Pierce and Dr. McIntyre are both in conference ?'

'Yes, sir.'

 

'Is it possible that they are in conference together?' ‘Yes, Doctor.'

 

'And is this conference being conducted in Dr. Pierce's chief of surgery's office?'

'Yes, Doctor, it is,' the operator said.

'Well, then, honey,' Dr. Grogarty boomed, 'you get either Hawkeye* or Trapper John** on the line and tell them to put down the gin and pick up the phone 'cause Aloysius J. Grogarty's on the other end of the line and the boozing will just have to wait.'

Stunned that the caller actually knew what was going on in Dr. Pierce's office, the operator pressed the button that caused the telephone to ring on his desk.

When the telephone rang, Dr. Pierce, Dr. McIntyre, Nurse Flanagan, and Student Nurse Miller, still dressed in their surgical greens, were bent over a table in the office. Doctors Pierce and McIntyre each held large hypodermic

 

* Dr. Pierce's father was a great fan of James Fenimore Cooper, and in particular of his monumental work, The Last of the Mohicans. Although he could not convince his wife that their first-born should be so christened, he had never called his eldest son anything but Hawkeye, and as time passed only Dr. Pierce's mother, the U.S. Army, and the Maine State Board for the Licensing of Medical Practitioners had continued to insist on calling him by the name on his birth certificate.

** While a college student in Maine, Dr. McIntyre had been discovered, deshabillé, as they say, and en flagrante delicto, with a coed in the gentlemen's rest facility aboard a Boston & Maine Railroad train. With shocking disregard for the facts and with her eye on her reputation, his lady friend, the moment the door had been jerked open on them, had announced that he had 'trapped her' in the room. From that moment on, John Francis Xavier McIntyre had been known to friend and foe alike as 'Trapper John.'

 

syringes with large-size needles, and each was, with infinite care and great skill, depressing the plunger of his syringe. What would have struck the casual observer of this otherwise fairly routine medical procedure was that they were injecting something into the soles of a pair of golf shoes. Therein, as they say, lies a tale.

 

Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre were, as they frequently admitted, indeed boasted, 'two guys who could certainly hold a grudge.'

One of those against whom the healers, former military surgeons and honorary Knights Commander of the Bayou Perdu (La.) Council, Knights of Columbus, held a longstanding grudge was Francis Burns, M.D., of Hillandale, Ohio.

Their grudge against Dr. Burns was of the active, rather than latent, variety. That is to say, they didn't merely harbor a resentful memory of Dr. Burns, idly hoping for the day when Lady Luck would put them in a position to, for example, let the air out of his tires on a rainy night. No, their grudge was of the active variety, and they gave some thought to and received a great deal of pleasure from zinging Frank Burns whenever possible.

And lest time start to heal the wounds, lest they be tempted to put all that Frank Burns had done to them beyond them, as water over the dam, they kept a sort of a memorial to Dr. Burns in Dr. Pierce's office. At no small cost, they had had a photograph of Dr Burns, taken during the Korean Unpleasantness, converted into a dart board.

It had been Major Burns then - or as the Army insists on putting it, Burns, Francis, Major, Medical Corps (as it had been Pierce, Benjamin F., Captain, Medical Corps, and McIntyre, J. F. X., Captain, Medical Corps.) And therein had been the germ of the problem. Majors are not only permitted but are actually encouraged by the military establishment to give orders to captains. It was not that Captains Pierce and McIntyre had objected to taking orders from their betters. They had, in fact, regularly taken orders from the hospital commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake Medical Corps, U.S.