(Author's Note: I stole the opening sentence from Stephen King ("The Mist"), who in turn had stolen it from Douglas Fairbairn ("Shoot"). King calls this line "the essence of all story," and I've always wanted to use it as a starting point. Here is the result.)
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Heaven Sent
This is what happened.
I wasn't actually supposed to tell anyone—that was our pact. Capt. Pierce said nobody'd believe it anyway, but even so, we all agreed it would be a good idea to keep it to ourselves.
But almost everyone who was involved is gone now. Col. Potter… he passed long ago. Hawkeye and Charles and Maj. Houlihan… all left us over the past few years. B.J.'s still hanging in there, but he's not as lucid as he used to be and he lives in a nursing home now. When I visit him, which is rare because he's still on the west coast, he usually can't remember who I am, even when I show him photos of me in my dresses.
So it's time, I think, to tell the story. Why not? It was unbelievable, but it was real—we all agreed on that, all those years ago. It was a miracle. And this is how it happened.
It began on a Saturday night, when the war was in a lull. That happened from time to time, all of a sudden the fighting would die down for a while and we would find ourselves with nothing much to do. Sometimes we'd start up a marathon poker game in the O Club, sometimes we'd gather in the mess tent and watch a movie, sometimes we'd just get bored.
On this particular Saturday night, I was alone in my tent, doing some sewing. One of my dresses needed mending. I know what you're thinking: why did I go to so much trouble, not only wearing dresses but also designing them, sewing them, making them from scratch? Well I figured, if you're going to try to get out of the service by acting crazy, you might as well go all the way.
I was sewing away in my tent, probably humming some tune like "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah," when I heard a shout from out in the compound.
"Hey! Somebody come help! Wounded soldier here!"
I put the sewing aside and ran out there. It'd been Igor who'd called, and he was no good with the wounded. I mean, he didn't have any experience. He was a nice guy and wanted to help, he just didn't have the medical background. Not that I had a lot myself, but I was at least more helpful than Igor.
The soldier in question wasn't actually wounded, though. He'd collapsed right there in front of Igor, but he wasn't bleeding or injured in any obvious way. I told Igor to run to the Swamp and find one of the doctors, and while he did that, I gave the soldier a pat or two on the cheek. He seemed to be out cold.
"Hey? Hey, guy? Are you wounded or sick or what?"
No response. But yeah, my guess was he was sick, because there was no wound I could see.
Hawkeye and B.J. came running with Igor in tow, and they asked me what was up.
"I don't know, sirs. I don't see any blood. Was he shot, Igor?"
Igor shook his head. "He just walked up to me and held out his hand, and then he fainted. That's all I know. I never seen him before."
Neither had I. He looked like a foot soldier; I guessed he had walked off the front line and wandered into our camp… AWOL.
Hawkeye called for a litter, and in no time, we had the guy moved into post-op, where the doctors could treat him.
Except first they needed to diagnose him, and as we found out over the next few hours, that wasn't going to be easy. They'd never seen this illness before. The guy remained unconscious, so he couldn't tell the docs anything about where he might have picked up his disease or whatever it was.
At first the docs considered hemorrhagic fever, which was a nasty disease we saw quite a bit of during that war. It was very serious, although we eventually learned how to better treat it, and that helped us save many a young soldier.
But the doctors ruled out hemorrhagic fever with a few tests, and instead they were left with… well, with nothing. They'd never seen these specific symptoms before, and they were growing more and more frustrated because the soldier (whose name was Britten, according to his dog tags) only seemed to be getting progressively worse.
You could always tell when the doctors there at the 4077th got panicky, because they had this look they exchanged with each other. They wouldn't put their panic or their worst fears into words, but I could read it on their faces.
They were worried as hell about Britten, and they suspected they were going to lose him, and what made them even crazier was that they didn't know what they were going to lose him to. At least when a soldier dies from being shot, they knew the cause of his death. In this particular case, they were going to watch a young man die from something they couldn't name.
The frustration, the anger, and the stress were written on everyone's faces. You could practically see it in the air, it was that overwhelming.
But that was nothing compared to the sheer, unadulterated terror when, on Sunday night, just about 24 hours after Britten staggered into our camp, Col. Potter suddenly fell ill with the very same disease.
(to be continued)
