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
BJ ushers them to hide behind a comically thin tree, and they peer around the trunk, BJ’s head above Hawkeye’s.
“Jesus, Beej, we oughta be in pictures.”
BJ doesn’t answer him. When they see the squad rounding the bend decked out in olive drab, Hawkeye feels BJ’s shoulders relax and figures BJ felt his shoulders relax and they both relax and emerge from their hiding place with their hands up.
“Don’t shoot!” Hawkeye says. BJ laughs. Hawkeye kicks his shin. “We’re one of the good guys.”
“Two of the good guys, actually.”
“Right. Two of them, are we. We are. Are, too.”
“Company, halt!” calls the major at the helm, not noticing his company halted about five paces back without him. He turns around and gets outraged for a moment while the soldiers scramble into place behind him.
“Who the hell are you two knuckleheads?” he demands.
“That’s BJ,” Hawkeye answers. “Which stands for anything you want.”
“And that’s Hawkeye. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Right. A person, sure, but a fly, that’s where I draw the line.”
“Certifiable,” the major mumbles. “Can’t get one straight answer in this man’s army.” He strides up to them and reads from Hawkeye’s dogtags.
“Pierce. From Maine?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why do you talk like you’re from the Bronx?”
Hawkeye looks up at him. “Ask the casting director.”
“Sir,” BJ adds.
The major looks withering. “Where the hell did you come from?”
Hawkeye and BJ exchange a glance. “That way.” They point in opposite directions. They exchange another glance.
“That’s funny…” Hawkeye says. “I know we’re here, but I don’t know how we got here.”
“We walked through the forest,” BJ supplies.
“Thank you, Sacagawea.”
“Hey, do I know you from somewhere?”
“Are you two finished?” the major barks.
Hawkeye and BJ exchange another glance. “Yeah, sure.”
“Corporal O’Reilly!” the major calls.
“Yes, Major Burns,” a kid breaks through the ranks and comes skittering to a halt beside the major.
“We are a division of the seventh infantry of the United States army,” the major announces. He holds out his hand and the corporal places in it a badly folded map, which the major unfurls. “Our base camp is here,” he points to one spot, “our target hill was here,” another, on the opposite corner, “and we are here, en route back to camp.” He points to a spot in the middle, denoted by a thicket of trees. “Kindly tell me where you were going, and where you have been.”
Hawkeye takes the map and examines it.
“We’re going home,” BJ explains. “We’ve been losing the plot. I, myself, personally–” Hawkeye interrupts him.
“You guys know you have the wrong map, right? According to this we’re on the mediterranean island of Pianosa which I don’t even think there is one of.”
“No kidding?” The corporal takes the map back and turns it upside down. Hawkeye furrows his brow and tilts his head to read it til he’s almost done a 180.
“Yeah,” BJ says. Hawkeye rights himself. “I’ve been to Pianosa and there is definitely no such place there.”
“Those maps are World War Two surplus.”
BJ looks at him and shrugs. Hawkeye shrugs back.
“You really don’t know where your outfit is at, sirs?” the deferential corporal asks them.
“I’m pretty sure you outrank us, kid,” BJ says.
“What he means is no, we really don’t know where our outfit is at,” Hawkeye says. “Quite honestly, I feel as if we must be coming up on forty days and nights of wandering.”
“The mediterranean island of Pianosa is hardly the promised land.”
“A lot you know.”
“For crying out loud,” the major interjects. “You goof-offs can come with us on one condition.”
“What’s that?” BJ asks.
“You shut the hell up!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” BJ says.
“Aye, aye is Navy,” Hawkeye says.
“Eh, green was never my color.”
“Fall in, soldiers!”
They fall in. They continue their conversation in hushed mutters.
“Remember what I said?” Hawkeye says. “Five bucks says I can convince them to desert with us.”
“On the way back?”
“Before the next… deployment? Mobilization?”
“Offensive?”
“I certainly think so.”
BJ rolls his eyes. “You’ll never do it.”
“I bet they could convince me.”
“Hm. Do you think you’re easily influenced?”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
“Ah, shut up.”
“Hey, O’Reilly!” Hawkeye calls the corporal over in a stage whisper.
“What’s up?”
“D’you ever think about busting out of this chicken outfit?”
His little eyes go wide. “What?”
“Taking a permanent vacation from active service? Not lift up your sword and study war no more? A real fuck you to the top brass?”
“Hey, this is a family show.”
“It’s a what?”
“Never mind.”
Hawkeye tries another tack. “Have you heard of the Congress of Industrial Organizations?”
“You mean like the House of Representatives and the Senate?”
Hawkeye blinks. “Never mind.”
“This is going great, Hawk,” BJ mutters in his ear.
“Fuck you,” he says evenly to BJ. Then to O’Reilly, “You got a first name, kid?” He doesn’t know why he’s calling him kid. He can’t be more than a year younger than Hawkeye is.
“Radar,” he answers.
“Radar?”
“Yeah. Some folks call me Radar on account of sometimes I can–”
“Tell when things are gonna happen before they do, right.”
“Wow, how did you–?”
“I’m just clever like that. Okay, Radar. How would you like to go home?”
Hawkeye blinks and they’ve arrived at camp. Burns instructs them to speak to a Sergeant Klinger about locating their outfit and that he’ll be the one in the scarlet gown and black nylons.
BJ looks to Hawkeye with a furrowed brow. “I think it’s possible I’m having a stroke.”
“Do you smell burnt toast?”
“Yes.”
“Probably coming from the mess tent.”
“Jesus, Hawk,” BJ tells him. “I can’t believe O’Reilly said he’d do it.”
“What’d I tell you, huh? I have a way with words. Dad always said if I wasn’t a doctor I could be a poet. Or a politician.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Hawkeye bites the inside of his lip. His heart is pounding with anxiety and his heart is pounding with thrill.
“If we do it– don’t do it, rather– and the next people, and the next–”
“It’s true,” BJ says. “They can’t court-martial all of us.”
“We just go one at a time. Every domino rally starts with one.”
“Right. Easy. Lather, rinse, repeat.”
“Right.”
They shake hands, and split up. Hawkeye must speak to fifty soldiers, and it’s more different people than he thinks he’s spoken to in the past year of his life. People hate this war as much as he does, they hate this stupid life here as much as he does, they hate themselves for being here as much as he does, and he is going to harness that hate into the biggest explosion of stick-it-to-the-man that any of these bastards have ever seen and they’re being called into a tent somewhere to be briefed on an offensive– hey, Beej was right– and then they’re going to go take a hill except the hell they are.
Hawkeye locks eyes with BJ across the room. He begs him telepathically for a signal. BJ gives him a shrug. Non-committal, but it’s Hunnicuttish for cautiously optimistic. Hawkeye knows because he’s become a fluent speaker himself.
A sergeant, must be Klinger, sidles up beside Hawkeye.
“We’ll never make it through this intense bombardment,” he says under his breath.
“We don’t have to,” Hawkeye tells him. “When we get called up to that line, we’re not going.”
“Oh, no?”
“Nuh-uh. They want a strike? We’ll show them a strike.”
Klinger smiles at him around a cigar, and shakes his hand. “You’re all right, Joe. You’re all right.”
And they do get called up. And they do get in formation. And Burns yells, “Move out!”
And they stay still. And they look around at each other. And they look to Hawkeye. And Hawkeye takes his gun out of its holster and lays it at his feet.
“It’s not loaded, anyway,” he says sotto voce to BJ at his side.
“Obviously,” BJ answers. And he does the same. And the whole line beside them follow suit. And in front. And behind. Until Hawkeye is standing dead center of an entire battalion with their weapons on the ground against orders and he laughs, one singular, triumphant “Ha!”
Burns turns around. He’s fifteen paces ahead of his men and fifteen steps behind them.
“What the hell… I said move out!”
It’s silent. You could hear a pin drop. Ideally one that hadn’t previously been inside a grenade. The eyes all land on Hawkeye again. This really isn’t democratic, you know. Nobody elected him leader.
“What is the meaning of this?” Burns demands, his gaze now fixed firmly on Hawkeye as well. Hawkeye swallows.
“We’re not going.”
“What do you mean, not going?”
“Not going as in staying.”
“I know what it means–! No, you’re not.”
“Not going?”
“Not staying!”
“I beg to differ, Major.”
“If I may cut in,” BJ says.
“You may not,” Burns says.
“There’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” BJ says anyway.
Hawkeye is going to cry. He’s going to throw up. He’s going to kiss BJ right on the mouth. He’s done it. He’s finally stopped the war. Maybe a soldier who doesn’t fire his gun isn’t so crazy after all. No less a contradiction in terms than army doctor.
Fifteen minutes later, Hawkeye and BJ are being held at bayonet point by MPs against the wall of an abandoned hut repurposed as a chapel. The rest of the seventh infantry has gone off to win a hill. The camp chaplain, a soft-spoken young priest, is imploring the MPs not to be too rough on a couple of idealists led astray by three days of isolation and hunger.
“This isn’t happening,” BJ whispers.
“It feels like it’s happening,” Hawkeye answers.
“Pinch me, then.”
“Not while I’m surrendering.” Then Hawkeye laughs again. “Buddy, you so owe me five dollars.”
BJ huffs and rolls his eyes, then shakes his head and pulls a rolled up bill out of his pocket.
“Hey!” an MP yells. “What do you think you’re doing?” He hits BJ in the head with the blunt end of his rifle.
“Hey!” Hawkeye yells, and then a sharp pain, and then his lights are out, too.
Hawkeye jerks awake with a start from a very strange dream. He expects to be in his sleeping bag, or maybe in a cell somewhere, but he’s in a cot, in an upright tent. In the Swamp, he remembers.
“You okay, Hawk?” BJ asks from across the room, where he’s lacing up his Chuck Taylors. BJ who just paid him five bucks on account of a bet while they were being held up by the MPs. There were MPs involved…
“Hm? Yeah. I, uh… I just had the wildest dream.”
His heart is pounding. There’s a dull ache behind his eyes. He coughs a single, wet cough.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Um. God.” Hawkeye blinks, hard. “We were… corpsmen– NCOs, I guess, and we were… and, and Father Mulcahy, and Frank… and Potter, and Henry… and the strike and Pianosa and the bet and Tommy’s letter– and the dream… I’d just dreamt that… Colonel Lacey,” he finishes darkly. Not darkly, resigned.
BJ looks up. “Yeah?”
“Did we just–? Did I just–? I did, didn’t I.” Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a hero is someone who’s too cold, and tired, and hungry to give a shit. Hawkeye doesn’t give a shit.
BJ nods. “Yeah.”
“That was real?”
“Real as you and me.”
Hawkeye nods. He scrubs his hands down his face. Eighteen year old dream-him had all the same back complaints and felt like a cigarette. Thirty year old now-him never smoked one in his life. He stands slowly. He thinks he might throw up.
“Beej, I’m sorry–”
“It’s all right.”
“No, really–”
“It’s really all right.”
Hawkeye nods again. He goes over to BJ and he hugs him. He doesn’t explain, and BJ doesn’t beg an explanation. BJ of San Fransisco and the size thirteen Chucks. BJ the beautiful fool. He just holds him there. Five seconds. Six seconds. Seven seconds. Eight. BJ pulls back, planting a kiss on his cheek on the way. Hawkeye looks at him, full of hate, full of love, half asleep.
“I’ve got so much noise in my head it’s liable to come spilling out of my ears,” Hawkeye says. “So many… different ways things could’ve gone.”
BJ frowns. Then, “Breakfast,” he says. “Then post-op. Then O.R., probably.”
“Lather, rinse, repeat.”
“Right.”
Hawkeye sighs. It’s meant to be a deep breath, but it comes out a sigh. He dons his robe and boots with all deliberate lethargy, like he thinks he can stop today from rolling in by extending last night. Like time isn’t a zero-sum-game without enough to go around. BJ lingers by the door.
“Are we good, BJ?”
“Yeah,” BJ says. “We’re good.”
Hawkeye nods. He may even flash a hint of a smile. A cheeky one. A wistful one. “What do you think would happen if we all just… stopped working?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would the wounded still come? What if everyone put their guns down and stopped fighting? What then?”
“They’d probably turn around and hire guys who would.”
Hawkeye shakes his head. “I’d bribe them. I’d stand at the port at Incheon and give everybody five dollars to defect– desert.”
“Hawkeye–”
“I’d, I’d, I’d replace all the bullets with blanks, the guns with water pistols, the saltpeter with sugar–”
“Hawkeye–!”
“I mean, who do I have to blow to get a little peace around here?”
“Hawkeye, stop.”
“Why?”
BJ stares him down. He almost glares. He sets his jaw.
“Because I said so.”
Hawkeye’s shoulders tense. He holds his breath. Then he releases it. He lets his shoulders relax.
“You’re right, you’re right.”
“I’m–?”
“I’m gonna get myself killed. First it’s the MPs and the rifle butt, who knows what next? Even in my subconscious, you’re–” Hawkeye stops himself. He shakes his head. BJ isn’t the voice of reason. No one is.
“Breakfast?” BJ says.
“Breakfast.”
“Good. I’m buying.”
“Good, you still owe me five dollars.”
“Since when?”
“Since last night. I’ll tell you about it over a cup of coffee and eraser shavings.”
“Okay, Hawk.”
“Okay.”
So they have breakfast. And they have post-op. And they have O.R. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.