He saw his friends and smiled.

"You'll be OK, boy," said the corpsman.

"I know," Ho-Jon whispered. "Captains Pierces and Captains Mclntyres will help me."

"You know it, Ho-Jon," Captain Pierce said. "You just rest, and we'll do it after you've had one more pint of blood."

The Duke was about to become occupied in a bad belly, so they decided not to tell him. They went out for a butt.

"How do we go, Trapper?" asked Hawkeye.

"Right chest, just like the missile. He's lost some blood. I'm afraid it's hit more than just the lung. It's in deep."

"Trapper, you remember how we used to wonder what a kid like Ho-Jon might do if he had a chance to get an education?"

"Yeah," Trapper answered dully.

"If we squeeze him through, I'm going to get him into Androscoggin College."

"We'll squeeze him through and right into Dartmouth," said Trapper, grinding out his cigarette. "If all he wants to do is catch lobsters, he can learn that here."

A grim pair of surgeons went to work on Ho-Jon.

"We'll need room," said Trapper. "The sixth rib goes."

"Never mind the conversation. Do it, Dad."

They opened the pleura, put in the rib spreader, and aspirated the blood from the chest cavity. Ho-Jon's pulse and blood pressure held steady. Trapper reached down toward the inferior vena cava where it empties into the right atrium of the heart. He felt the missile.

"I got it," he said. "Here, feel."

Hawkeye felt.

"I don't feel anything."

"Oh, Jesus," moaned Trapper, and felt again.

"What happened?"

"The mother must have gone in. I can't feel it."

"I don't get it," said Hawkeye nervously.

"It must have been in the cava, and the hole sealed itself off. When I felt it I must have jiggled it just enough to turn it loose. I can't feel it in the heart. I don't feel it in the right pulmonary artery. It must be in the left pulmonary artery."

"Whadda we do?"

"Close and get an X-ray and fight another day."

"OK," Hawkeye said unhappily.

The X-ray confirmed Trapper's guess. The shell fragment was in the left pulmonary artery. Three days later Ho-Jon was out of bed, happy, proud to have been operated on by two of his three heroes and, unaware of the odds against him, not at all upset at the prospect of further surgery.

Taking a missile out of a pulmonary artery is no great trick, but few surgeons in Korea were familiar with such techniques. Cardiovascular surgery was in its infancy, and such procedures were not usually done in tents. Ordinarily this sort of case would have been evacuated to Tokyo, but no one seriously thought that any other surgeon in the Far East was better equipped to do the job than Trapper John. Colonel Blake did mention the possibility of evacuation once, but dropped the subject when Hawkeye gave him a very direct look.

In The Swamp the next week the tension grew. Humor was nonexistent. Unmilitary behavior tapered off. One evening Hawkeye passed around a bottle of Scotch, feeling that, for the sake of efficiency, they should attempt some sort of comeback.

"When do we go for it, Trapper?" he asked.

"June 2."

"Why June 2?"

"That's the day I shut out Harvard on two hits."

Trapper John did not say another word that night. He lay on his sack, sipped his drink and just looked straight up.

Ho-Jon, at the start of his big day, lay on the operating table, expectantly but confidently gazing up at Ugly John. Ugly John said, "Now, Ho-Jon, you just take it easy. Everything will be all right."

Ho-Jon smiled and said, "I know, Captains Blacks."

Ugly John started the Pentothal and curare, and three minutes later inserted the intratracheal tube through which Ho-Jon would do all his breathing while his friends worked on him.