A/N: I don't own the characters used in this story, except for Saunders. There is a slash component to this story, but only a very mild one. I wrote this some time ago, but I found it again recently and found that I was still proud enough of it to publish it now. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Dear Peg,

Before I even start, I want you to know how hard this letter is for me to write. This is, without a doubt, the hardest thing I've ever had to do. But even as hard as this is, I know it has to be this way.

There are so many things that I want, need to tell you, but I'm not sure words can do it. I don't think I can make you understand what it is I'm going through here, especially when even I don't get it most of the time. I'm not the same man as I was. I'm not the man who left you and Erin at the airport—God, it seems like a lifetime ago, but it must've only been a few months. I look in the mirror some mornings and don't even recognize the man staring back. I'm old, Peg. It takes its toll, seeing kids, some of them not even 18 yet, die in front of me, watching them slip through my fingers and into an early grave, knowing there's not a damned thing I can do to stop it. I know it sounds grim and terrible, and it is. The worst part is that after probably hundreds of times, it still hits me as hard as if it were the first. No, I take that back. The worst part will be when it stops hitting me that hard.

What really gets me though, and this, I guess, is really the whole point, is that even after I leave this place, when I'm half a world away, it won't leave me. I can't go back to the man I was, even a year ago. I can't go back to being your husband. I hate not telling you this to your face, even over the phone would be better than this, but I hate more knowing that I couldn't say this to your face. I hate that this is the only way for me to tell you that I've fallen in love with someone else. I want more than anything in the world for you to understand, so please keep reading.

I hope you're still reading. Like I said, I want you to understand, so I'll try to start from the beginning. His name was John Saunders, a nineteen-year-old corporal who took some shrapnel when his colonel had his unit trying to retake some hill at the line. He wasn't too bad off, so he got bumped back in the triage line. He was still conscious when they dropped him on my table.

"Hey, doc." He was young. They were always so young.

"Hello…" BJ couldn't read the man's name through the blood. It looked much worse than it was. Guys this drenched were usually a screaming mess. Probably how they missed him with the anesthetic.

"Saunders, name's Saunders. Corporal, if you like, but my friends call me Johnny. You get this Commie trash outta me, we'll be friends for life. What'd'ya say?" He grinned weakly up at his last hope, a man in a white jacket whose face he couldn't see.

"Johnny it is. If you'll stay put just a minute…"

"Hell, doc, I ain't goin' nowhere too fast. Figure you can catch me if I do make a break." He smiled again.

"I guess so. Nurse," BJ called, grabbing the attention and the arm of a passing woman. "This man needs anesthetic."

"Does he, doc? Does he really?" Johnny grinned up.

"Can't start pulling until you're under."

"It really hurts that bad?"

"No," Hawkeye broke in from the next table. "He just doesn't want you to hear when he starts poking fun at your liver."

"Or a scalpel at your pancreas." The gas mask was fitted over the man's nose. "Just count backwards from ten and take a few deep breaths."

"Be sure an' get it all, now, doc."

"When he's done, you won't set off the metal detector at an airport," Hawk called over.

"Saunders, can you hear me? You in there, Johnny?" When he didn't get an answer, BJ went to work. It proved to be a little more complicated than the superficial scrapings it had seemed at first. "Hawk, when you get a minute, think you could give me a hand? This kid's a mess. I may need two hands and a flashlight to get all this junk."

"Don't forget," Hawkeye said as he changed into a fresh white apron. "All the pink oozing stuff goes back inside when you're done."

"You sure? I think some of it would look better on the outside." BJ grinned despite his mask.

"That's why you're a doctor, not a decorator. Pink doesn't go with Army green or his nice Korean tan."

"I don't know what I was thinking, inside it is. I don't know what I'd do without you, Hawk."

It took the two of us three hours to get all the shards out of that poor kid. See, Peg, the problem wasn't that there was a lot of metal floating around in him, but that the few pieces that had gotten in had splintered and spread out across his abdomen. They were there from his stomach to his bowel, and if we hadn't been as careful as we were, he would have bled out from a thousand tiny holes, and we would have lost him in less than a minute. We actually had to use a flashlight at one point.

The first night in post-op is always the most important. That first night tells you how a patient will do. There are three types of first nights here, Peg, three types of patients: ones that will last through the night, ones that won't, and, the worst kind, ones that could go either way. I know you think certain death is worse, but for a doctor there is nothing that makes you tear your hair out quite like not knowing.

We stayed up in the post-op ward, Hawk and me, watching over Johnny Saunders. Here was some kid, couldn't have been more than twenty, and we were waiting for him to die. We joked about it as much as we could without hating ourselves, but that's really what we were doing, and we knew it.

"You ever feel like the grim reaper, Beej?" All the humor was gone from Hawkeye's voice as he looked over the still form of Corporal Saunders. "Like you're bringing it on them? Standing here right now, we worked on this kid for hours, we did our best, hell, better than our best, but if this kid dies, it'll be our fault. No matter what happens, some of these guys never stood a chance, but it's still our fault."

BJ looked forlornly at his friend in one of his rare moments of absolute honesty. "Yeah, I know what you mean." This place was killing BJ; Hawkeye could read it on his face as he watched Saunders sleep.

He put an arm over BJ's shoulders. "Sorry I brought it up."

The first night went well for Saunders, better than any of us could have hoped for. By the second day, he was eating solid food again. It looked like we had gotten all the shrapnel out, and he was going to make a full recovery. He even walked around every now and then, testing his legs. I think he needed to know he could still use them. I think he needed to know he could still rely on some things.

Hawkeye and I spent every spare minute we had in that dingy tent, talking to Johnny. He had a sister, Peg, and a whole life to go back to when he was done in the Army. He talked about it every day. Some patients come and go without saying three words other than "My leg hurts," or "No, it feels fine." Other patients, well, they need to be heard. They need to talk and for someone to listen. Johnny needed us to hear about his sister and her husband. He needed to tell us about the job he'd had working at the radio station down the street from his old high school. He just needed someone to talk to. We didn't worry about him.

"Hey, fellas, grab up a couple chairs." Johnny gestured the two doctors over as they entered the post-op tent.

"What've you got for us today, Johnny? Any good stories?" Hawkeye sat on the side of the bed and waited eagerly.

"Not today, Hawk. Why don't you do a soldier a favor an' tell me how the ol' war's goin?"

"Eh, you don't want to hear about that." BJ waved the question away. "It's just the same story over and over again."

"We gain a hill, we lose a village. We gain a village, we lose a hill." Hawkeye patted his shoulder.

"I was just wonderin' how my unit was doin." Johnny grinned weakly, but Hawkeye was feeling his face.

"You feeling okay, Johnny?"

"Now that you mention it, yeah. Feel like I could wrestle a bear." He tried to grin again, but he was pale and sweating, and obviously weak. "Little tired is all, promise."

"Nurse," Hawkeye called urgently.

We missed something. For most people, a mistake is a mistake. You go back later and fix what you did wrong. That's true for almost everyone, even most doctors. Most civilian doctors, anyway. When you're doctoring in a front line unit, every patient is all or nothing. You don't usually have the time to go back and redo a surgery, and even when you do, it's always too late. We missed something, a piece of shrapnel we didn't see, or an instrument that wasn't sanitized properly, or a little wind got kicked up and some sand blew into the OR. Whatever it was, it was something, and Johnny had an infection.

Back home, back where doctors have the luxury of proper equipment and supplies, this would have been a problem. Here, it was a death sentence. There was nothing we could do. He wasn't stable enough to be moved, we were nowhere near the right medicines. The only thing we could do was try to dull the pain, and sit by his bed while he died. Sometimes that's all we can do, but it has to be enough for us to know that they didn't die alone.

It probably sounds selfish and cruel, but at a certain point it's more about the doctor than the patient. When you get right down to it, the patient either lives or dies. But the doctor always lives, always has to live with the guilt and the questions. Was it my fault? Could I have saved him? Did I kill him?

"Hey, doc, how's it goin?" Johnny asked weakly from his bed.

"Not great." BJ sat by him on a stool he'd found somewhere.

"Why don't you just tell ol' Johnny what's the matter, huh? Bet it'll make you feel better."

"Well Johnny, it's this guy I know. I worked on him a few days ago, and I really got to know him. Now it doesn't look like he's going to make it."

Johnny seemed to consider something for a moment, then put his hand on BJ's knee in an attempt at a comforting gesture. "It ain't your fault, is it?'

"No, but it still bothers me."

"It ain't never easy to watch a man go, specially not one you know. But you did your best, an' it's just his time. Let 'im go."

He was ready. He was actually ready to die. He was only nineteen, Peg, nineteen. He had a family and a life, and he was accepting death! I looked at him, and I couldn't help but think of what Erin might be like at that age. I couldn't stand it. That night, I went back to the Swamp and tried to drink my problems away. When Hawk came in after his post-op shift, I felt like I was the one dying.

"BJ, I say this not as a friend, but as an expert. You've had enough."

"I'll tell you when I've had enough!" BJ shouted in Hawkeye's face. Then he stumbled into his friend. Hawkeye held him up long enough to help him to his bed. "He's dying, Hawk. Johnny's going to die."

"And drinking yourself to death is going to change that?"

"I don't want him to die."

"No one does. He's a good kid."

"A good kid? Is that all you can say? He's a great kid. Think of the kind of man he could've been, Hawk. If this damned war hadn't… if I hadn't…."

"No. I'm not gonna let you blame this on yourself, BJ. You know as well as I do how hard you busted your ass to save that kid. We both did, and I'm not going to let you demean that! Nobody could've done a better job for him than we did, and you know it. Sometimes things just happen, BJ. Some things can't be stopped, no matter how great a job you do trying, and we did one hell of a job on that kid in there. The second you start blaming yourself for things you can't come near controlling, you give up any right you have to call yourself a doctor. We can't win all of them. We can come as close as, closer than humanly possible, but every now and then, we're going to lose one."

"Any more clichés you wanna throw at me, Hawk?" BJ asked after a tense, quiet moment.

"One. You have to learn to let go."

"What's different, Hawk? I've let go before. I've known the kid before and I let go. I didn't drink, I didn't even cry, I just let go. Maybe that's what's different, huh? I've always let go. Maybe I'm ready to let one get under my skin. Maybe I'm ready to admit I have a heart. What do you think, Hawkeye, am I ready to have a heart?"

"I don't know anyone with a bigger heart than BJ Hunnicut. Just because you don't want it, don't admit to it, doesn't mean it's not there." Hawkeye was sitting next to him on the bed now. He had an arm around BJ's shoulders now. BJ was starting to cry now, and Hawkeye held on to him for as long as he could. Hawkeye put his head on BJ's head now and felt his own heart break.

Charles entered quietly. He met Hawkeye's eyes. "It's Saunders," he said simply.

"C'mon, Beej," Hawkeye muttered as he hefted the man to his feet. "Let's go say goodbye." He dried his friend's eyes now, dabbed at them with a torn piece of uniform.

"Brave face, now, Hawk. Can't let him see me sweat."

"Sweat, huh? That's what you're calling it?"

"That's my story and I'm sticking to it."

"Then I'll back you up every step of the way."

BJ looked at his best friend, a man with whom he had endured so much, the man who could climb mountains and part oceans in the name of medicine, the man who let him have his own miracles every now and then. It must be him, after all. BJ was never this good in the States.

BJ looked at his once-in-a-lifetime, total knockout, over-the-moon, hell-in-a-hand-basket, whirlwind of a best friend. BJ looked at a man he could admit to. A man he could love.

Corporal Johnny Saunders died at 3:04 am, May 8, 1953. Looking back, I think that's the day I started thinking of California and you and the house and Erin as "The States" instead of home. I think that's the day I resigned myself to living in hell. That's the day I told myself I could make it better by accepting how bad it was and just…giving my all to fix it.

That was the day I stopped living in the fantasy world I had made for myself. The world where all the soldiers lived, and the war eventually ended and I went home to a wife and daughter. Because that was the day I realized that everyone dies eventually, wars go on forever, and even when they end, they've dragged us so long and so hard through the mud that we're never really clean again. Never.

I still fight tooth and nail for every soldier, I still hope and pray for an end to all this. I still think of you and Erin. But you're my past now, Peg. I'm sorry, but I can't pretend anymore, not for anyone. If I could put that show on for anyone, it'd be you, because I still care about you.

I wrote you this letter to tell you that I'm in love with someone else. His name is Hawkeye, and I really think you'd like him.

I wrote you this letter and I feel like I'm not making sense anymore. Like I'm circling back over and over around the same ideas.

I wrote you this letter, and I hope someday to actually send it.

I wrote you this letter, and I hope you're still reading.

Love,-No

Sincerely,-No

Yours truly,-No

-BJ