“Paris,” replied Hawkeye.
“Yeah,” said the Duke.
“That’s very interesting,” said Henry. “What for?”
“We gotta get the Duke fixed,” explained Hawkeye. “It’s an emergency. He’s been nice to me and Trapper and Spearchucker for three days in a row, and we think he’s turnin’.”
“Well,” said Colonel Blake, “that certainly is an emergency, and we can’t have that sort of thing around here, but why don’t you just take him down to Seoul? It’s so much closer.”
“Why, Colonel,” replied Hawkeye, “you can’t be serious. Just two days ago you gave the enlisted men a lecture on how they should not get it in Seoul because there is so much neisserian infection. What applies to enlisted men must certainly apply to officers, and we do not wish to set a bad example. We hear that there is not too much of it in Paris, so that’s where we are going.”
With that they jumped into their jeep and disappeared for what turned out to be another three days. This time their colonel realized that, for the good of the organization it for no other reason, he would have to curtail the extracurricular excursions of his two transients. At the same time he realized that, as the two sweated out the termination of their enlistments and grew more itchy by the day, he needed some means of keeping them busier and thus happier in their home away from home. He might have prayed for an increase in battle casualties, but he was too fine a human being for that, so he prayed for any other answer, and the next morning it appeared in two parts, named Captains Emerson Pinkham and Leverett Russell.
Captains Pinkham and Russell were replacements for two of Henry’s surgeons who, having been nursed along to the point of being able to accept major responsibility, had unaccountably but not unexpectedly been whisked away. Henry greeted them, oriented them and then invited them to meet him and various members of his staff late that afternoon for cocktails at the so-called Officers’ Club.
It was a pleasant, but in some ways disturbing, social occasion and confrontation. Trapper John, Spearchucker, Ugly John and the others who were not on duty found Captains Pinkham and Russell highly presentable. They were intelligent, polite, seemed to possess normal senses of humor and on the subject of surgery talked impressively. This last should not have surprised nor disturbed the veterans, for the surgical world changes rapidly and almost all surgical residents talk well, but the veterans had been so far removed from the mainstream of their profession for so long that, as the recruits expounded on new approaches and new techniques, at least several of the listeners wondered if, when they did get home, they would have to start all over again,
“Well,” Henry said, as he, Trapper John and Spearchucker headed toward the mess hall at the party’s end, “they seem all right. Good men.”
“I think so,” Spearchucker said, “for Ivy League types.”
“I guess so,” Trapper John said, “but we’ll see what the Hawk and the Duke think, if they ever get back.”
“Oh, they’ll be back,” Henry said, “and that gives me an idea.”
Two days later, when Hawkeye and the Duke returned, Henry read them the Old Familiar. While the strains of that were still sounding in their ears, he launched into his project for the preservation of what remained of the sanity of Hawkeye and the Duke and the perpetuation of the efficiency of his organization..
“Now, while you two clowns were gone,” he told them, “we picked up two new men. Their names are Emerson Pinkham and Leverett Russell.”
“Sound like Ivy League types,” Duke said.
“That’s right,” Henry said. “They are, but they’re good men. They’re intelligent, they’ve had excellent training and they’re abreast of certain new concepts of surgery that you and I have never even heard about.”
“Good,” Hawkeye said. “Then let them do all the work.”
“No, goddammit,” Henry said, the red rising to his hairline again. “Not for one minute. That’s been the trouble with this organization. When we’ve been busy there hasn’t been time to teach the new men the kind of hurry-up, short-cut or call-it-what-you-will surgery that you have to do in a place like this. When we’ve had time you people have goofed off, which is my fault, and as a result anybody who learned anything here just picked it up by accident. Well, that’s gonna stop, and it’s gonna stop right now. These new men are going to be taught everything they can be taught, and you two are gonna teach them!”
“Yes, sir,” Duke said.
“OK,” Hawkeye said. “I guess you’re right.”
At lunch that day, Henry introduced Hawkeye and Duke to Captains Emerson Pinkham and Leverett Russell, and the two veterans invited the two recruits to join them, Trapper John and Spearchucker at The Swamp for cocktails at four o’clock. At four o’clock the two appeared and were served libations. As before, they shaped up well in all the requisite areas. Since their arrival they had observed a number of operations and had performed two themselves, and this, of course, quite naturally invited a comparison between the methods being employed at the MASH and the techniques taught in the high-level stateside training hospitals.
“I think I can speak for Lev as well as myself,” Captain Pinkham said at one point, “when I say that we are not, for a moment, regretting our presence here. There’s a job to be done, and some men are giving their lives so, at the very least, we can give our time and our talents, such as they may be. At the same time, any surgeon, aware of everything that’s going on in his field back home, has to regret it when he’s sent to a place like this where about all he ever gets to do is meatball surgery. No offense, of course.”
Hawkeye looked at Duke, Duke looked at Hawkeye, Trapper John and Spearchucker looked at their colleagues. The term was one that was used often in The Swamp, but now it had just been used by someone else, and a recruit.
“No offense,” Hawkeye said. “Have another drink.”
As it happened, the Double Natural was moderately busy at this time, and Henry had paired Captains Pinkham and Russell with Captains Pierce and Forrest on the night shift. On this very first night, in fact, there was even a six o’clock chopper, so after they had bolted down a quick meal, the two veterans escorted the two recruits over to view the passengers.
The chopper had brought two 4077th MASH Specials: both had belly and extremity wounds, and one had a minor chest wound. Hawkeye and Duke stood back while Captains Pinkham and Russell made their examinations, then informed the recruits that they would be ready and willing to assist when the patients had been prepared and moved into the OR. After that the two Swampmen retired to the lab where, a few minutes later, Captain Bridget McCarthy found them avidly engaged in questioning Radar O’Reilly who had recently been in communication with Jupiter,
“All right, you two!” Captain McCarthy ordered. “Get out of here!”
“What’s your maladjustment tonight, Knocko?” asked Hawkeye.
“Listen,” she said. “Your two Cub Scouts want to operate on those patients right away, and they’re not ready to be operated on.”
“Now just a minute, ma’am,” Duke said. “Just where did y’all …”
“Attend medical school?” Knocko asked. “Right here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Duke said. “We’ll go help.” In the preoperative ward the two graduates of the ivory tower surgical training programs were showing their inexperience. The two cases that confronted them were well within the ability of the Double Natural, or any other MASH, to handle. Both patients were in moderate shock, but had no continuing blood loss. Both required preoperative resuscitation by a process well known even to the corpsmen and Korean helpers.
Captain Pinkham had the boy with the minor but significant chest wound. When Hawkeye and Duke wandered in, he was fussing around the patient, rapping on the chest and listening to it with a stethoscope. He was behaving, in other words, like a doctor and not a meatball surgeon, so Hawkeye took a look at the X-ray, assessed the situation and spoke.