“Thanks, Hawkeye. I wondered when you’d recognize me. The minute I saw you I knew you were the guy that inter­cepted that pass. Lucky you didn’t have your mouth open or it would have gone down your throat.”

“Trapper, Trapper, Trapper,” Hawkeye kept saying, and shaking his head. “Say, what you been doing since then?”

“Not much. Just living on my reputation.”

The Duke got up and shook hands with Trapper.

“Right proud to know y’all, Trapper,” he said. “Are you sure y’all don’t have the clap? Y’all look right peaked.”

“I got over the clap. I’m so skinny because I don’t eat.”

“Why not?”

“Got out of the habit.”

“Don’t let it worry you,” Hawkeye said.

“It could happen to anybody,” Duke said.

And so the Trapper was one of them. An hour later the three tentmates weaved into the mess hall, arm in arm.

“Gentlemen,” yelled Hawkeye, “this here is Trapper John, the pride of Winchester, Dartmouth College, and Tent Num­ber Six, and if any of you uneducated bastards don’t like it you’ll have to answer to Duke Forrest and Hawkeye Pierce.”

4

For several weeks following the identification of Captain John Mclntyre as Trapper John things settled down into an orderly routine. The work during the twelve-hour shifts was often intense, sometimes lacking, and usually somewhere in between.

Although many of the casualties were brought in from the Battalion Aid Stations by ambulance and might arrive at any hour, the most seriously wounded were flown in by helicopter. This meant that daylight was the frequent arrival time be­cause the choppers did not fly at night. When the night shift had worked steadily from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. and finally had everything cleaned up, some of its members could usually be seen as the first light of day seeped into the wide valley, peering north beyond the mine field and the river with its railroad bridge, hoping against hope that no choppers would materialize out of the mist.

When casualties were heavy, the regular schedule was ignored and every man worked as long as he could stay on his feet, think and still function. Finally, overcome by fatigue, he would grab a few hours of sleep and then go back to it again. When things were under control, however, there was leisure time and, particularly in winter and early spring, very little to do with it.

Tent Number Six, the home of Forrest, Pierce and Mcln­tyre, became a center of social activity. It also became known as The Swamp, partly because it looked like the kind of haunt one might come across in a bog and partly because Hawkeye Pierce, while in college and unable to afford a dormitory room, had lived just off the campus in a shanty that his classmates had called The Swamp. The words, in big capital letters—THE SWAMP—were painted in red on the door of Number Six.

Cocktail hour at The Swamp began at 4:00 p.m., the hour at which the night shift normally awakened and had a few before supper, and the hour at which the day shift, if unem­ployed, could begin to relax. Cocktails consisted of better booze than most of the crew had ever had at home, and martinis were a favorite, served in water glasses filled to the brim.

A frequent visitor to The Swamp parties was the Catholic chaplain of the area, Father John Patrick Mulcahy, a native of San Diego and former Maryknoll missionary. He was lean, hungry-looking, hook-nosed, red-haired, and, in the eyes of the Swampmen, one of a kind.

The occupants of The Swamp had loose religious affilia­tions. Hawkeye claimed he had been brought up to be an all-over Baptist but that he had lost his nerve at the last minute. Duke was a foot-washing Baptist, and Trapper John was a former mackerel-snapper who had turned in his knee pads. It was the Duke who hung the name of Dago Red on the Father, and the Father accepted it with good humor.

Prior to being in the Army, Dago Red had spent five years in China and seven years on the top of a mountain in Bolivia. His contacts had been limited. With Duke and Hawkeye and Trapper John he found stimulation in conversation that in­cluded politics, surgery, sin, baseball, literature and religion. Dago Red combined the dignity of his profession and the wis­dom, understanding and compassion of an honest missionary with the ability to tolerate the Swampmen. He became one of them.

At two o’clock one morning, Hawkeye and Trapper John were fighting what seemed to be a losing battle in the OR with a kid who had been shot through both chest and belly. Despite control of hemorrhage and administration of blood, the patient, whose perito­neum had been contaminated for ten hours by spillage from his lacerated colon, went deeper and deeper into shock.

“Maybe we’d better get Dago Red,” said Hawkeye.

“Call Dago,” ordered Trapper John.

A corpsman went for him. Within minutes he appeared.

“What can I do for you fellows?” asked the Father.

“Put in a fix,” said Hawkeye. “This kid looks like a loser.”

Father Mulcahy administered the last rites. Shortly thereaf­ter, the patient’s blood pressure rose from nowhere to 100, his pulse slowed to 90, and he went on to recover.

From then on Dago Red put in many a fix. With the Swampmen it was mostly a gag, but one they could not quite bring themselves to forgo when things were rough. As far as Red was concerned, of course, it was no joke. He spent many sleepless nights applying fixes and feeding beer, whiskey, coffee or consolation to distraught surgeons whose patients had not responded to the fix or who were waiting for the fix to take.

This was all to the good, except that Duke Forrest became somewhat bothered. Protestantism was strong in him, and close association with an accredited representative of the opposition caused occasional qualms.

“Y’all seem to be a mighty effective bead-jiggler, Dago,” he said one night, “but how do I know one of my boys couldn’t do as well?”

“I’m sure he could,” Red answered calmly.

“Tell y’all what I’m gonna do,” Duke said. “I’m gonna get Shaking Sammy to put in a fix the next time I need one,”

Shaking Sammy was the Protestant chaplain. His head­quarters were in an engineering outfit down the road. He was called Shaking Sammy because he so dearly loved to shake hands. Whenever he hit the hospital, Shaking Sammy started shaking hands as soon as he came in and kept right on shaking. On one great morning, people whose hands were shaken by Sammy as soon as he entered the compound maneuvered into his path again and again as he made his rounds and shook his eager hand again and again. It took Sammy two hours to make the circle, and he had shaken hands three hundred times with fifty people.

Despite repeated warnings, Shaking Sammy also had the bad habit of writing letters home for wounded soldiers with­out inquiring into the nature of their wounds. One day, before Duke had a chance to invite him in for a fix, Sammy wrote a letter for a boy who died two hours later. The letter told his mother that all was well and that he’d be home soon. It had been written with no investigation of his surgical situation. The nurse had managed to see the letter, and she told Duke and Hawkeye. They escorted Shaking Sammy out of the hospital and, as he left, they shot all four tires of his jeep with their .45’s. That was the last of Shaking Sammy for a while.

“Guess I’ll have to stick with the bead-jiggler,” said the Duke that afternoon. “Do you suppose we could convert him?”

Discussion of conversion was cut short by the arrival of a chopper with two seriously wounded soldiers. One of them, it seemed clear from the wound of entrance, the disten­ded abdomen, and the severe degree of shock, had a hole in his inferior vena cava or possibly in the abdominal aorta. Since the inferior vena cava and the abdominal aorta drain blood from and supply blood to the lower half of the body, he was not long for this world.