Chapter Text
Hawkeye's cot was immediately on the right hand side of the Swamp as you entered. Frank mirrored him on the left, and Trapper had always taken the space further across the tent to avoid Hawkeye having to take it, in the way that Trapper just knew and did things without needing to be asked. It hadn't taken him long to figure out that Hawkeye preferred sleeping next to doors, next to windows, next to tent walls where you could scoot up and see a bit of sky. Lying there in the dark, watching vague shadows through the mosquito netting, it still felt some nights like there was a world of unknowns outside, waiting for you, pressing in.
Hawkeye didn't often suffer from insomnia; none of them did. Fourteen hour shifts took care of that. After he kicked off his boots and stretched out under the blanket, he listened to the war for a couple of minutes. He couldn't see it with his face pressed into a pillow, but he could always hear it. Jeep engines were the sound of the war. The stuck pig squeal of the PA was the sound of the war. It was a line repeated in his ears.
Despite it, he slept. Not without dreaming; that was rare. But his dreams usually woke him after a while.
He dreamed about his mother. He wished his head would show her to him as he wanted to remember her. Her emaciated body was a grotesque contrast with her distorted abdomen, the tumors he'd heard them say were growing inside her. Her skin had a yellowish cast. His family's world was falling apart and he didn't know how to stop the destruction. All he knew was that his mother was going away and all love was going away with her. He was helpless, and terrified, and very, very small.
He didn't wake up.
Hawkeye rolled over on his cot, and the dream rolled over, and now he was at the operating table. His patient was lying ready for him, naked except for the draping, chest peeled open, smooth glistening cartilage like the ends of chicken bones, his heart pitifully exposed to the world. Voices swirled around the room, strange disembodied sounds, and Hawkeye caught a few fleeting words.
*...blood pressure dropping...*
*...haven't got much time...*
He tried to speak, to ask for his instruments, but his mouth felt like it had been filled with cotton wool and no sound came out. He bumped clumsily against the table when he tried to reach the head of it, as if even that simple path of action was being obstructed. He positioned the man's mask and squeezed the bag, trying to push oxygen into silent lungs, but the bag barely compressed, as if there was something blocking the air flow. For Christ's sake, his patient was dying, and Hawkeye couldn't even bag him. He repositioned the mask and tried again. He started cardiac massage, the failing organ squeezed between the flats of his hands like a ripe plum.
No pulse.
In his anger and fear, he shouted out, and the sound that had been impossible to make a few moments ago came out as a weak croak. He looked down at his patient's body. He'd watched the man die and he'd been helpless to do anything.
The smell of blood was strong in his nostrils; the stink of cadaverine, of slowly cooling human meat.
Still, he didn't wake up.
Eventually, everything grew silent, no more murmurings from the surgical team or moaning exhalations of air from the flayed open chest cavity of the patient, and Hawkeye was aware that he could move. He was drawn out of the OR, and into a maze of corridors along which doors randomly opened off. He opened some of them. Behind some of the doors, he found girls he'd dated and taken advantage of, using them for what he needed them to give. Shapeless things lurked in dark corners there which scared him to death.
It disturbed Hawkeye that his own age kept changing. Sometimes he was ten years old, and sometimes fourteen, or seventeen, or twenty, but in every form of himself he was lost, alienated, and full of self-loathing.
When he opened the last one, he found soldiers and Korean civilians. There was the dead man lying on a gurney, his neck slightly craned to expose the deeply embedded chunk of shrapnel that had come close to decapitating him. In the next room was the corpse of a woman whose skin had been peeled off her face like an orange, revealing the intricate patterns of muscles and tendons beneath. They seethed with accusation.
"You bring war," the mutilated woman told him. "You no fight, you no come to Korea, then no war."
He began to cry, cupping his eyes with his hand and letting go with wracking sobs. The baby in her arms wailed too, a thin, reedy sound.
That finally woke him.
It took him a minute or two to realize that he was still crying.
*** *** ***
Radar used the latrine before he went to bed. He walked over there in his shorts, bathrobe, and boots, and came back in them.
That was what had done the biggest number on him, way back when he arrived: communal living; the juxtaposition of regulations and casualness. Mornings in the summer, the off-duty nurses walked around half-dressed before they took their showers, robed and pantied and comfortable, hanging and folding their laundry. Part of it was the heat - Korea was near as humid as Iowa, only it could hit a hundred degrees or more, too - but most of it was unselfconscious habit, just part of the way everyone mixed together in a kind of human soup. The camp never really stopped moving at any time. It was like a fish tank, filled with people constantly in motion. The only people who weren't were the ones who were wounded, or the ones who were asleep.
The second thing that had kept him bug-eyed, and wide awake, sometimes, in those early days, were all the thoughts. Accidentally overhearing thoughts wasn't anything new for Radar. He'd think that people were just talking and asking him a question, and it wasn't until he answered them that they'd get snippy and uncomfortable.
What was something new here was the constant tide of thoughts. After he got a little used to it, they turned into more of a hum in the background, like the wop wop of the choppers coming over the hills. But he'd found it hard to concentrate on anything at first, because they were always there.
He figured that everyone's thoughts got crazy here because the war made a lot of people go crazy. Some of them he felt had already been a little crazy when they arrived.
Some people had clearer thoughts than others. Some were just mad and scared all the time, some were confused and jumped about from one subject to another like a box of frogs, and some didn't think about much of anything at all. Hearing anyone who was drunk made Radar laugh sometimes, and just feel sad a lot of the time, because of why they'd needed to be drunk. He'd start to feel a little drunk himself if he listened too long.
Most of them had to be close for him to hear them. If they were across the compound it was just like the faint edge-of-your-hearing drone you get when there's a mosquito in the room, and usually if they were in another room he could hear them mumbling, but he couldn't make out the words.
Radar could always hear Colonel Blake. His thoughts kind of meandered about like a river, but they always headed back home a dozen times a day, with the Colonel himself shuffling behind, kicking up the dust in what felt more like bone-deep tiredness than anything else. He could hear Hawkeye's thoughts very, very strongly, tumbling and somersaulting over themselves the way they did. Except once in a while Radar would jump inwardly, because he'd get the feeling of a door being slammed in his face.
At night, when Radar was alone and before he went to sleep, he always heard the hum most distinctly. He guessed it was the thoughts of the dozens of people who were lying in their bunks. He was listening to their dreams, and their fears, and their nightmares. He could hear them tonight, as he switched the light back out again and padded in socked feet to his cot.
Except that they were louder than they usually were. A lot louder. That had been happening for a couple of nights, but now it was scaring him, because there was getting to be something wrong with them. He'd definitely never heard that many people on the camp having bad dreams before, and he could always tell when there was a bad one. Suddenly what had been normal seemed to have gotten very dark. Sinister, like something had broken loose. He could feel it, like ice in his blood, a tingle in the marrow of his bones. Something strange and very ugly, spreading out in ripples like a stone tossed into a creek.
Maybe he was getting sick. They'd had a lot of personnel sick this week. Some of the patients, too. They'd been recovering from their surgeries, but then they'd come down with weakness and chills.
It wasn't a cold night, but Radar found himself shivering. Even after he got into bed and wrapped himself in his blanket like a papoose, he couldn't stop.