Now I suggest that you go to bed and lull yourself to sleep counting your annuities or something, before you precipitate my decision, to the sorrow of us both."

Frank ran to Colonel Blake and complained. Colonel Blake came to The Swamp.

"Pierce," he asked, "what ails you?"

"Well,", said Hawkeye, "the guy from the Sox who looked me over once said that, in addition to having a very weak throwing arm, I'd never hit big-league pitching."

"Jesus," said Henry, "you are crazy. Anyhow, you leave Burns alone. I know what you mean about him, but surgeons of any kind are hard to find. Leave him alone, or it's gonna be your ass."

"Yes, my leader," agreed Hawkeye meekly, as Henry stormed out.

That night when Hawkeye went to work he encountered Frank.

"Hey, Frank," he said, "one of my kid brothers just got out of jail. I wrote him and told him to go out to Indiana and burn down your thirty-five-thousand-dollar house."

Again, Frank ran to Colonel Blake who visited Hawkeye in the morning.

"Pierce, have you flipped?" he demanded.

"Whadda ya mean?" asked Hawkeye, who had forgotten all about it.

"I heard what you said to Frank last night about your brother burning his house down."

"Which brother? I got six."

"The one who just got out of jail."

"Well, for Chrissake, Henry, I can't keep track of things from here. It could be any of them. They all sort of rotate in and out. Forget it. None of them could find Indiana on the best day he ever had."

When Hawkeye, for the moment and to placate Colonel Blake, let up on Captain Burns, it was Duke Forrest who took over, again in behalf of the enlisted men. This time it was in behalf of Private Lorenzo Boone, the dunce of the Double Natural.

In his nineteen years, Private Boone had been exposed to very little, so his real abilities were difficult to assess. He couldn't seem to do anything right, which may have been why the Army assigned him to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, where he was given the job of third assistant bedpan jockey in the postop ward. Inept though he was, he did try hard, and he improved with time.

For a while Private Boone was assigned the simple job of computing the liquid intake and output of the more severely ill patients. This was really quite easy. Most of the patients received only intravenous fluids for intake, and they all had catheters in their bladders, so there was no problem in measuring the urinary output. In accordance with medical custom, Private Boone was supposed to measure these quantities in cubic centimeters (cc's), of which there are one thousand to a quart.

After a few days, the intake figures recorded by Private Boone became open to the question. Several patients were alleged to have taken only one cc, two cc's, or in extreme cases four or five cc's in a given twenty-four-hour period, and no output at all was recorded. The ensuing revelation that Private Boone thought cc's stood for cups of coffee solved part of the problem but did little to increase his efficiency.

It was shortly after this that Captain Burns was taken ill. In fact, he was so indisposed that he spent three days in his tent and, although the nature of his illness was never widely known, its origins were as follows:

Captain Burns was addicted to a common failing in the surgical dodge: if a patient died, he claimed it was (1) God's will or (2) someone else's fault. One day he spent six long, hard hours operating on a severely wounded soldier, who'd been in deep shock throughout most of the procedure. Half an hour after surgery, the patient died in the postoperative ward. His final gesture was to vomit and aspirate some of the vomitus.

Private Boone, on his own initiative, quickly brought in a suction machine. It was not functioning, but neither was the patient as Captain Burns appeared and observed Private Boone's futile efforts.

"Boone," he said, "you killed my patient!"

Private Boone turned white. He walked away and went to a dark corner and cried. The Captain said he'd killed a man, and the Captain was a doctor and he ought to know.

Duke Forrest caught it. To Captain Burns he said, "Frank, may I speak to y'all outside for a moment?"

Korean nights can be dark. Often you can't see your hand in front of your face. Captain Burns never saw the hand that broke his nose, split his lip, or the knee that made him terribly uncomfortable for three days to come.

Trapper John was next in line to take on Captain Burns, and it had to do with cardiac massage. Cardiac massage is manual compression of a heart that has stopped. It is done through a hole hastily made in the chest in the hope, usually forlorn, that the heartbeat will resume and the patient will recover.