Read Online Mash by Richard Hooker - Free Book Online Page B

himself drove Ho-Jon to Seoul. There the two went to see Ho-Jon’s family who lived in a dirty shack on a filthy street and whose reaction to the largesse showered upon their son by the American doctors was awe-inspiring and pathetic.
    Hawkeye left hastily. He found an Air Force Officers’ club where he drank moodily and disinterestedly without getting any emotional benefit from the good Air Force Scotch. He never expected to see Ho-Jon again. He thought of Crabapple Cove and wondered how he could ever have thought his material benefits and opportunities limited. Compared to Ho-Jon, he’d had everything.
    As it turned out, Captain Pierce did see Ho-Jon again. It was six weeks later, when Ho-Jon returned in the uniform of a private in the ROK Army. The uniform was covered with blood. Deep in Ho-Jon’s chest was a mortar fragment.
    At the Double Natural, as at every MASH, all wounds were first hastily assessed in the admitting ward and then the seriously wounded were brought into the preoperative ward. There blood was typed, nurses and corpsmen took blood pressures, started transfusions, inserted Foley catheters in bladders and Levin tubes in stomachs, and hung the X-rays on a wire in front of each patient’s cot.
    Arriving for duty on this morning and finding the preop ward full, Hawkeye, Duke and Trapper John had gone down the row of wounded and started to make their plans. When they reached the last cot a corpsman said, “This kid is pretty bad.”
    Hawkeye looked at the X-ray. He saw a large shell fragment deep in the boy’s chest.
    “This one’s for you, Trapper,” he said. “I’ll help you, and Duke can take that belly back there.”
    Then Captain Pierce took his first look at the patient.
    “Christ!” he said. “It’s Ho-Jon.”
    Trapper looked.
    “OK. It’s Ho-Jon. We’ll fix him.”
    Ho-Jon opened his eyes. He saw his friends and smiled.
    “You’ll be OK, boy,” said the corpsman.
    “I know,” Ho-Jon whispered. “Captains Pierces and Captains McIntyres will help me.”
    “You know it, Ho-Jon,” Captain Pierce said. “You just rest, and we’ll do it after you’ve had one more pint of blood.”
    The Duke was about to become occupied in a bad belly, so they decided not to tell him. They went out for a butt.
    “How do we go, Trapper?” asked Hawkeye.
    “Right chest, just like the missile. He’s lost some blood. I’m afraid it’s hit more than just the lung. It’s in deep.”
    “Trapper, you remember how we used to wonder what a kid like Ho-Jon might do if he had a chance to get an education?”
    “Yeah,” Trapper answered dully.
    “If we squeeze him through, I’m going to get him into Androscoggin College.”
    “We’ll squeeze him through and right into Dartmouth,” said Trapper, grinding out his cigarette. “If all he wants to do is catch lobsters, he can learn that here.”
    A grim pair of surgeons went to work on Ho-Jon.
    “We’ll need room,” said Trapper. “The sixth rib goes.”
    “Never mind the conversation. Do it, Dad.”
    They opened the pleura, put in the rib spreader, and aspirated the blood from the chest cavity. Ho-Jon’s pulse and blood pressure held steady. Trapper reached down toward the inferior vena cava where it empties into the right atrium of the heart. He felt the missile.
    “I got it,” he said. “Here, feel.”
    Hawkeye felt.
    “I don’t feel anything.”
    “Oh, Jesus,” moaned Trapper, and felt again.
    “What happened?”
    “The mother must have gone in. I can’t feel it.”
    “I don’t get it,” said Hawkeye nervously.
    “It must have been in the cava, and the hole sealed itself off. When I felt it I must have jiggled it just enough to turn it loose. I can’t feel it in the heart. I don’t feel it in the right pulmonary artery. It must be in the left pulmonary artery.”
    “Whadda we do?”
    “Close and get an X-ray and fight another day.”
    “OK,” Hawkeye said unhappily.
    The X-ray confirmed Trapper’s guess. The shell