Title: The Very Model
Rating: K+
Wordcount: 1557
Warnings/Spoilers: character death, survivor's guilt, war is hell. Basic MASH spoilers and speculation.
A/N: The title of this comes from Gilbert & Sullivan's "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General." Crossposted on ao3.
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It's funny how the work of the unit has to go on, even though the life has gone out of it. Everyone walks around, but blind, with the hesitant tread of those walking in the dark. It's as if they are groping, having to use their fingers and hands and the pain of hitting obstacles in the pitch back to see where they are at all.
Click, click, click, clang.
The type-writer keys were stuck again, he had struck two at once, together, and they were jammed. Impatiently, he hooked his finger around the right arm and levered it away from the other, they slide smoothly back into place, ready to keep going.
All present and correct, sir.
He pulled off his glasses roughly and pulled out his pocket square to polish them. They were so blurry, it must be that they have gotten fingermarks or oil smears on them. It's not that he's crying. It's not. He had lost friends, many dear friends to bigger wars than this one, and served on without faltering. But he had never lost a son of his heart before.
Under his clean glasses, the letter was still a mostly blank sheet of white paper: Dear Mrs. O'Reilly was about as far as he had gotten.
Your son, he typed, then halted.
He could picture in his mind the form that was supposed to be used on occasions like this. Dear X, it read, Your son was killed on Y date in Z location on behalf of A unit. (They run out of letters at some point.). He was B. A commander he had known in Europe had a whole rotating list of adjectives to fill in for these forms. Like they were replaceable, insert adjective 1 into blank 1, insert name here, insert details of death. But Radar, Radar could never be replaceable, not like a dime a dozen cog in a machine. He was little but fierce.
He supposed Mrs. O'Reilly would appreciate that.
He put his fingers on the keys again. They were trembling, and he supposed that was right too, the rock steady hands of surgeon, trembling in grief. They hadn't trembled once, taking his pulse, finding nothing where there should be a surging something, picking off his shattered glasses and closing those big, blue boy-like eyes, wiping away the blood from his face, simply because there was nothing else to do.
I had not thought death had undone so many.
There was nothing at all anyone could have done, the spectacularly improbable piece of shell fragment that had struck at just the right place, at just the right moment, a rogue bomb falling from an artillery barrage. Radar was just unlucky. An unlucky boy, stuck in a war fought for politics and undercurrents of fear, in a country he had probably never heard of before he was sent to it.
Just a boy, really, that would never have the chance to grow up.
If sometimes, when he had settled into bed and felt the weariness of a too long, forty-eight-hour day easing off his bones, he had imagined a happy future after all this for them all, with a sort of hazy picture of Radar grown up, married, with a passel of kids, still on the farm in Ottumwa.
He would have been the sort of father who knew all his children's favorite ice cream flavors when he took them downtown to buy seed-corn on Friday afternoons, and always had at least one more piece of sugar in his pocket for the horses, and the kids. There would have been a wife, sturdy, pretty, petite, with the kind of figure that said wife and mother and love, love happy, love fulfilled, love expanding.
He'd have called his children after his Ma and Pa, and their Ma and Pa, and his wife's and her parent's, and maybe, just maybe, he would have looked with contentment at those guys he had served with in Korea and a Benjamin or a Francis or a Sherman might have sprung up, right there, in that fertile soil of young, growing things.
—when he was cut off from the land of the living. His blood felt cold to think it, that there might be no more O'Reilly boys.
Tremble hands, he thought furiously, tremble, because you are old and yet you still live.
Your son had a heart bigger than his size.
It made him smile to write that, even though it hurt. He swiveled in the chair and leaned an arm over the back. The teddy bear was propped up on Radar's bunk, almost as if it were simply waiting. That made him smile too, ruefully, because the bear belonged to them all now, a promise to live up to.
"Radar, son, you were a pony with the heart of a racehorse."
It felt like a bone pulled out of its socket not to hear Radar stammering thanks, or to blush about saying something so nice before he had said anything at all. There were a lot of things that Radar did around this place to miss, but Radar simply being Radar was the biggest one of all.
He pulled more that his fair share of weight around here, and he did it all with the pluck and determination of a boy raised right, Mrs. O'Reilly, to do hard work well and give every last inch of himself for the good of others. I count myself lucky to be one of those others.
There were a lot of battlefields that he hadn't died in, to be at this one. In all the wars he had been in, he had met an awful lot of boys like Radar, innocent, kind, just kids off on their first grand adventure out in the world. It ended too soon for a lot of them, too.
Lucky.
What did it mean to be lucky? Three wars lucky.
Oh, but he had never wanted to die. In the Great War he would have done it, died for his buddies, only because he knew so little of life, how precious it was, what it was worth. By the war after that, he had looked coldly at the prospect, weighing the value of Mildred and his children against the value of his men and found himself a coward.
The calculus of life. The cut of that decision had never felt so deep before. Fifty-two years lucky and guilty as sin.
How many men have died for you, Sherman T Potter?
Radar never passed by anyone he could help, whether it was playing with one of the Korean orphans or helping carry patients into surgery. He did his duty as soldier—
He wanted to cross that last sentence out, but he didn't think he could make himself retype the whole thing.
—but more truthfully, I want you to know that Walter O'Reilly might have been barely old enough to be over here in this war, Mrs. O'Reilly, but he was a man and conducted himself like one.
Only five foot four inches tall and more like a man than soldiers twice his weight and head and shoulders higher. Oh, he had his pets and his teddy bear and his Grape Nehi, that everybody teased him about, but he got up cheerful in the morning after being woken up three times during the night, and he visited the soldiers in the wards and he traded comic books and a deep tin of his Ma's shortbread cookies for that one particular surgical instrument that Hawkeye and BJ and he had harassed the Army about for two months.
Radar had weighed things differently in his calculus. He could barely do more than simple arithmetic but even so, he knew exactly how much one life wasn't worth his comics or cookies.
Your son was a credit to you, and to the family and to the place that raised him and brought him up well.
I am honored to have known him, Mrs. O'Reilly, you should be proud of your son. All of us here at the MASH 4077th were very fond of Radar, and we are better people for knowing him.
We will all miss him so very much.
Sincerely yours,
He typed the last words and it sounded strange, like the click of a rifle's bolt coming back but not firing properly. It made him twitch, and he put a hand on the spacebar as he turned. Then the typewriter's bell dinged. He had reached the end of the row, to come around for another pass.
But the only thing left to do was sign it. He pulled it out of the machine, and left it sitting on Radar's desk. Only Radar's desk for a little while longer. There would be a new clerk, soon enough.
Another day, sir, another war—
It didn't sound like Radar's voice, coming from behind the double doors. It wasn't a whisper, wasn't a question, just an officious, even-toned statement of fact.
He had been a POW once, shot twice, starved, barraged with artillery hundreds of times, beaten up in fistfights dozens of times, but nothing could hurt, quite so much, quite so hard, quite so deep, as the matter-of-fact, dry sound of his own voice complacent inside his head:
You don't even know how many.