AN: This is part one of a planned two part series. A humungous thanks to Jo (fyeahvulnerablemen) for the beta. She's a saint and the only reason this is being published. I've been working on it for years.
I'm A Heartsick Soldier On Heartbreak Ridge
Across from the River of Si
Where the shells burst around me
And cover the sound of a poor lonely heart when it cries
-Ernest Tubb
He takes oaths. There are rules. Most men are expected to follow those rules. They raise their right hands and promise to always do so. Hippocratic. Geneva. God and country. Most men honor the oaths they have taken, like the men in the sweeping, epic adventures he used to read as a child, and continues to read to this day.
BJ Hunnicutt believes in oaths. It's why he's taken so many, promised so many things to so many people.
He will fight in a war he doesn't believe in. He will first do no harm. He will not fire upon the enemy's medical facilities. He respects the rules of engagement. Unfortunately, in war, not everyone always does.
There isn't much room up on the helipad of the MASH 4077th. The small space they chose to serve as a landing zone when they set up camp here who knows how long ago is little more than a pile of rocks formed from the craggy Korean topography. Some formation left over from prehistoric times. Far enough away from camp that the blown up dust is supposed to stay out of their tents, close enough that it doesn't. The trade off, he figures, is that it gets their patients from point A to point B a little quicker. Grit-free sheets be damned.
He's standing near that hill right now, watching as the corpsman beside him leans against the side of an ambulance that shields them from the burning sun, smoking a cigarette while they wait. BJ doesn't smoke, never has, but during the unbearable bouts of inactivity here on this base, the times of sheer boredom no war propaganda flick ever told him about, it's pretty hard not to consider taking up the habit.
They're waiting for helicopters, which is mostly what living on a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital entails. Waiting around. Waiting for that sound. The whoosh of blades as they cut through the air and deliver them the battered remains of what used to be soldiers. It is BJ's job, he's discovered, to take these remains and attempt to reconstruct them back into human beings. Walking, talking, able to get back to the front, perfectly capable human beings. That used to be easy for BJ. He used to have time, vast medical facilities, and state of the art equipment at his disposal. Now he's lucky if he can get his hands on sterile sutures or gauze to get them stable enough to send them to the places that have all that. Places far away from this particular place.
It's summer in South Korea. Everything is dry and dead and it hasn't rained in over a month. Brown grasses sway in ineffectual breezes and the dust is incredible. It reminds him of the desert, though it's unlike any desert he's ever been to. Instead of long winding highways cut into mountain sides with tourist traps at every bend, there are irate villagers who are more interested in finding their livestock water than hearing his woes about not being able to stop for gas and purchase a Coke from the local merchants. Things here run on hay and water and four legs. It's the soldiers who bring the noise.
Oh yeah, and the bullets. Fighting on the front has ramped up a bit in the past few months. It stalks them, edging ever closer, like the wildfires that have been devouring the countryside ever since the rain stopped. The 4077th hasn't been affected but, like the fighting, it's something they pay attention to.
As is the case with any time conditions heat up between North and South, there has been an influx of wounded. He's lost count of how many hours he's been in surgery. How many millions of yards of silk he's gone through patching the bellies of soldiers so they can be sent back, or out, or home. Sometimes the macabre urge to sew himself up in their mangled remains, just so he can get out of here, barges into his brain and he doesn't know whether he should laugh or cry at it. Would he get far? What would they do to him once they found him? Not like they can throw him in prison. They need him too much. Who else are they going to get to make humans out of the piles of desiccated meat the maw of the front lines keeps hurling out at them? BJ is, of course. And Charles and Potter and Hawkeye and any number of the other nameless, faceless doctors that have meandered through the MASH 4077th.
BJ shuffles forward and shields his eyes from the intense sun to scan the horizon. Hawkeye is on his way back. Hawkeye, who pulled the short straw and has been helping out at an aid station right on the front lines, will be home soon. The last blast of radio communication they'd received had promised as much.
Aid station fell. Incoming wounded. Get everyone ready.
But most importantly…
"I'm fine, just be ready."
They've been at this for six days. The helicopters just keep coming and the only reason BJ is here and not down prepping in the OR is that the man who should be here performing this particular job was in such dire need of a rest that they found him sleeping in the mess, his left cheek pressed into something BJ had affectionately taken to calling Army Surprise. And so BJ has taken his place. Partly because he's needed, and partly because he misses his friend. He hasn't seen Hawk in over a month and is in need of his easy wit and cheerful smile. ...And maybe because there might have been some chatter about a VIP patient coming in with him. Probably some General's son. Probably some kid BJ will regret plunging his hands into, because he will inevitably die, as men at the front often do, and the doctors of the 4077th will take the heat, because they're all the general will have to yell at. Doctors at a field hospital who didn't have enough time or enough resources to give his kid the attention he needed. The realization of who's fault it really is will come later. When they're all back home in the states, and this godforsaken war is nothing but a distant, repressed memory. BJ has a feeling that he will be so good at suppressing the bad memories that, if he plays his cards right, he might be able to convince himself eventually that he had a good time here and it was all fun and games with an unusual bunk mate.
"Incoming," Radar says, sidling up to BJ by the ambulance and pulling him from his thoughts. Like BJ, Walter "Radar" O'Reilly is on loan to the helicopter welcoming committee today. There are a lot of people gathered here actually. They're expecting a lot of wounded.
"Four birds, completely full," Radar continues, as easily as if he were reading BJ's lunch order back to him. Radar is many things to many people. He all but runs this camp from the antechamber of Potter's office and BJ knows him probably as well as anyone can be known, having shared the trauma of war and loss with him repeatedly. But BJ is pretty sure he will never, ever get used to Radar's uncanny, almost preternatural ability to detect incoming choppers better than any air traffic controller ever could. He's about to open his mouth and tell the Corporal as much, when he hears the first of the birds approach.
The actual landing zone is small. It's really only meant for one chopper at a time. (Whoever made that engineering leap when designing the camp should be stoned.) Two, if the pilots are good ones. Most of them are, but it makes for one hell of a mess on the ground. There's scrambling and ducking, and cleaning kicked up grime out of the crevices of his body for weeks after it happens. And then there's the noise. You'd think the cacophony at the front is enough to drive you mad, try hanging out in a MASH unit while four helicopters, stuffed with wounded, all try and land at the same time. It's deafening. It's confusing. It's chaotic and if you don't know what you're doing, you can end up getting yourself killed. Or worse, someone else.
BJ watches the helicopters approach, wishing he had a pair of earplugs he could force into his ear canals. Even some tissue would do. He pats his pockets for good measure, but knows he won't find any there to help. He thinks he might have had a pair of earplugs once, but like most things of value at the 4077 th , they eventually disappeared.
The sun is headed toward the South Korean horizon, dusk putting it to bed like the dutiful time keeper it is. Mountains that would have been pretty, had they not been the backdrop to unimaginable horrors for the past several years, loom purple in the distance and reach for the sinking sun like they miss it or something: come here, sleep, hide your face for a while behind me . He has people in his own life who act like that for him at times. Whole mountain ranges of them. He reminds himself to hold them a little closer from now on.
A sinking sun means light in his eyes as he steps out from behind the ambulances to tilt his head and blink into that light. He shields his eyes with a hand and watches as the four promised helicopters appear on the shimmering horizon, heat and light messing with their edges until they're unintelligible blurs and BJ has to look away. The dust beneath his feet is already starting to stir, and rocks skitter as the pounding of helicopter blades gets louder and closer. Soon BJ won't be able to hear a thing but that rumble and whoosh and the occasional cry of the corpsmen as they attempt to communicate with one another over the din. He's hardening himself even as he waits, ready to be unresponsive to whatever the helicopters are bringing him. Except for Hawkeye. With Hawkeye he doesn't care how he reacts. He'll crack a smile. He'll jump up and down and waive his arms like some stupid kid being reunited with a best friend he hasn't seen in weeks. Because he is just some stupid kid who is excited to finally be reunited with his friend. A 4077 th without Hawkeye is a boring 4077 th and Charles has been driving him crazy. He needs wit right now, desperately, not insufferable ego.
When the helicopters are closer, BJ risks another look, and this time the sun has set enough that he can actually see the craft approaching.
Four because Radar is never wrong. One of them even has someone hanging out the side of it. A figure too tall and gangly to be a real soldier.
Hawkeye.
Something twinges in BJ's chest. He loves his wife, but he loves this man too. It's not sexual, it's not physical. It's the kind of love born in trenches. When you've dug yourself in, the war rages around you, and someone else jumps down into that hole with you and you know in that moment that you both will do anything to get the other one through this alive. There are similarities between you. You both have a common goal. And that ends up being all you need to form a bond and never leave each other's sides. That is how BJ loves Hawkeye. Not as a lover, but as a brother. A more intense, and stronger bond, if he thinks about it.
And so BJ does not hide the smile on his face when he's pretty sure he catches Hawkeye's attention from the ground. He doesn't blush when he starts waving his arms over his head like a madman, and grins just as crazily.
Hawkeye is here. Hawkeye is home. Well, as home as an army base in the middle of the South Korean countryside can be.
Hawkeye's chopper is last in line, so BJ can't just stand there and wait for him to land. As happy as he is to see Hawkeye returned to the 4077 th , he has a job to do, and surges forward when the first of the helicopters lands and a second one hovers close by like its pilot is thinking of trying to maneuver itself onto the landing pad as well. He bends at the middle. He's never tried to approach the helicopters any other way. He's pretty sure they're tall enough that there's no risk of being decapitated, but it's like his instincts are physically incapable of allowing him to approach the bubbles carrying the wounded at anything other than a comical crouch that's bad on the back and equally as brutal to the calves. He helps the corpsmen pull their first patient from the protective plastic bubble at the side of the craft and makes a face. The young soldier, dressed in an officer's uniform and reeking of top-brass yet looking too young to be here, is a mess.
BJ has stopped trying to think in clinical terms. He got rid of that silly habit two days and three gins into arriving at the 4077 th . Medical terminology is thrown out here now like they're ordering from a fast food menu. I'll have one order of Meatball Surgery, please.
The kid's entire left flank is charred, a meaty mess with raw pink flesh pocked by deep black swatches of burnt flesh. In Korea, shrapnel is unapologetic. In this case it has taken other pieces of this young man away with it, and white bone is visible in some places. He never should have made it past triage at the aid station.
Damn it, Hawk.
If BJ knew where Hawkeye was at that moment, he would have strangled him. And yet… chances are this kid really is the son of some top-brass officer if Hawkeye let him get this far. But he is BJ's problem now, because there is no way he's leaving this kid's side. He will ride in the ambulance with him back to the OR, accompany the stretcher into the room they work so hard to keep sterile, scrub until his cuticles bleed, and try to save this kid's life. A quick check of his pulse yields positive results so BJ gives the signal to move him and doesn't even have the time to turn around and check for Hawkeye as he raises a bottle of fluids above his head and races alongside the gurney.
It really is loud by the landing site, so maybe that's why he doesn't hear it. He'll wonder later if Radar might have, even over the booming bass of the helicopter blades. Whether the Corporal with the superpowers ever shouted a warning. A warning swallowed up by the noise as soon as it was issued.
A shell explodes in the field next to the landing pad. The ground beneath BJs' feet lurches and they all go down. Like bowling pins. Like the dominoes he used to stand end on end with his niece when she was very young. They used to count the spots on the tiles, too. She always loved numbers. He hopes that Erin will, too.
BJ is thrown forward and his first instinct is to cover his patient. So that's what he does. He covers the charred remains of the officer with his body and covers his head with his hands as best he can.
For unknowable moments all there is is heat and screaming and noise. He's reminded again of rules and how there are some that you are not supposed to break. He first does no harm. Pretty high up there is also you don't shell the hospitals, not even if they belong to the enemy. BJ can't even remember the number of North Korean soldiers he's patched up over the years, how many he's saved. Some the government took, others they let walk out of camp and never spoke of again. But the point is, even when Frank was still around, they never turned them away, never denied them care. It was how you did things, even in war. Because it was the right thing to do. Because, contrary to the propaganda train, they were all human out here, and BJ took an oath.
Whatever the reasoning behind the shelling, he knows it's not supposed to be happening. Not here. The big red cross, painted across more than one of the buildings here in the compound, is supposed to keep it from happening. Like their own personal totem. A powerful magical symbol that keeps away the heavy artillery but allows the wounded through. He believes in that magic, has put all his faith in it, which is why this all seems so fucking impossible.
There are explosions so intense they rock the ground beneath him and send debris pelting down over him, but BJ doesn't dare move. Every so often pain erupts on some extremity, but instinct keeps him head down and curled protectively around his patient. The kid so young. He shouldn't even be here. None of them should even be here.
He stays tucked in until something that doesn't even sound like an artillery shell hits the ground and produces a shockwave so intense, BJ and his soldier are pushed back a few feet across the rocky ground. Something hard slams into the side of him, right into the space where his head meets his neck, and the world around him dims.