The first casualty of the 'Police Action' operated on by captains Pierce and McIntyre is a six year old Korean girl with a pound of shrapnel in her chest. It's strange, and a little frightening. The blood itself is nothing new to them, but the quantity of it - it's leaking out of the kid's chest and into Hawkeye's boots, while he grasps a spouting vessel in his fist and screams for clamps. No nurses have arrived yet, so it is Trapper who plunges a gloveless hand alongside Hawkeye's and staunches the bloodflow while Hawkeye sutures. The lorries with their carefully stacked cardboard boxes of masks and gloves and white surgical scrubs cannot be accessed owing to a heavy barrage of mortar fire, so by the time they are finished, the red has soaked right through Trapper's sage green shirt, and Hawkeye has to shake the blood and sweat out of his eyes.
There are twelve children in the first batch, none of them older than fourteen. Henry Blake proves himself a competent and dedicated surgeon, though his hands shake as he reaches for the instruments, and there is undisguised anguish in his pale blue eyes. The fourth surgeon, Major Burns, is shaking even worse than Henry, and goes to pieces completely over a little girl with dark pigtails. Henry tells them later that Major Burns has a swanky, newly-built private practice back home, where he has a simple, repetitive schedule involving tonsils, hysterectomies and adenoids.
Hawkeye's patient goes into cardiac arrest, and he screams for adrenaline while Trapper turns over a box of instruments, and falls upon his knees, scrabbling though the cascade of steel for a heart needle. A shell whines overhead, and Trapper yells as his palm closes on a scalpel. There is an explosion, a flash of green and gold that shatters the newly laid windows, and shrapnel peppers the corrugated iron like hail. The kid dies.
The mortar barrage continues all night. The surgery continues until two in the morning. The personnel of the 4077th huddle at one end of the uncompleted post-op ward and stuff their ears against the shellfire. There is no food, as none of them particularly feels like crossing the compound, and without blankets or firewood, their breath plumes, foggy, in the frigid air. Trapper strips off his sodden shirt, and the hurricane lanterns flicker redly across his bare torso, goose-pimpled so that the brown nipples stick straight out, crimson-slick with blood.
"I liked you better off-white," says Hawkeye, into the flat silence.
He tosses Trapper a ragged towel as inadequate as the jest, and Trapper half-laughs, but does not smile.
The surgeons sit propped against the shaking walls, with the blood drying dark on their cold skin, and share stories about parents, girls, kids back home. Scrub away tears with furtive, self-conscious hands, and remember all the people who ever told them that big boys don't cry.