A/N: I own nothing. Title taken from Friday Night Lights. Also, despite potential confusion to the contrary, no main characters are killed in the making of this fic. (Ie, Hawkeye's not dead in this one folks). Also, I have no idea how they do roll call in the army, but probably not like this.
Sherman Potter did not come from a long line of soldiers. His folks were from Missouri, and farming ran as deeply in his veins as soldiering did in others with less corn dust behind their ears.
Running away at fifteen to join the Cavalry had far more to do with his love of horses than it did with a patriotic desire to be the first in his family to put on a uniform and die for his country.
Three years, two bullet wounds, months behind enemy lines, weeks in enemy hands, a dead cavalry horse or three, and a dozen or so medals disabused him of any glory his young mind might have found in the entire venture.
It also taught him that there's nothing else he could picture himself doing with his life.
Then the summer of 1918 rolled around, it with it his little brother's eighteenth birthday.
Sherman had little time for his younger brother growing up. Separated by less than a year all told, Ben was the exact opposite of everything Sherman was, which naturally made Ben everything their father wished Sherman would be.
Ben is dead and buried before Sherman even gets the letter informing him of his brother's conscription into the good old US army which Sherman has found more of a home in than he ever did back on the farm they both grew up on.
He makes it home the day of the funeral, watching his father stoically refuse to accept the flag offered to him, refusing to look his remaining son in the eye, cheeks as dry as the prairie dust swirling in the air.
Sherman goes back to his unit the next day. He never exchanges another word with his father.
He signs up for officer training the next week, and that Fall quietly joins a cohort of students bound for Medical School.
He never thinks too hard about why. He just remembers that Ben always wanted to be a doctor.
STP
Meeting Mildred remains the single happiest moment of Sherman's life, fresh from Medical school, uniform starched and polished, young and free and happy.
He meets her at Ben's grave, of all places. He's placing violets on his little brother's cross. She's placing tulips on her big brother's cross.
Sherman looks at Mildred, in her Sunday best, bright as the flowers at their feet. "His name was Ben" is somehow all he can think to say.
She smiles, a dimpled and twinkling thing, tinged with sadness, but edged with possibility.
"His name was Ronnie."
They stand together for the longest time, holding hands and gazing at the things they've both lost, thinking about the things they've found.
They get married that same summer.
STP
They've long since had a family before the second great war rolls around, and it isn't until the moment he's saying goodbye that it finally hits him.
War is hell.
Somehow, youthful excitement or exuberance or numb idiocy or horses or something prevented that enlisted cavalry boy from every really registering that little fact.
He spends the next six years bouncing between postings, patching up kids of all ages, colours, and creeds from France to England to the Pacific. The faces blur together in the first week.
He makes Colonel in the first year, pausing long enough to reflect that he's saved almost as many people in this war as he killed in the first.
Somehow, every boy that passes under his knife seems to resemble a bookish fourteen-year-old with accusing bright blue eyes.
Ben will always be Sherman's ghost, ever since 1918. By the end of 1945, that hasn't changed. He just has a lot more ghosts besides.
STP
Making Colonel before the roll up of '45 meant more than just an end to bunking in with his men. It meant more time Stateside, more time to breed horses, more time to spend with his kids and growing list of grandkids at the holidays, and for a few brief, blissful years, more time to spend with Mildred, putting down roots in the fields he once ran in, nails in walls not unlike those of his childhood home.
It meant that he could have stayed there, safe and happy and snug, when the latest Fracas erupts somewhere hot and humid and far away, and good old Uncle Sam decides to step in and help, or something.
But Sherman Potter married a rare old bird of a Southern Belle, and Mildred Potter comes home from bridge one night, talking one to the dozen about how Myrtle Lion's boy Billy just got called up to go to somewhere starting with a K, and their eyes meet somewhere over the glazed carrots, and Sherman hears the words almost before they leave his wife's mouth. "You go keep those boys safe Sherman. It's the right thing to do."
He's in Seoul a week later.
Of course, being a Colonel also meant that he spent the next twelve or so months signing paper work and patching political snafus rather than binding wounds.
That lasts right up until he first hears the name 4077th, in the Officer's mess one night over a glass of first class hooch, General Weiskopf talking about what a shame it was, about that Henry Blake, klutz and Colonel and General Surgeon rolled into one.
Sherman's always prided himself on being a rather smart cookie, but somehow it isn't until the great Hunnicutt's Family Reunion Caper of '52 that it finally occurs to him that for all they are scattered across a globe from each other, that family he ran away from home to find back in '14, has finally found him instead.
He wishes Ben could meet them all.
He has a feeling his brother would have loved them. Every last crazy one of them.
STP
Sherman sees Ben in the face of every soldier he treats, every soldier he fights with, every soldier he serves with, from baby-faced corporals to hard-bitten generals.
He's not sure why. He never even saw his little brother in uniform. For him, Ben will always be that scrawny teenage boy who asked his brother to stay, the night Sherman ran away to a war that would claim the wrong brother in only a few short years.
Despite appearances, Sherman Potter doesn't live his life in accordance with what he thinks his brother would have done. He goes to medical school to help boys like Ben, not because it was Ben's dream. He stays in the army because he wanted to, despite the fact being in a uniform is what got Ben killed.
He goes back to Missouri, because it was where they were both happy, not because it was where Ben was happy. He pretends not to remember whether that statement was ever really true.
He sees Ben in the faces of every soldier he treats because, like many people who lost someone in a war, who served in a war themselves, the faces of boys in uniform blurred together after a while, forever tinged with the features of the one who was loved, and lost.
Then his third war rolls around, a war he's decided almost definitively will be his last, that he tells Mildred in every letter home will be their last, even though they both know he would go off and fight a fourth at a moment's notice, if they thought he could save even one Ben, one Ronnie.
Sherman transfers to the 4077th the same day as his last official administrative meeting with the top Brass, at least nine stars between them, where everyone spends a good three hours carefully avoiding the word war.
By the time he convinces a scared young corporal that no, he really can drive himself to his new command, silently adding that getting blown up while driving back from delivering a Colonel and his jeep is a stupid waste of a young life he'd rather avoid it he possibly can, by the time he rolls into a dusty camp with apparently permanent red stains etched into the dirt outside a clap metal building marked in fading letters as Post-Op, by the time he's met yet another fresh-faced kid with a glasses bigger than his eyeballs and a good head for predicting the future, by the time he's seen the first evening frock he's laid eyes on since that dinner dance in '46, by the time he's preparing to review the files of his latest batch of officers, files he hasn't even cracked open yet, he's ready to take the words Police Action and shove them down those generals' collective throats.
Take it from him, this is definitely a war. He's been in three, so he should know.
Trouble is, so should they.
Sherman's so busy fuming internally that he barely notices the gaggle of faded and dusty people to trail into his office like a rather odd set of mismatched ducklings.
Which is how he gets to the file marked Pierce, B. F., the one he hadn't gotten a chance to open yet because they were stacked by alphabetical order, but laid out upside down, for some ludicrous reason, without so much as glancing at the assembled gaggle before his desk.
Although in hindsight, looking down turns out to be a rather fortuitous move, as it prevents the frozen look that must cross his face as he opens the crappy card paper folder and reads the name printed in stark military black at the top from being visible to anyone but that sheet of paper.
Sherman was taught that you call out full names at roll call, after a rather unfortunate incident with three different Ralph Smiths in his first unit, and it is a practice he hasn't broken in three wars and thirty years. Until now.
Because Sherman seriously doubts his own ability to even pronounce the name Ben without stuttering, even to this day. There's a reason he didn't name his son that.
Then his eyes leave the paper, and Sherman is going to demand an Oscar one of these days, because darn it if the next few minutes aren't one of the finest pieces of acting he's ever pulled off.
It isn't until that boyish face, with it's lanky frame, mussed black hair, and electric blue eyes has left his office that Sherman allows his head to fall onto his arms, uncharacteristic sobs silently racking thin, aging shoulders.
Somehow, it takes three wars for him to meet another boy named Ben.
A boy with the bluest eyes he's seen in thirty years.
STP
Of course, Sherman never thinks of that boy as Ben. It is kind of impossible after spending any amount of time with the man, certainly impossible after watching him perform surgery with a kind of graceful finesse that he's never seen, before or since, to think of him as anything but Hawkeye.
Still, that does little to assuage the sharp note of grief that permeates every interaction with Hawkeye, for all that his personality is roughly as far from Ben's as anyone is likely to get.
If anything, Hawkeye reminds Sherman far more of himself at that age, if he hadn't lost Ben, if he hadn't met Mildred.
That note of grief never quite eases, but every smile, every begrudging laugh, every warm fuzzy feeling, every hand on his shoulder, every game of poker and twirl of that ridiculous red bathrobe, every life saved, every life lost, somehow makes something else blossom in Sherman's chest, something he hasn't allowed himself to feel for a Ben in three decades.
Something not unlike love.
STP
Benjamin Potter's ghost will always haunt his big brother, until the day Sherman Potter dies. He has lived his life in Ben's honour, if not always in his shadow. He's proud of that.
The ghost of Hawkeye Pierce will always haunt Sherman Potter, until the day he dies. A ghost tinged with too much gin, too many premature grey hairs, too much blood and death and endless, manic screaming. Too much laughter in the face of mindless suffering. Too many tears in eyes too blue for this world. Just too much life lost, wasted, washed out and wrung out and pieced back together like a badly reassembled jig-saw puzzle.
Sherman's first Ben was the reason he knew his first war would not be his last. His second Ben is the reason he knows his third will be.
Still, watching Hawkeye quietly sit at his kitchen table in the dusty plains of Missouri, the horses grazing outside the window, Mildred gently pouring them all cups of tea, Hawkeye's hand shaking more than a little as he reached out to grasp the saucer, Sherman's weathered ones reaching across the table to steady it, blue eyes meeting blue across a tablecloth decorated in delicate violets against a border of bright, vibrant tulips, Mildred's quiet inquiry echoing in the air around them "Are you alright Ben dear?", Sherman takes solace in the knowledge that this is one ghost he still has a chance to give some measure of peace.
STP
Sherman Potter decided not to name his only son after his dead brother. He's not sure why.
It isn't until thirty years, two more wars, a gaggle of not-named-Ben grandkids, and countless lost souls later that he meets a young surgeon who fixes him with a pair of piercing baby blues and promptly cracks a joke about tap-dancing poultry, his fingers waggling in a rather unfortunate cross between a wave hello and a salute goodbye.
And finally understands why.