"So let me get this straight. You filled a syringe with Nembutal, and gave it to Hawkeye so he'd sedate himself."

For once, it was Trapper who was doing all the pacing. He paced up and down in Henry's inner office, waving his hands about for emphasis. "What were you thinking, Henry?" he demanded. "There's got to be some sort of army directive about not wilfully sedating a fellow officer!"

"For heaven's sake, McIntyre, I didn't sedate him!"

"I think me and about fifty other people would beg to differ, Colonel!"

"I didn't do it!" Henry repeated, exasperated. "He did it to himself, you saw him! He was holding the syringe, he pushed down the plunger and injected himself!"

"Well, now, Henry, I don't think he meant to do that. And even if he did, I don't think he would have done it if he'd known there was a sedative in that thing!"

"I would have told him," Henry said forlornly, "only by the time I got around to it, he was unconscious."

 "Why were you holding that syringe, anyway?" Trapper asked, genuinely interested to know.

"It wasn't meant to have anything in it," Henry said. "I was using it as a demonstration of… of…"

"Of?"

"Hepatitis," the colonel said obscurely. "So I asked for someone to run get me a syringe from somewhere, and they got me… that. And then it was too late, so I just used it."

"Which is all well and good, but Frank and Margaret can now think of new ways to go over your head, every enlisted man in the camp now thinks venereal disease involves sleeping for long periods, and we've got a chief surgeon who isn't thinking anything and won't be thinking anything for a long time yet!"

"Where'd you put him?" Henry asked, attempting to ignore the previous diatribe.

"Post-op," Trapper said, and added by way of explanation, "I thought he'd just passed out for no apparent reason."

"Well, get him out of there," Henry said decisively. "There's nothing wrong with him.

"Oh, no," Trapper muttered to himself, wandering out of the office, "no, no, nothing at all, he's only going to sleep for eight hours, that's all…"

The door swung outwards as Trapper went out, and as he did so, the other door swung inwards.

"Excuse me, sir…"

"Radar!"

"Right here, sir."

Henry jumped. "Radar! Do you have to do that?"

"Sorry, sir. I thought you might need the forms…"

"I need those forms, Radar…"

Henry sat down behind his desk and took the many sheets Radar had handed him. "See, sir," the company clerk explained, "this one's the form you fill in to explain the unlawful sedation of an officer, and you sign here, and then, you sign this other form to say you signed the other one but you didn't know you were accidentally sedating your fellow officer at the time, and that's 'cause it was accidental…"

"Do I really have to sign all these, Radar?"

"Well, sir, you could initial them but then you'd have to sign a form to say that's what you did."

A sudden desire for alcohol was experienced by all.

Trapper enlisted Frank's help to get Hawkeye out of post-op and back to the Swamp. This proceeded without incident – "No, Frank, you carry his feet – if you drop him I wanna make sure he has the brains to sue you," – and having installed the chief surgeon on his own cot, where he slept more peacefully than ever, Trapper realised he had eight hours to kill and no sidekick to kill them with.

Trapper looked again at the puncture mark on Hawkeye's left thumb. "So much for being careful," he muttered to himself, and Hawkeye said nothing at all, for faintly obvious reasons.

He (Trapper, that is) tramped out into the compound in a severely prickly state of mind.