The bunkhouse is no better and no worse than he was expecting. A hastily erected corrugated iron shell of a thing, with rectangular bunks lining the walls and a long, thin table down the centre. Hawkeye dumps his regulation green dufflebag on the nearest unoccupied bunk and collapses moodily next to it. The dogtags clink against his chest as he moves, and almost unconsciously his fingers reach up to grasp at the cold weight. With a tentative thumb, he traces the graven letters. Capt. B. F. Pierce, and then a number. US12836413. He lets the tags drop, and they chime softly against his sternum.
"What the hell." he says to himself, and the words sound strange in his own ears, his voice still, but not his own any more.
"What the hell." he says, more firmly. Then: "God, I need a drink."
It does not take him long to find the shabby airport bar, a ten-by-twenty rectangular slab without windows, and a door made of rough-hewn, untreated timber. There is a subdued cluster of Americans huddled around one of the three tables, which he avoids out of reflex. A slightly more vocal group surrounds the cheap jukebox in the corner, jabbering away in Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, the hell he knows. Or cares. Just like any bar he's ever been in, anywhere else in the world. Except, he thinks, that every person in this bar is a marked man, and they all know it. What strikes him, very suddenly, is the absence of colour. Every man in the room is wearing a crisply starched new uniform, shiny boots, and enough brass to make a trumpet section. God, he needs that drink.
No... he reflects, after his third lukewarm, foreign-tasting beer. It is not the absence of colour, it is the weight of it. So much colour, and all of it the same. Official, sombre looking dark brown fatigues, the very weight of all that brown dragging him, and each and every one of them down into some nameless quagmire. War. His stomach churns, and he resists the urge to tear off every shred of uniform brown and run screaming back to the plane, right back to Crabapple Cove, back to when he was twelve years old and his Dad made him mugs of hot cocoa and read him "The Last of the Mohicans" before bed.
The group over by the bar shifts, and he hears a distinctive burst of ringing laughter, out of place and quickly stifled, catches a flash of gold beneath a tilted cap, an elegant hand drumming restless on the counter. For a long, long moment, Hawkeye simply stares. He hesitates, then downs his drink in one. What the hell, he thinks. He could use the laugh.
He slides along the bar with the ease of long practise, leans a casual elbow upon the other's shoulder.
"Hello sailor," he whispers in a voice low and seductive. "Come here often?"
The shoulder stiffens beneath his arm, barely perceptibly. The head turns, shocked brown eyes meeting laughing blue. It is almost worth all the years of silence just to see the look on Trapper John's face.
"Hawk!"
And then they are laughing. Wild, crazy, irrational laughter, arms tight about each other's necks, a fistful of golden curls in Hawkeye's hand.
"You crazy bastard!" the Hawk grins, when he has the breath to speak. "What in hell are you doing getting transferred here! Thought a guy like you had more brains."
Trapper shrugs, laughs, and nudges Hawkeye with a friendly fist.
"What, and let you have all the fun? Wouldn't have missed it for the world."
It is sorted, in the end, with surprising ease. Trapper John, assigned to the 8063rd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, merely trades some skilfully altered papers with a snoring chest surgeon from Nebraska, and he and Hawkeye climb together into a rusting tin can on wheels, flood the bathrooms at the Korean air base with saki as a parting gesture, write a few well-chosen comments in the visitor's book, and head off together in quest of one 4077th M*A*S*H.