The Hearts of Angels

Preface: This is inspired by an English class story I did about my youth pastor, a retired LAPD helicopter pilot, and his wife. The story really took place in Viet Nam in the 70's, but I adapted it to the Korea War in the 50's...so unfortunately some of the technology and details are not exactly spot on for MASH.

Through early morning fog I see

Visions of the things to be.

The pain that is withheld for me

I realize and I can see…

The little green helicopter, with the big red cross on it, beat away the thick fog as it approached…almost right on top of the black smoke. Pilot Marty Williams deftly settled it on the ground. All around, chaos ensued.

This was the forward pad for the 1st Battalion of the 9th Infantry Regiment, and they were being overrun. A combined force of Chinese and North Korean troops wanted this side of their hill. And they were going to get it.

Fires were everywhere. An entangled pile of enemy bodies formed a startling large mound. At the edge of the pad the American dead were stacked up in a row three layers high and each one covered in its own body bag.

Green tracers from outside the perimeter whizzed by…seeking to destroy the chopper that they could hear but not see. G.I. machine guns from four positions returned the fire viciously. Soldiers along the edge also gave covering fire with their individual rifles. They were giving this last effort so that their wounded comrades could be evacuated and then they were abandoning this forward post.

Hawkeye jumped out of the helicopter. He unfastened the plastic shield covering the stretcher over the right skid. Medics dropped a bloody-chested soldier onto the air ambulance bed. Marty did the same on the left side, but this wounded soldier was missing two legs and half of a lower arm. The two burned edged legs were brought along with their owner and strapped down right were they would be as if they were still attached to his torso.

"Where's the hand?" Marty shouted to the lead medic. He always tried to take dismembered soldiers back with all their parts. He didn't like to think a guy could have had something sown on…if only the part had made the trip. It was not a small matter.

"I don't know!" The medic, black and young like Marty, was a face he well recognized. He looked worn. "Marty man, you gotta get outa here! That fog is lifting! The gooks are gonna charge! When you go we pull out!"

The young medic pointed in the direction of the wind and sure enough it was blowing away the besieged battalion's cover. They were already falling back. Troops not needed to rear-guard the retreat and the They had to start falling back.

What's worse the little medical chopper was becoming exposed.

"Okay!" Marty acknowledged. He shook his hand. This was rough.

"Hold on! We got two more. We weren't expecting you to have a passenger."

Marty hopped back in. Another chest wound was slid into the cockpit. Hawkeye tried to secure the unconscious soldier as best he could with gauze and his arm. He slid himself in as someone placed a human with half his head missing right on Hawkeye's lap.

"You're gonna have to hold on to him!"

Hawkeye looked at him. It was surreal. The whole scenario. But it was worse. This man was ghost white. Hawkeye pulled at his eyelids. He had scene that lack of reaction before.

"This guy is gone!" he shouted at the young black medic as he tried to wrap a seat belt around the both of them.

"He's got a pulse!" the medic shouted back.

Hawkeye felt for it and found it.

"It's just fibrillation! He…he has no brain!" The soldier's heart was spasming…not really pumping. It was all over. The cardiac muscle fibers were pushing out maniac uncoordinated signals. His heart, like the rest of his body, would never work together again toward any purpose. There was only blood borne energy left.

The medic shrugged. He looked like he didn't know what else to do. He gave a curt wave and ran for cover.

Marty looked around to make sure nobody was still standing. When a launched grenade landed and exploded no more than 40 meters away he gunned the engine with a twist of his wrist. At more than one hundred and ten percent of the safe speed for the blades he pulled back on the collective stick and tilted the nose forward. The little helicopter barely lifted off of the ground but gained speed slowly.

The helicopter struggled mightily against the wind, but it was to no avail.

It was less than 10 miles as the crow flies to the valley where the 4077th MASH currently resided, but it might as well have been a hundred. The prevailing winds coming over the Chong Li mountains that were blowing away the fog even now over the battlefield were also creating a terrific downdraft that the little chopper could not climb through.

Marty applied all the turbine power from the engine as he approached the lowest point of the ridge line, but they simply weren't gaining enough altitude to clear it.

"He's going into shock!"

Hawkeyes announcement was confirmed by the soldier between them beginning to spasm.

"We can't make it through!" Marty announced pointing to gap in the rocky hills. "Too much weight with this headwind…it's pushing us down!"

"Can we go back…"

"No one back there now…except the enemy! Can he wait?"

Hawkeye pressed on the spasming soldier's neck.

"No!" There was barely a pulse off the carotid artery. Lack of blood supply to the brain was causing the convulsing. "He's gonna go cardiac!"

"That guy gone?"

Hawkeye's hands palpated the neck of the other man sitting on his lap. The fibrillation had stopped. It didn't matter really. With half his head gone, that soldier was dead from the moment whatever bullet, missile, or projectile had hit him. Hawkeye frowned. He should have never been on the chopper.

"Gone!"

Pilot Marty Williams looked at the ground, the hills, the way they had come.

"We need to unload him to make it over!" he shouted.

"What?"

"We have to let him go!" Marty took the stick in his left hand briefly to make a pointing gesture out the door with his right. "77 is about a minute away once we make it over them hills!"

It was an ugly thing to do…but they were going to do it.

"I'm gonna tilt…you push!"

Hawkeye felt the weight come off his lap as he tried to guide the semi-beheaded body out of his side of the cockpit.

"Get tags!"Marty shouted.

At just the last second Hawkeye snatched at the GI's shirt and managed to grasp the dog tags beneath. The chain broke as the soldier fell away from the green ship leaving Hawkeye holding onto a hunk of t-shirt and both little ID plates. He watched to see the human ejectee fall 200 feet into the rocks of the hills.

The weight difference was enough. The skids cleared the tops of the rocks as they came over.

…and the 4077th sat right where it should; in a circle of large green tents with red crossed roofs on the floor of a rocky valley just on the other side of the hills.

"I'll go back for him later." Marty promised.