Sex in Korea is both like and unlike sex in the real world. Like in that it reminds them of medical school - hectic days and even madder nights, silly and fun and no responsibilities. Unlike because there's not a shred of privacy to be found anywhere within the camp - no time to take your clothes off properly, and no chance of keeping anything quiet when your walls are made of canvas. There's a coathanger on the supply-room door, and another on the generator shed, and the laundry trucks parked in the back of the motor-pool each have a handy flag made from an old surgical mask that can be deployed when in use.
It's not even two months before Hawkeye knows Trapper as intimately as he's ever known a girlfriend. He knows what Trapper looks like with a morning hard-on, his eyes still groggy with sleep as he stumbles around the tent searching for his fatigues. He knows what Trapper's body looks like underneath his clothes, and the way he rises to half-mast every time the showers are even close to warm (later, he'll be able to gauge the degree of Trapper's exhaustion by the number of days since he last saw that contented, hopeful little bob of his prick). He knows the smell of Trapper's sweat and the smell of his semen, can tell his state of arousal from the thickening of his voice. And Hawkeye knows that Trapper knows the same things about him. It might have been awkward, but somehow it isn't. It's just another medical-school caper, all lads together, and once the initial shyness is overcome it's even funny. They race each other sometimes, in the showers, competing to see who can get there first, who can hold out longest or shoot the highest, or who has the better aim on the occasions when they manage to borrow Frank's shower cap.
Once or twice, when the nurses aren't willing to give them the time of day, it gets even sillier. All the lads together in someone's tent - the Painless Pole's, say, or the B-shift boys'. Someone will be passing some grass around, and they'll all be a bit stoned - Painless and 'Chucker and Duke and Ugly John, Cowboy and O'Brien and Leroy and Boone, George and Me-Lay and Klinger, Cardozo and Spalding, Trapper and Hawkeye. They'll all be a bit stoned, and everything anyone says will be the funniest thing they've ever heard - and someone will say how long it's been since he's had a piece, and someone else will offer to pay five dollars to any man who'll suck him, and they'll end up in a sloppy, giggling round-robin, each with his hand in the pants of the guy sitting next to him.
Mostly though, nurse-chasing is their favoured past-time. The nurses, by and large, are a great bunch of girls. Some of them are married, and some of them aren't, but it's not a thing that really matters, in Korea. Trap tries to explain it a bit, once or twice, just a shrug of his shoulders and a bit of a grin.
"Lou's in Boston, and I'm here," he tells Hawkeye, self-efacing, but not ashamed. "I'm not her keeper, and she's not mine."
Whatever the case, there's usually a nurse or two willing to be taken out - a dance, a drink, a picnic in the scrubby field behind the hospital. Sometimes it leads to something, and sometimes it doesn't, but that's ok. Working out that it raises their hit rate, Hawkeye and Trapper take up double-dating, and these are some of Hawk's favourite times - with a borrowed jeep, a bottle or two, and a couple of soft personnel, the two of them are invincible. Whenever a lull in business coincides with decent weather, they head for the hills. The hills behind the camp are scrubby and sage-green, smelling of smoke and scorched earth, and the skies are blue and endless above them. Dressed in straw hats and swimming trunks, they sprawl lazily side by side on a blanket, the girls in short kimonos or summer dresses or tiny army shorts that show off their legs. Trapper-and-Margie, Hawkeye-and-Dish - or sometimes Hawkeye-and-Margie, Trapper-and-Ginger - for they pass nurses from hand to hand quite companionably, and the nurses themselves keep a tally and a scorechart for comparison. Sometimes, when it's been a week of long shifts in surgery, they'll take an extra bottle or two, stay out past curfew beneath a covering blanket of stars, and then it's Hawkeye-and-Trapper-and-Barbara-and-Gwen; or Hawkeye-and-Trapper-and-Nancy all together.
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N.B. Chapter title from an Irving Berlin song