Mirror M*A*S*H: Through the Mirror, Part Thirteen
This is by way of being a sequel to MirrorM*A*S*H. Please note this is Part Thirteen.

If you've been reading this through from one onwards, you won't even notice this part and the skips won't confuse you even a little. I don't think.

If, however, you are reading backwards through my journal, and this is the first MirrorM*A*S*H post you've come to and you haven't been reading my journal for MirrorM*A*S*H since, ah, not recently, you should know: This part is from our-Hawkeye's POV. From our-Hawkeye's POV, the action jumps more or less directly from part ten to part thirteen: most of part eleven and all of part twelve take place, chronologically, after part thirteen begins. In fact, the end of part eleven and all of part twelve take place, chronologically, about a thousand words into part thirteen. I know you could figure this out for yourself, but as we're friends, I just thought I'd mention it.

This is why I think you might want to go back and re-read (even if you are reading them in the order I write them) part ten, part eleven, and part twelve before moving onto part thirteen.

Part one, Part two, Part three, Part four, Part five, Part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part ten, part eleven, part twelve, part thirteen, part fourteen and part fifteen are here.

Part Thirteen

“How long is your cousin staying?” BJ asked. They were standing elbow to elbow, scrubbing up.

Hawkeye twitched, trying not to look all ways at once. No one else was in the changing area just now. “Not long. Shut up about him, will you?”

BJ’s eyes looked as if his brain had locked into practical joker mode. Hawkeye stared back, aware in an appalled kind of way how many things could go how badly wrong.

“You know, you and your cousin really do look incredibly alike,” BJ said, very quietly. “And no one but us knows he’s here?”
“Just let go of that thought, will you? I told you, he and I don’t get on.” Hawkeye finished scrubbing, and turned away, his hands held out. He shouldered the door into the OR open, and went to join the Colonel and Winchester at the tables.

He and Charles and Margaret were working on a soldier with a lacerated pulmonary artery and a lacework of bullets taking bits of the rest of him out. Charles claimed the artery repair, a delicate job that couldn’t wait. As Hawkeye had planned to let him take it anyway, he didn’t bother to acknowledge the Winchester maximise-my-ego dance. Margaret was doing that. The rest was meatball surgery: he was done while Charles was still at his painstaking work. He looked up: BJ was on his second bowel resection, the Colonel was working on the only head injury of the evening’s delivery.

“Anyone need any help?”

“Everything is just fine over here,” BJ said. “I’m building up an unrivalled collection of genuine Chinese bullets.”

“I am, as usual, performing superbly,” Charles said.

“Come over here and take a look at this man’s femur, Pierce,” the Colonel said.

Father Mulcahy must still be out in the compound. Hawkeye stripped off his bloody gloves and went to the Colonel’s table.

Shattered bone and torn flesh held together by aid station work. “We amputate, or can we repair?” the Colonel asked. He was still working on the head injury: depressed skull fracture.

Hawkeye was regloving, examining the patient by eye. It looked feasible. “How many do we still have waiting?” he asked.

“Five, doctor,” Baker said.

“Only five?” You could tell Winchester was sneering even through the mask. “That’s barely a challenge. Margaret, close for me. Where is my next patient?”

“The war’s slow today,” BJ said. “I’m taking the next stomach injury. I’m on a roll here.”

The boy – he couldn’t even be nineteen yet – had been under now for nearly an hour. Repairing the shattered leg would take at least another hour. “Where’s this guy’s photo album? I need to see some family snapshots here. What’s his vital statistics?”

Without looking up, the anesthetist began to read the numbers. Hawkeye was beginning to feel his way from the patella – virtually intact – up to where a burst of machinegun fire had insulted flesh and bone.

“Okay.” The boy seemed to be in good shape, considering the circumstances. He ought to be able to survive another hour on the table. “Baker, you’re good with legs, get scrubbed.” Hawkeye wanted to add “Someone get Father Mulcahy, we need some cross action here,” but Mulcahy was leaving.

A few minutes later, he looked up, hearing something, wanting to confirm it briefly by eye: Mulcahy was walking beside a man – BJ’s next stomach injury, Hawkeye guessed – talking quietly. “ – my son, the surgeons here are the best in Korea. Just be calm.”

God saves the patients, the surgeon takes the credit.

“They left me alone! It’s been hours!” The man’s voice was cracked and feeble, but the anger and terror came through. “I’m thirsty! God, I’m thirsty! Why won’t you bastards at least give me a drink of water?”

“Because it would leak all over the floor,” BJ said cheerfully. “Nurse, put him under.” His voice rose suddenly. “Father, don’t let him sit up – ”

“Let me go, I need a drink – ” the man said.

“Son, it’ll be all right.” Mulcahy sounded as if he were at the end of his tether. When Hawkeye glanced up again, Mulcahy was actually leaning over the man, pinning him down by the shoulders. The man shrieked a protest, but the mask cut it off.

“I hate a patient with the vapours,” the Colonel said. “Good work, padre.”

Mulcahy said nothing. BJ was talking to the anesthetist. Hawkeye kept his eyes down, where they belonged. He kept touching the man’s lower leg: the aid station medic had managed to retain some blood supply, or there would have been no point in trying this, but it was leaky. Graft nerve to nerve, splinch bone to bone, repair the damaged veins, let this boy walk, if not dance: keep both feet on the ground.

Hey, Father, come on over here and put one of your fixes on this boy.

“Father, how are you feeling?” Hawkeye said instead.

“Oh, I’m fine – ” Mulcahy sounded far away and dazed.

“Well, you fainted earlier,” Hawkeye pointed out, not letting his hands stop work. “Went right out.”

“Fainted?” the Colonel said sharply, echoed by BJ and Margaret. “What happened, padre? Should you be working?”

“Just collapsed,” Hawkeye said. “Went right out and stayed out for a minute or so.”

“You fainted?” Margaret hadn’t moved away from the table, but her voice rose. “That can be very serious. What happened?”

“I’m fine,” Mulcahy said. He sounded startled – almost betrayed. He had come over towards the table where Hawkeye and the Colonel were stationed.

“You don’t look good,” the Colonel said. “Go take a rest.”

“I’m fine,” Mulcahy repeated. Hawkeye didn’t look up.

“Pierce, you should have told me,” the Colonel said.

“Wasn’t time.” Hawkeye glanced up for a moment, at the Colonel, ignoring Mulcahy. “Happened just before the choppers got here.”

“Padre, out,” the Colonel said. “We’ll call you if we need you. Margaret, get one of your nurses to see him to his tent.”

“Yes, doctor,” Margaret said promptly. “Kelly!”

“There’s no need for that,” Mulcahy protested. But he was going. Hawkeye heard him retreat to the door. “Don’t take anyone else away from their work. Really, I’m fine…”



BJ was in the officer’s club with a letter from Peg. Charles was in the Swamp with Beethoven. No one mentioned seeing Sidney, and the VIP tent was empty. He must have driven the other one back to Seoul. There was no more hot water in the showers. Nevertheless, Hawkeye washed himself meticulously, tried for a shave – cold water shaving was hell – and dressed in his last clean set of fatigues.

There was a light on in the chaplain’s tent. Hawkeye knocked and went in.

Fathr Mulcahy didn’t get up. He was sitting holding two chapbooks in his hands, not reading them. He looked at Hawkeye, and said nothing.

“Don’t you want to know which one I am?” Hawkeye said, trying for a joke.

Mulcahy didn’t even smile. He shook his head. “Did you want something?”

“I’m sorry I put you through that,” Hawkeye said. The usual chair placed for a visitor to sit in was missing. Hawkeye stood where it had been,

Mulcahy laughed. Almost soundlessly, and so bitterly it was like being doused in cold water all over again. “Sidney drove h – him back to Seoul,” he said. His right hand was clutching at his cross. “I’m leaving here day after tomorrow.”

“And he’s going to Spain on Sunday and you never have to see him again,” Hawkeye said. “I’m sorry I brought him here. But I wanted – ” Hawkeye sat down. He didn’t want to loom. He sat there on the floor with his hands wrapped round his knees and said “Father – do you know how much – do you have the least idea how important you are to all of us?”

It was meant to be the opening of a speech that would rock Mulcahy’s socks off, but Mulcahy shook his head, pressing his other hand against his mouth. He said, in a muffled voice, “Hawkeye, please don’t do this to me.”

Hawkeye sat still on the edge of a precipice. He could hardly bear to move: he was afraid even words would push Mulcahy over it.

“I need you,” he said finally.

Mulcahy shook his head again. “Please don’t,” he repeated.

“I know it’s not fair to lay that on you,” Hawkeye said, feeling as if he were cutting each word out of himself and bleeding on the floor. “This place is a cesspool. We take in children who ought to be learning how to shave and we stand every day in their blood with our hands in their guts. Nobody ought to be here. But it’s not fair – ” to his own surprise, his voice cracked, “it’s not fair if you’re going because you can’t stand looking at me. I didn’t do anything to you. I can’t – I don’t see how anyone who was even a little bit me could. He’s not me! He may look like me and talk like me but we’re not the same person.” He swallowed, staring at Mulcahy. “I wouldn’t.” He was trying to be certain of this, trying not to imagine it. He was more certain, now, with Mulcahy’s stricken face looking at him as if Hawkeye were his worst nightmare come to life. “I couldn’t.”

Mulcahy bent his head. Not as if he were nodding: he bent further and further down, bending himself over, both arms curved before his face. When he was bent over completely, he stayed there.

Hawkeye froze. He had seen shellshocked soldiers do this, or something like it. He had pushed Mulcahy over that precipice. When Mulcahy spoke, he sounded as if he were having difficulty articulating.

“I wanted to die.”

Hawkeye heard it first as present tense, I want to die, and nearly cracked. It was only repeating the sentence in his mind’s ear that he was sure Mulcahy had said, past tense: wanted.

“It isn’t you,” Mulcahy said, his face still buried in his arms.

His head bent, the back of his neck was visible: across it was a fresh scar, tidier than the marks on the other man’s flesh, but newer.

“Who did that to you?”

Mulcahy lifted his head, after a moment, and looked at Hawkeye. “I used to say you’d make a good priest,” he said. “I need you to know my sins. I think it’s very – very selfish of me to want you to know them – ”

Hawkeye made an inarticulate noise of protest.

“ – yes, selfish. I don’t think – I know you won’t be better for knowing what happened to me – but I want you to hear my confession.”

“If you want to talk to me,” Hawkeye said, his heart thumping, “I want to hear it. But you know – ” He tried to convey sincerity, he wasn’t sure he could do it, even though he meant every word of it. “ – you know whatever you did, when you were a prisoner, it’s not going to make me think any worse of you. Go on. I’m not going to interrupt.”

Mulcahy’s right hand clutched at his crucifix again. He swallowed, quite visibly. “You want to know who did this to me. I can’t tell you their names.”

“Where did that scar on your neck come from?”

Mulcahy let go of his crucifix as if it had burned him, and clapped his hand over the mark. He stared at Hawkeye. He opened his mouth without speaking, closed it again after a moment, and finally said, in a cracked voice, “You said you weren’t going to interrupt…”

“I’m sorry,” Hawkeye said. “I just – happened to see it. Sorry. I won’t – ” He put his hand across his mouth and shook his head.

“They tattooed the back of my neck,” Mulcahy said. He took his hand away from the mark, and clasped both his hands between his knees. “When I came back I had it removed. I can feel the scar, but I didn’t think about people – seeing it.”

“It’s new, that’s all,” Hawkeye said. “When it’s faded – anyway, people don’t go around looking at the backs of people’s necks.” Except me. At you. “You wear a collar, it’ll hide the mark.”

Mulcahy nodded. He dropped his eyes again. “Please,” he said, at last, “don’t say anything.”


to part 14