Hawkeye, BJ, and Margaret sat in the mess tent and went through the daily, guess what food this is, routine. Hawkeye lifted what looked like a piece of meatloaf with his fork and examined it. "I don't know whether to eat it or return it to the civil war soldier they stole this from," he remarked.
"Maybe we can donate it to the orphanage, give them something to play baseball with," BJ suggested.
"Mail call!" Radar announced as he walked in. He stopped at one table as the three turned and watched. Next, he pulled out a box and carried it over to them. "Major Houlihan," he stated as he handed her the box.
Margaret took the package and examined it. It was from one of her friends back home, a friend from a very long time ago.
"You got anything for us?" Hawkeye questioned.
"All I have for you sir is a letter saying that you have a chance to win a new car," he announced as he handed his the lonely letter.
"At least you got something," BJ said as he looked over to Hawkeye.
"What did you get?" Hawkeye asked Margaret.
She moved her tray aside and set the box down in front of her. She tore off the paper and opened the box as Hawkeye and BJ anxiously watched. With confusion, she pulled out a book and examined the plain, wordless cover. She opened the cover and found a folded up letter, which she read to herself and then quickly tucked it away back in the cover. "Excuse me," she said before rushing out of the tent.
BJ looked over to Hawkeye. "Must have been some present," he commented.
"Yeah," Hawkeye distantly responded. He then excused himself and left to go follow Margaret to her tent. Standing out side her door, he gently knocked. "Margaret?"
Margaret who was sitting at her desk going through the book, looked up towards the door. How did she know that he was going to be there? "What is it?" she sharply called out.
Hawkeye took this as his cue to stick his head in. "What did you get" he asked leaning into the tent.
Margaret huffed as she rolled her eyes. "None of your business, now please leave. I never even gave you permission to come in," she responded.
"I never gave my draft board permission to send me here, so I really think that you should take that up with them," he quipped.
Margaret gave up. "Come in and close the door," she ordered.
Hawkeye was about to make a joke, but decided against it. There was something with her, something that made her seem a bit more vulnerable than usual. He actually kind of liked it. "What is it?" he implored as he approached the desk.
Margaret sighed as she opened up the book. It was a photo album containing pictures of her and her friend during her last year of high school.
Hawkeye's eyes were caught by one photo I particular. Margaret was leaning against a rock in front of the ocean. She was wearing a strapless dress that tightly hugged her upper body and then went out at the waist line. She had a thick scarf tied around her waist, allowing some of it to cover the skirt of the dress. Her shiny high heels matched the gloves that she wore with a few different bracelets over them. A boa was wrapped around her shoulders. Her soft face, smiling, accentuated by her curled hair with the flower stuck in behind her ear. "What was going on there?" he asked pointing to the picture.
"We were getting ready for the Senior dance," she explained.
"I think someone went all out," he stated and then looked up and smiled to her.
"Well, I was invited to go by the quarterback," she informed him.
Hawkeye then looked over to a picture of Margaret and her friend sitting at a table outside. Margaret had a scarf tied in her hair as a headband. Sunglasses were over her eyes and she was wearing a button down, short sleeve shirt. "Are those pierced ears I see?" Hawkeye inquired, finally noticing.
"Yeah, Lorraine and I pierced our ears. Cathy thought it was special enough to go get her father's camera and take a picture," she stated.
Hawkeye went through and looked at the rest of the pictures. "Cheerleader?" he questioned.
"At ever high school since I started," Margaret said.
There were pictures of her in cheerleading outfits. Some were of her and her friend at the beach. Quite a few of them were at parties, ones in which she held drinks and sat on people's laps.
He looked up to her and saw her gazing down at the page. "Something happened between then and now," he said.
Margaret's smile faded as she turned from the book to him. "Things change. I wasn't in charge of a group of nurses in the middle of a war back then," she responded.
"What about when we're not in the OR, or when you're not ordering nurses around?" he asked.
"This is hardly the place to be acting like some irresponsible school girl," she answered. She got up and closed the book to put away on her shelf.
"Despite everything you're saying now, I still think that there's a little free spirit in you just dying to get out," he insisted.
Margaret turned to him. "Trust me, it's not. That part of my life is over."
Hawkeye watched her as she randomly tidied up parts of the tent. The decorations, and pictures all somewhat suggested that it wasn't completely done with, that instead she might have just been trying to hide it. Maybe even completely deny it. "Would you go back and relive it?" he questioned as he leaned his head on his hand.
Margaret froze. She had allowed herself to become too comfortable with his previous questions and now he was starting to dig. "I don't know," she admitted. "I never really thought about it."
That struck him as a bit odd. "Something happen back then?" he implored.
Margaret turned around and sat down on her cot. "You want to know what I was like in high school?" she asked with a grin. "I was care free. I cared maybe about grades, but I never tried too hard, if I got a B, I got a B. Everything else though was nothing. I stayed out late. I dressed how ever I felt like dressing. My dad and I got along real well, so he trusted me, a lot. That meant I did whatever I felt like, whenever. I went to every party after every game. With all six schools that I was at during those four years, I dated one football player from each and was a cheerleader at each place. I was the nerdy girl who got picked in during grade school and then one of the popular girls in high school and I took advantage of it," she informed him.
"What went wrong?" he inquired.
"I let myself get more attached to people, and then I would have to say good bye to those people right away. I would become happy with something and then lose it within a few months," she said.
Hawkeye lifted his head and looked to her with concern. "So you changed who you are?"
"I changed because all of those things I used to do just remind me of what I was, and what I used to have. Those pictures only show the good times that I had within half of one year. They don't show how often I had to pack up and leave and how often there were fights at the parties and how may times either my heart would get broken or I would brake someone else's simply because one of us had to move. All those little things I did would just remind of the bad along with the good," she confessed. "It would be like taking a photo from a party here. Yes, we were having fun at the time, but it doesn't show the blood that we just got on ourselves during the previous ten hour OR session, or the cuts and bruises we got during a shelling. It doesn't show any of that."
The tent fell silent. Hawkeye now understood a but more about why the gift had upset her. "What did the letter say?" he finally asked.
Margaret shook her head. "Just that she had it and thought I should get to have it for a while," she flatly replied.
Hawkeye stood up and grabbed the album on his way to sit down next to Margaret. "You know, this war isn't going to last forever, and there are some times spent here that are at least a little bit worth remembering," he explained.
Margaret shrugged. "Like what? Every time we got drunk?"
"Well, the parties Trapper and I used to throw were something to remember. But then again we never remembered them the next morning," he remarked.
Margaret rolled her eyes. "What are you trying to say?" she asked, trying to speed up the conversation here.
Hawkeye opened up to the page with her leaning against the rock in her prom dress. "I think you should at least keep in mind the good that happened. The people that were with you," he started, but saw her blankly staring at the photo.
She looked to him and smiled. "Here," she said as she peeled the picture off the page. "I think you should keep it."
Hawkeye accepted the gift. "Why?" he asked.
"You seem to like it more than I do. And besides," she started, and then stood up to put the book away. "After this is all over, you might," she trailed off.
Hawkeye kept eye contact with her. "Even without the picture, I think I'd remember you," he assured her.
The next day, Margaret walked into her tent and spotted an envelope on her desk. Not really thinking much of it, she walked over and opened it. Her eyes lit up. There was a picture in there of Hawkeye when he was younger. He was wearing a flannel shirt with jeans as he sat on a boat with a beer bottle in his hand. Turing it over, she saw writing. "Dear Margaret, yes, I used to be just a little bit more care free too," she read to herself.