Disclaimer: M*A*S*H does not belong to me; the novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors belongs to Richard Hooker, and the television series belongs to Larry Gelbart and Twentieth Century Fox Television.

A/N: Well, this is definitely something new. I was just looking through documents on my computer the other day when I found this, which I completed over a year ago. I wrote the first draft in January of 2012 when I first became obsessed with M*A*S*H, and it's just been sitting there, waiting for the day when I finally chose to post it. After a final edit, I decided it was time to put it out for the world to see! And then I thought, why not post it as a Memorial Day present? Perfect timing, indeed!

Although I no longer watch the show like I initially did, it's still one of the best I've seen. I love the drama and the humor and the realness, and I was especially drawn to the relationship between Hawkeye Pierce and BJ Hunnicut, which is partly focused on here. Honestly, this was one of the easiest pieces for me to write; not because of the length, but I just fell into a rhythm while working on this, and I feel like I did the best I could when it came to capturing the horror and stress and exhaustion of being a doctor in the middle of a war.

I have absolutely no idea if anyone's going to read this, but maybe some fanatic like I was will stumble along this little piece and find it to their liking!

StarKatt427

It is April, 1953, and there is no where you would rather be than in Korea at the moment. Every day, you would kill to be back in the States, back home, with your wife curled against your side, her pretty blonde head resting on your shoulder, and your beautiful little girl in your arms, laughing and talking and just looking at you, actually knowing that you're her father. But you're not there; you're not with Peg and Erin, and you haven't been for months, and you have no idea when this hell will end or if it ever will. You've been here for what seems like a lifetime, even though it's only been a little over a year. Time is warped; but that's what the horrors of war do to you, even when you aren't the one fighting. You see the horrendous results of shellings and bombings, the outcome of sniper fire, and you know what those machines can do to a human body. You deal with it every day, even if there are no wounded brought in by choppers or recovering in post op. They are always there, in your head, infecting your dreams, and you sometimes wonder if it's all just a nightmare, if this whole war is some kind of sick joke God has played on you and the entire world, and you can just never wake up.

Right now, you're working on the next wounded man brought to you and are about to commence with another case of 'meatball surgery'; maybe your twelfth, maybe your fifteenth. You lost count a few patients ago. Choppers flew in close to eleven the night before, not even an hour after you had lain down to go to sleep, and you have been working for who knows how long. In a way, time means nothing, but yet it's everything: it's what can stand between a man living or dying.

The coppery salt stench of blood, like pennies, and quickly approaching death floods your nostrils and makes you, even after a year of operating on mangled bodies, beyond nauseous. Yet you remain calm. The boy—and he is a boy, barely even nineteen, most likely—before you is covered in dirt and, beneath the grime and blood, his face is pale. You don't remember him from earlier, when you assessed the men to take the more critical cases first, but his wounds must not have been that serious initially; now, you can see the creeping coldness of death in his features, and you know that he won't last much longer if you don't hurry. A wound to the abdomen that is not too deep, and you don't believe the shrapnel hit anything vital, but you can't be sure until you get inside of him. Expertly, scalpel already in hand, you cut a clean incision along the wound to get a better look, just below his ribs.

And there it is: a piece of jagged metal no longer than half the height of your pinky finger, but enough to take his life. There's more, but none as big as this one piece to the right of his liver. Fresh blood quickly coats your white gloves, and when the nurse tells you his blood pressure and heart rate are dropping, you know you have to move faster. Without even raising your eyes, you lift your hand up and call for tweezers, and the scalpel it taken away and replace by the tool you asked for, and you delicately move to where you can grab the uneven metal with the instrument; your hand is steady, your head level, even as you fear that when you pull the shrapnel out, it will tear something.

Thankfully, it doesn't, and the removal is even better than you had hoped. It will be easier to remove the rest, as long as they aren't in too deep.

But then the nurse to your left, the one watching his vitals, tells you that his heart rate is dropping, her voice without panic but filled with tension; very professional. And you show the same calm outwardly as you quickly move to the next piece of metal, but inwardly, you feel the jolt of adrenaline that you know to be fear hit your gut. The next piece is out even quicker than the first, and you're off to the following; there's four more, and you can't do anything else until you get them out.

His breathing is slowing; you can feel the way his chest refuses to contract and expand. Only two more to go now, and you move flawlessly, hands still sure. You have to move faster.

When the last piece is out and you've quickly sown the cut up, his heart rate is steadily plummeting. The nurse is supplying him with the oxygen he needs, but it won't be enough if you can't get his heart beating regularly again. So, barely even thinking, your press your hands to his chest, palm over palm, and push firmly. You're dimly aware that you're mumbling to the boy, but you aren't really conscious of what you're saying, or the fact that the other doctors and nurses can probably hear you. You just keep pushing on his chest, hoping that with you performing CPR and the nurse administering air into his lungs, he'll pull through.

His heart is stopping.

It's hard to lose a patient. So hard. When you have your very owns hands inside their body, feel their lifeblood coating your gloves and seeing the vivid red, when you can feel every thump of their heart beneath your hand slowing, until it finally just stops and there's nothing you can do. You can't cry because it won't help; even though it's all you want to do, to just forget where you are and who you are and that you held that man's life in your hands, that his death is your fault. Maybe if you had been quicker, if you had done something better, he would have lived.

This has to work. You will not let him die.

No pulse. No heartbeat.

You ignore the sweat running down your forehead and coating your face beneath the surgical mask, block out the exhaustion that has been slinking into your bones for the last two hours. You haven't had a break, and it has to at least be close to dawn by now. But this boy hasn't had a break either, and you refuse to complain when his life is slipping away.

You keep pressing his chest, unable to give up on him, telling him to breathe, to fight, your tone sharp and determined. You even curse at him once when he doesn't respond. And you never quit, repeatedly pushing your weight down over his heart for at least a minute, even when you hear the nurse's relieved voice say that she has a pulse, that his heart rate is slowly rising.

And you are so focused that it takes a few moments for you to realize that you really just saved a man many would have declared dead. He's alive. Even though he's still not out of danger yet, he is alive because of you.

Normally, you would be happy; proud, maybe. But right now, all you can feel is the hot fear shaking your body, the cold sweat on the back of your neck. You've had patients die in front of you, but this man's heart stopped, and you were able to pull him back, and that doesn't happen as often as you would like. So you look down at him, shocked and in awe and still scared.

As if from a great distance, you hear a voice, loud and tired and triumphant, announce that that's the last of the wounded and congratulating everyone on a job well done, on there being no loss of life: Colonel Potter.

And you realize that it's because of you that not one of the wounded brought in is proclaimed deceased.

Something pulls you; not physically, but some unseen force, and when you slowly lift your eyes, he's staring back, as if you're both trained to know when to turn to each other. The bottom half of his face is still covered with his white surgical mask, and yet you can almost see his smile; not quite the cheeky grin he usually gives you—the one when you're both up to no good—but an actual smile that he saves only for moments like this, when you both know you've done well. Pale blue eyes are squinted with his smile, the skin around them crinkled just slightly, and he says without speaking that you've done well, that he's proud of you.

Slowly, your mouth lifts into a tired smile beneath your mustache, the same words reflected back at him in your eyes.

"Well," a gentle voice rings out: Father Mulcahy. "We just did finish before sunrise, thank the Lord."

And when you turn away from Hawkeye and look to the door that will soon lead you into the dawn, you can already feel the sunshine on your skin. "Yeah," you say quietly to the man on the operating table. "We made it."

Just across the room, Hawkeye answers you. "We sure did."

The title can refer to both the patient BJ saved and BJ himself: this could be one of the many things BJ said to the wounded soldier as he fought to save his life, but for me, it's a little bit more about BJ finding the strength to make it through the hell of war.