Mash (12 page)

“We’re just in from visiting relatives in Korea,” Trapper informed him. “Our clothes got burned up. We can’t get any new ones until we win some dough in your tournament.”

“Ah, so,” hissed the pro, much relieved, and he promptly supplied them with golf shoes and two female caddies.

With the wide-eyed girls carrying the clubs, they trekked to the first tee. There, waiting to tee off, they were taking a few practice swings, to the amusement of all in their vicinity, when they observed four British officers, one of them a colonel, approaching. In a matter of minutes two things became evident. Judged by his own practice swings the British colonel was not on leave from his country’s Curtis Cup team, and judged by the disdain evident on his face when he eyed the Swampmen he was not in favor of any Papa-Sans sharing the golf course with him.

“Damn this get-up,” Hawkeye was saying to Trapper. “It doesn’t do much for my backswing.”

“Good,” Trapper said, increasing the awkwardness of his own efforts.

“What do you mean, good?” Hawkeye said.

“Keep your voice down,” Trapper said, “because I think we’re about to hook a live one.”

“See here, you two!” the British colonel bleated, walking up to them at that moment. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I think …”

“Think again,” Trapper said.

“I want you to know I’m Colonel Cornwall …”

“Cornwallis?” Hawkeye said. “I thought we fixed your wagon at Yorktown.”

“I said Cornwall.”

“Lovely there in the spring,” Trapper said. “Rhododendrons and all that.”

“Now see here!” the colonel said, red in the face now. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but rather than make an issue of it, if you’ll just step aside and allow us to tee off …”

“Look, Corny,” Hawkeye said. “You just calm down, or well tee off on
you.”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Colonel,” Trapper said. “You look like a sporting chap, so to settle this little difficulty in a sporting way, we’ll both play you a ten pound Nassau.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard him,” Hawkeye said.

“Excuse me a moment,” the colonel said, and he turned and rejoined his companions to get their opinion of the proposition.

“What do you think?” Hawkeye said.

“We got him,” Trapper said, manufacturing as awkward a swing as he could without making it too obvious.

“Here he comes now,” Hawkeye said.

“All right,” the colonel said. “You’re on, and we’ll be watching every shot you hit.”

The Swampmen hit drives designed to get the ball in play, with no attempt at distance, and they were down the middle about 225 yards. Trapper reached the green in two and got his par four. Hawkeye hit a nice five-iron but misjudged the distance and was long, hit a wedge back but missed a five-footer and took a bogey.

The second hole was a short par three that gave them no trouble. Both bogied three and four, however, as it became clear that driving range experience at the Double Natural had sharpened their hitting ability but done little for their judgment of distance or their putting. Nevertheless, the girl caddies were quite impressed, particularly by Trapper John, whose every move they watched with rapt fascination.

Approaching the seventh, a par five, they were both three over par, and as the day was getting warmer, Trapper took off the long, flowing top of his Papa-San suit and his hat. This left him with long hair, a beard, a bare torso, and long, flowing trousers, and seemed to move him up another notch in the eyes of the girls.

On the seventh, he was down the middle a good 260, with Hawkeye not far behind him. Hawkeye’s second shot wasn’t much, however, and he had a full five-iron left. Then Trapper cranked out an awesome two-wood with a slight tail-end hook which hit the hard fairway, bounced over a trap, and came to rest within two feet of the pin.

“Jesus!” exclaimed Hawkeye. The paddies, hearing this, looked knowingly at each other, and it dawned on the Swampmen what their mounting excitement was all about. Happily, Hawkeye had several of the autographed pictures in his wallet and, with a grand gesture, he bestowed complimentary copies upon the girls who, their suspicions confirmed, were overcome. Hawkeye had to lead them aside to calm them down, explaining as best he could that the Master’s game was a little rusty and that He wanted to get in at least eighteen holes before making His comeback generally known.

“These bimboes,” he explained to Trapper, approaching the eighth tee, “are on a real Christian kick, so don’t disappoint them.”

Trapper grabbed his driver, winced and looked at his hands. “Goddam nail holes,” he complained.

The rest of the way around, Trapper played even par on the not too difficult and not too long course to finish with a seventy-three. Hawkeye couldn’t figure the greens and found himself needing a ten-footer on the eighteenth for a seventy-eight Trapper blessed the ball and the cup before Hawkeye essayed the putt, which went in like it had eyes. The caddies, bowing their way out, departed to spread the word.

“Now,” Trapper said, “let’s prepare to lighten Corny’s load a little. If that hacker breaks eighty I’ll take it to the World Court.”

The Swampmen, with Trapper back in full uniform, found the bar. They were on their second Scotch when they noticed the Japanese faces peeking through the window and then Colonel Cornwall and his three colleagues pushing their way through the crowd at the door.

“I say now,” the colonel was saying, brushing himself off. “Does anyone know what this is all about?”

“Ah, yes,” Hawkeye said, motioning toward Trapper, who was bowing toward the faces at the window and door. “Mighty
High
Religious Personage is greeting followers.”

“Of course, of course,” the colonel was saying now, starting to rock with laughter. “I say! That’s rather droll, isn’t it?”

“What’s that, sir?” one of his colleagues asked.

“Chap here,” he said, nodding toward Trapper. “Why, the chap here’s portraying John the Baptist!”

“Colonel,” Hawkeye said, handing him one of the autographed pictures, “you can’t tell the players without a score-card.”

“Oh, I say!” the colonel was roaring now. “That
is
good, isn’t it? I
do
get it now. Say, you chaps, do have a drink on me. Oh, I say!”

The Swampmen had several drinks on him and, when they got around to comparing cards, the colonel, who had shot an eighty-two, paid up willingly.

“Corny,” Hawkeye heard himself saying, “how about you and these other gentlemen joining us for dinner at Dr. Yamamoto’s Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse?”

“Oh, I say!” the colonel said. “That sounds like sport!”

Shortly after 7:00 p.m., Me Lay Marston, idly sipping a martini in the bar of the FKPH&W, heard a commotion outside. Going to the door, he found Hawkeye, the British contingent and then Trapper John bringing up the rear. Trapper was trying to disentangle himself from the converts and the just curious.

“Me Lay,” Trapper said, when he got inside, “I’ve had enough of this. Get me a pair of scissors and a razor.”

In time Trapper John was shaved, shorn and showered, and dinner was solicitously served by the young ladies. While the visitors sipped after-dinner cordials, Me Lay excused himself to make his rounds at the adjoining hospital. In a few minutes he returned with a worried look.

“What had you guys planned for tonight?” he asked.

“Well,” answered Trapper, “we thought we’d get some …”

“How about looking at a kid for me?”

“Look, Me Lay,” Hawkeye said, “you’re supposed to be the intern in this …”

“Shut up, and come look at this kid.”

“What’s the story?” asked Trapper.

“Well, one of our girls got careless, and two days ago she gave birth to an eight pound Japanese-American male.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Every time we feed him, it either comes right back up or he coughs and turns blue and has a helluva time.”

“We don’t have to see him,” Trapper said. “Call that half-assed Army Hospital and tell them to be ready to put some lipiodal in this kid’s esophagus and take X-rays.”

“But it’s ten-thirty at night. We can’t get everybody out for a civilian. They won’t do it.”

“How much you wanna bet, Me Lay?” inquired Hawkeye Pierce. “Get on the horn and tell them the pros from Dover are on their way with a patient. Better tell the OR to crank itself up, because I got a feeling that you’re going to pass some gas while I help Trapper close a tracheo-esophageal fistula.”

“Oh, I say,” Colonel Cornwall wanted to know, “what’s that?”

“It’s a hole between the esophagus and the trachea, where it doesn’t belong,” Hawkeye explained.

“And you chaps can repair that?”

“Well,” said Me Lay. “We can try.”

At the 25th Station Hospital, the Officer of the Day received a call from Captain Marston saying that an emergency was coming in for X-rays. Soon after, Hawkeye and Trapper, in Papa-San suits and followed by Me Lay carrying the baby, entered the X-ray department.

Captain Banks, the O.D., arrived and asked, “What’s this all about?”

“It’s all about this baby,” Hawkeye informed him. “We want to X-ray him and we want to do it right now, and we do not wish to be engaged in useless conversation by officious military types, of which you look like one to me.”

“But, we can’t …”

Hawkeye sat Captain Banks on thre edge of a desk and handed him the phone.

“Be nice, Captain. Call the X-ray technician. If you give us any kind of a bad time, me and Trapper John are going to clean your clock. We are frustrated lovers and quite dangerous.”

Captain Banks called. While awaiting the technician, Trapper and Me Lay placed a small catheter in the baby’s esophagus. A few minutes later, radio-opaque oil was injected through the catheter. It revealed the abnormal opening between the esophagus and the trachea but no significant narrowing of the esophagus. This meant that anything the baby ate could go into his lungs but that, happily, once the opening was closed, the esophagus would be able to accommodate the passage of food. It required careful preparation, proper anesthesia, early and competent surgery and good luck.

“Me Lay, let’s you and me get a needle into a vein,” Trapper said, and then, turning to Captain Banks, he said, “You there, in the shiny shoes, tell the lab to do a blood count and cross-match a pint. We won’t need that much, but it’s a term they’ll understand. Then tell the OR to get set up for a thoracotomy. We’re going to operate in about two hours. Hawkeye, you stick close to Alice, or whatever his name is, and see that he performs efficiently.”

The Officer of the Day had no choice but to perform efficiently. The nurses were routed out, not at all pleased at the prospect of operating a second time with the pros from Dover. There was, in fact, outright grumbling which Hawkeye Pierce brought to a rapid conclusion.

“Ladies,” he said, “we are sorry to get you out at this time of night. However, we stumbled upon this deal, and we can’t walk away from it, no matter whose rules are broken. This baby will die if we don’t fix him, so let’s all be nice and just think about the baby.”

Fortunately, nurses succumb to this kind of pitch. They gave up any show of resistance, particularly after they saw the baby, but Hawkeye caught Captain Banks calling Colonel Merrill.

“Now, Captain,” he chided him, “I may give you a few lumps, but first I must call the Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse.”

So doing, he talked to Colonel Cornwall, explained their situation and made a few suggestions. Fifteen minutes later, as Colonel R. P. Merrill stormed into the hospital, he was met by four British officers who loaded him unceremoniously into their Land Rover and returned to the FKPH&W.

After Captain Banks had been stripped naked, and locked in a broom closet by the two Swampmen, the operation was finally started. Me Lay’s anesthesia was excellent, the nurses cooperated completely, and Trapper and Hawkeye indulged in none of the by-play that had marked their first local appearance. After an hour and a half of careful work, Trapper had closed the fistula. They shed their gowns and discussed the postoperative care.