50

"Anyway," Hawkeye exclaimed loudly, trying to reinsert himself into the conversation. "The Army Information guy wanted to send my little creation back to the States to help promote enlistment."

"You promote enlistment!" Trapper scoffed in amusement. "That'll be the day that pigs start to fly and hell freezes over."

"Exactly." Hawkeye nodded. "Well, once I found out that that's what he wanted to do, I decided to give him a lesson in 'senseless destruction' by blowing up my tower."

"Did it work?" Trapper asked curiously.

"You bet it did!" Hawkeye exclaimed. "After all 'one picture is worth a thousand smithereens'!"

"And what was your reaction to all this, Colonel?" Henry asked Potter, an amused look on his face.

"Hardly surprise." Potter laughed. "I knew Hawkeye well enough by then to expect almost anything from him. Like I said before he was always keeping me on my toes."

"Do you have any other of Ben's exploits in there, Klinger?" Daniel Pierce asked curiously, giving his son a warm smile.

"Nothing terribly off the wall, sir." Klinger replied. "I think most of his more bizarre moments have already been shown." He flipped the picture on the screen to show a shot of Hawkeye and BJ reclining on lawn chairs with umbrellas over them as they watched a couple of men dig a hole.

"What are you two characters doing there?" Peg asked with a laugh.

"It was BJ's first latrine digging." Hawkeye replied with a broad smile. "I told him he had to come downtown more often."

"You made a big thing out of a latrine digging?" Margaret exclaimed with a laugh.

"Well, come on Margaret." Hawkeye commented with a smile. "You know as well as we do just how boring things could get if there was nothing to do. So, we made our own fun."

"Oh, believe me, I know it!" Margaret exclaimed with a laugh. Looking at Peg she added. "One time they were 'bored' so they ran all my underwear up the flag pole!"

Peg looked at BJ and exclaimed reproachfully. "You didn't!"

BJ smiled and nodded in confirmation. "We did. Hey, like Margaret said, we were bored."

"I'm sure you could have found other ways of amusing yourselves." Peg commented.

"Oh, on many occasions we did." BJ assured her. "But at that time, running Margaret's underwear up the flag pole was all we could come up with."

"What other things did you do for entertainment?" Peg questioned, giving her husband a questioning look.

"Allow me to show you." Klinger replied, quickly flipping the picture on screen. "This was our 'Anti green party' that was held in Hawkeye's honor after he went up to the Peace Talks and gave the leaders there a piece of his mind."

"You better be careful about doing that, Hawk." Trapper quipped. "You don't have too many pieces left to give away." Hawkeye laughed sarcastically and gave his friend a mock annoyed look.

"What are they doing to Hawkeye?" Ellie asked with a laugh as she noticed that he was being help upside down by BJ, Margaret and a couple others over a bowl of some sort.

"They're dying his hair red." Margaret replied with a laugh. "You can't tell because the pictures black and white, but everyone else is dressed in red, with their hair dyed red as well. Hawkeye was the only one not red, so we were going to rectify that."

"Thanks to them I looked like a tall Irish Setter." Hawkeye quipped shooting his wife and best friend a teasing glance.

"What other things did you do for amusement?" Peg asked curiously, an expectant smile on her pretty face.

"Another thing we did was set up visiting Congressional Aids who were spreading lies about one of our dear friends." Klinger replied as he showed a picture of Margaret and Mr. Williamson, the Congressional Aid that had come to the 4077th to accuse Margaret of being a communist sympathizer. They were in a rather compromising position on Margaret's cot.

"What on earth!" Peg exclaimed in surprise. BJ, Charles, Hawkeye and Margaret all burst out laughing at the shot.

"That's a perfect picture, Klinger." Hawkeye commended profusely.

"Perfect for hanging." BJ agreed.

"What is that all about?" Potter asked curiously. "What is Williamson doing with Margaret."

"Trying to do the same thing that his wife was doing with the Congressman that he was Aid to." BJ quipped wickedly.

"We led him on, trying to get him to do something to hang himself so that we could get some blackmail pictures on his so that he would leave Margaret alone." Hawkeye explained. "And it worked perfectly."

"You boys are awful!" Peg reprimanded.

"Not as awful as Williamson was." Margaret asserted seriously. "He tried to make me believe that if I fooled around with him that he would leave me alone, but in reality he wasn't planning to let me off the hook at all."

"The snake!" Ellie exclaimed vehemently.

"Don't worry, he got his." Margaret continued. "It turns out his wife was having an affair with the Congressman that he represented."

"Serves him right!" Peg exclaimed as they all laughed heartily at the irony of the situation.

"Remind me never to cross any of you people!" Ellie commented in amusement. "Goodness knows what'll happen to me if I do."

"You'd better believe it!" Hawkeye remarked a big mischievous smile on his face.

"What else did you clowns do for excitement?" Patty asked curiously.

"Well, we played a lot of Poker." BJ commented and laughed as Klinger flashed up a picture of the whole gang around a table in the Officer's Club, cards in hand.

"We also laid cement floors in the OR." Klinger added as he showed another picture of them doing just that.

"Yeah, and it only took us how many tries before we finally got it right." Hawkeye remarked, shooting Klinger a mock annoyed look.

Klinger took the jab good-naturedly and continued. "Some of us even captured North Korean's for a hobby." He flipped to a picture of Hawkeye and BJ standing on either side of a Korean soldier. The three of them had their arms around each other's shoulders in a very buddyish fashion.

"He's a North Korean soldier?" Patty exclaimed greatly surprised at the friendly demeanor between the three. "Wasn't he the enemy?"

Hawkeye and BJ laughed at the memory of their first contact with the little man. "North Korea was the enemy." Hawkeye admitted. "But this guy was quite the character. He not only surrendered to us..."

"Quite persistently, I might add." BJ stated, continuing to laugh heartily.

"...but he also saved our necks..."

"And our butts and everything that was attached to them." BJ added with a sly smile.

"How did he do that?" Ellie asked curiously.

"As we were headed back to camp, on foot I might add since Beej decided that it was too nice a day to drive and parked our jeep, horizontally." He shot his friend a look of mock annoyance. "Anyway, we came across 'Ralph'..."

"'Ralph'?" Trapper questioned with a snicker. "That doesn't sound like a Korean name."

"It wasn't." Hawkeye replied. "We gave him that as a nickname since he couldn't speak English and we couldn't speak Korean. Anyway, after he surrendered to us we were heading back to camp, or at least trying to, which was very difficult considering we were VERY lost."

"Anyway, a group of North Korean soldiers came along." BJ continued the tale after giving his friend a large grin. "Ralph suddenly turned into a screaming madman, scaring us out of our wits. It turned out though he was just trying to keep us from getting killed. Thanks to him, we made it back to camp alive."

"That's quite a scary tale." Patty commented with a shiver, not wanting to think what could have happened to the two men in front of her had 'Ralph' decided to turn on them.

"Well, I have to say that I certainly wouldn't want to have to get through that again." Hawkeye confessed. "Any of it. Army life is not for me!"

"Here, here." Trapper and BJ echoed eagerly. Even Margaret chimed in her agreement, much to Trapper and Frank's surprise.

At their looks she continued. "You couldn't pay me enough to join the Army again." She told them.

"Had enough of discipline and regulations?" Trapper joked, looking at her carefully.

"I had enough of killing and destruction." Margaret replied seriously. "When I went to Korea it was with the idea that war was a good and noble thing. But when I left it was with the knowledge that war was nothing more than, as Ben likes to say, 'senseless destruction'. And I've had enough of it!"

"Humph!" Frank remarked as he gave her a disappointed look. Hawkeye however put his arm around his wife's shoulders and kissed the side of her head, a look of pride in his eyes.

"Come on, Klinger, what else do you have to show us?" Trapper prompted, looking eagerly at the screen.

"I'm afraid were coming to the end of our presentation folks." Klinger said as he flipped to the next shot. It was of himself and Soon-Lee as they were being pronounced man and wife.


Back | Stories | Forward