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It was around midnight when Klinger knocked on his door, only waiting a fraction of a second before groggily opening the door and finding Father Mulcahy pushing up from where he was kneeling at his bedside.“Good, you’re awake. Hawkeye on the phone for you.” Klinger stalked over, grabbed him by the bicep, and helped haul him the rest of the way up and then out of his tent, towards the administrative tent and the radio. It was abrupt enough that it took Francis a second to understand where they were going and why.“Did you say Hawkeye? Is he alright? Did he say why he was calling?” They’d all spoken to him that morning, and while it hadn’t exactly been a pleasant experience, Hawkeye had sounded physically fine, if emotionally raw. What could have happened in just a few hours, so far from the front? Possibilities ran amok through his mind, each of them more horrible than the last, before Klinger cut him off.“Sounds a little wild, but I think he’s doing okay. He don’t seem to be about to snap, but what do I know? I’ve been about to snap for three years at this point.” Klinger shrugged, slammed his way through the office doors, trusting the Father to not get smacked on the backswing, before making a beeline to the phone. “Hawkeye, you still there?” He listened for a second before laughing sharply. “You and me both, buddy. Listen, you get out like this and maybe I’ll see you in Toledo next week, huh? I got the Padre for you, if you’re ready? Alright, talk to you later, I’m going back to sleep!” He made a kissing noise down the receiver before handing it to the Father and stumbling over to collapse back to his bed, apparently having fallen back asleep before he even hit the pillow. Francis took a deep breath before raising the phone to his ear, pasting a smile on his face despite knowing that Hawkeye couldn’t see it.“Good evening, Hawkeye! To what do I owe the pleasure? I’m guessing you can’t sleep, but how’d you convince Sidney to let you call out this late?”“You’re right on the can’t sleep, Father, but I bet you can empathize.” Correct. Nearly three years in war together and Hawkeye knew him just as well as he knew Hawkeye. “Sidney believed me when I said talking to you would help me sleep, or he humored me at least, probably because he was sick of me bothering him when he wanted to be asleep, but if I can’t sleep then why should he be able to, you know? The war’s so goddamn loud anyway, how can anyone sleep?”Francis breathed deeply through Hawkeye’s questions, the raw, desperate tilt to his friend’s voice making him feel like he did at the bedsides of the dying, when they asked him if heaven was waiting for them. “I don’t know,” he parroted, much as he did to those dying boys, “but isn’t it a pleasant thought, that maybe someone’s sleeping?” It felt weak even to him.“But you’re right, Hawkeye, I was awake. But I’m not so sure about being able to help you get some sleep if I can’t even find sheep to count. How would you like me to try to help?” He felt lost, though this would not be the first time he was asked to lull someone, even Hawkeye himself, to sleep. What else could he be hoping to achieve when he read to the GIs in post-op, who could not sleep unless they had stories to paste over their memories of foxholes, artillery blasts, and dead friends?When Hawkeye came to him late at night, it was usually for conversation, but Francis found that he was having a hard time knowing how to talk to Hawkeye like this. He was used to the man being frayed but whole, just like all of them. Now it felt as though his friend was in tatters, and putting him back together would take a scavenger hunt, solving a puzzle, and some excellent sewing skills, all of which felt much beyond him at that moment. Still, he could not have been expecting what Hawkeye pleaded for down the tinny line.“Father, will you hear my confession?”In nearly three years in Korea, he had heard a grand total of twenty-three confessions, most from soldiers passing through who’d been deeply devout at home and who had somehow managed to retain their faith through the shelling and shooting and blood in the air. Among the more permanent residents of the MASH, he had only heard two confessions. Frank Burns had come to him once, to confess that he’d never been to confession, never been confirmed, never been baptized, wasn’t Catholic, but that he really respected the Church and loved what they had to say about jezebels and homosexuals. It was about as nauseating as any interaction with Burns, and he was happy when it was over. Henry Blake had visited him, drunk as a skunk, the night before he shipped out home, and he couldn’t remember a thing about the confession because he was similarly plastered, but he remembered that it brought him no comfort to know Henry had died relatively sinless.Hawkeye was something else. Culturally Jewish but an agnostic-identifying athiest to his core, Francis didn’t know what he could be thinking, but he knew desperation, and he could never turn down an opportunity to provide confession.“Sure, Hawkeye. Do you want me to guide you through it, or do you want to, uhm, freestyle it?” He wished they were in the same room, so he could see Hawkeye’s posture, his eyes. He’d only spoken to Hawkeye on the phone a few times, one of the last times being when he’d had to tear through a young man’s throat to let him breathe. The last time had been that morning, when he’d found he couldn’t say a thing he wanted to with everyone else there. So much of knowing Hawkeye was watching how he moved, how he fit into a space, and without that he felt as if he was talking to a ghost.“Can you help me?” How many times had Hawkeye asked that of someone? “It’s just that I’ve been having a hard time finding words, first for Sidney and now for you and probably for everyone else in the world too, I just don’t know what to say anymore. It’s smothering here, Padre, it’s like they don’t give you any room to breathe, and I wish I knew what to say here, but I don’t, I just needed to call you and that’s as far as I got, so can you help me the rest of the way?”Francis pictured him curled in on himself and getting smaller with every word. He felt the barely suppressed waves of grief wash over him anew as Hawkeye went back to the bus, where not many of them would ever have the chance to leave. He knew BJ was having nightmares, just as he was having nightmares, just as Colonel Potter, Klinger, Kellye, Margaret, Able, and Charles were having nightmares.“Of course, Hawkeye. I’ve told you how much I enjoy hearing confessions. If you want to do it by the book, you’ll start with the sign of the cross. That’s your forehead, then your abdomen, left shoulder then right.” The rustling of his clothes as he performed the sign, mirroring Francis’s own movements. “Now, you say ‘forgive me Father—that’s God the Father, not me—, for I have sinned, it has been whatever amount of time since my last confession.’”“Can it be you?” More shuffling, probably him fidgeting with his sleeve or lapel. “It’s just that you know how I feel about God, and you know how I feel about the war, and God never brought me any comfort in this godforsaken war, so why would I go asking Him for it now? Why would I ask a guy for forgiveness who lets men and women and babies die in a war they didn’t even ask for, that I didn’t even ask to be part of, that no one even asked us if we wanted to fight? Not to tell you that you’re better than your God or anything, but in my book you are, and I’d rather just be talking to you, because at least you take care of all those kids and don’t talk to me from a burning bush and haven’t ever flooded the world, you know?” He was breathing hard, like he was running a marathon, and Francis felt so far away from everything for a brief, vertigo inducing moment.There were tears in his eyes, but he couldn’t figure why. Klinger snored in his cot, having fallen back asleep pretty much the moment he’d delivered Francis to the phone, and his snores were the only thing the priest had to hang on to to stop himself from falling down the phone line. He swallowed, and found his voice jammed in the back of his throat. He cleared it as quietly as he could.“Of course, Hawkeye. This’ll be between just you and me. I don’t think my boss needs to know, this time.” He tried to make himself sound more jovial than he found he could be and failed, but Hawkeye didn’t call him on it. It would’ve been hypocritical for him to do so, anyway.When he spoke again, after a few staticky seconds, Hawkeye was even quieter, and now Francis saw him sitting on the floor with his knees drawn to his chest, a bundle of too-thin limbs and sallow skin. “Okay. Okay. Okay. So, uhm, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned and I’ve never confessed a lick of it. I’ve told people I’m sorry, sure, but I’ve never actually told them what for, and if I went around trying to do it now like for one of those 12-step programs to not be an alcoholic anymore I’d never get past step five. Maybe I just wanna be an alcoholic forever, huh? Why’s no one ever thinking that maybe I want to drink myself to death if they won’t let me out of here—this war, this hospital, this fucking brain that’s always running—“ A soft thunking noise, like Hawkeye bouncing his head off the wall but knowing that if he does it hard enough the nurses’ will hear. “Maybe getting so drunk I wake up under my cot with a mouth full of dirt is better for me than sleeping at this fucking hospital with its soft goddamn mattresses and box springs, has anyone thought of that?”Francis couldn’t speak. He clutched the coiled telephone cord so tightly in his fist that his whole arm was beginning to hurt. What was he meant to do when he couldn’t see him? Couldn’t reach out and touch him? At home, he hated doing confessions in the traditional booth, mostly for the lack of eye contact, but often because he believed forgiveness should come with someone holding your hand, helping you stand up again, wrapping you up in a human hug meant to express a divine love. That he couldn’t offer Hawkeye anything but his ragged breathing tore him apart. Hawkeye didn’t seem to notice.“But anyway, I can’t give you an itemized list of every sin, but maybe how sorry I am will be enough. Every day, every hour, I feel like I’m haunted by all the things I’m sorry for, and most of it’s in technicolor in blood and guts and brain matter and bone shards and fat. We have a 97% survival rate, but do you know how many 3% shakes out to when you’ve been here three years? Hundreds of people. Hundreds of dead people that I couldn’t save even though I’m a surgeon, and everyone says I’m such a good surgeon, but how could I be so good when I’ve killed hundreds of people? Sure, maybe the bullets and the shrapnel and the tires and the land mines killed them first, but what’s the point of being a good surgeon if you can’t save the dead? No matter how many Humpty Dumpties I put back together again, they keep getting set up on that wall as target practice and shot from all sides.” He was going a mile a minute now, speaking so fast Francis began to worry someone was going to cut off their connection, and he’d be stuck having given no absolution, having not offered Hawkeye the one thing he had asked for.“Mostly, I’m sorry for not just breaking my leg when I got my draft notice, and I’m sorry for wanting to go back and do it so bad. If I wasn’t such a coward, I woulda gotten myself out on a Section 8 that woulda made Klinger jealous with how iron clad it was. Maybe now it’s my cowardice that’s gonna do it for me. You know, Father, that I’ve put my leg out in front of a moving Jeep more times than I can count? When Frank had his gun I’d just look at it, and know that if I scared him at just the right time he’d shoot me for sure and put me out of this miserable war for good. Every day I’ve thought about it, and every day something’s made me stop myself. Some days it’s the nurses, and not always in the way you’d think. No one knows this, and you can’t tell anyone because of that confession secrecy thing, but half of the time I’m in the supply tent after dark is because I just don’t think I can do this alone, but I don’t want to wake BJ up, or Colonel Potter, or Margaret, or Klinger, or you for my bullshit when you’ve all got your own bullshit. How am I supposed to explain to any of you that I can’t be alone, even for a second, or it feels like I’m going to walk into the minefield? What am I supposed to do about that, huh?” He didn’t give Francis a chance to think of an answer.“Sidney doesn’t even ask me about that, he just keeps asking about the bus. He doesn’t even ask me about the minefields, or the guns, or the Jeeps, can you believe that! He just keeps asking about the beach, and the bus, and the bottle, and so and so and so and so and so and so and so. Half of the time I can barely keep myself from dying and he’s asking about the bus.” His voice was muffled now, the rustling of clothing jerky and rhythmic, and Francis heard the wet lump in Hawkeye’s throat as clear as he felt the one in his own.“Oh, Hawkeye,” was all he managed to get out, and that alone felt like following Moses up Mount Sinai.On the other end of the line, the rustling abruptly stilled. Hawkeye’s voice was strained, teetering on incandescent when he spoke again. “Don’t pity me, Father, I’m not asking for that and I don’t want it from you or anyone.”This defensiveness was more what he was expecting from Hawkeye as he was, but it hurt no less for the anticipation. Still, he was practiced in the art of defusing most situations, so it wasn’t hard to find a way of explaining himself that would hopefully make sense to Hawk.“It’s not pity, Hawkeye, it’s grief, and I hope you’ll allow me that for the sake of a dear beloved friend who’s hurting. There’s nothing for me to pity in you, except for that we’re both caught up in a cruel war and we’re both hurting for it. I just wish I had—“ He ran through the myriad list of things he wished he had done. Stopped that poor young mother, for one, even if they all might have died then. Hugged Hawkeye before he had been taken to the evac hospital. Broken his own leg when he’d received his assignment to minister in a war torn Korea. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I just wish you had come to find me more often. Sleep doesn’t find me most nights either, and I would’ve liked to have you to sit with.” It wasn’t exactly what he meant to say, but was all he felt he could.On the other end of the line more rustling, a sharp and painful sounding sniffle. When he spoke again Hawkeye sounded two inches tall. “Sorry, Padre. You know I don’t mean it. Or I do, and you’ll forgive me anyway because you have to, because it’s what you do—““Excuse me,” he interjected, cutting off what he was sure was going to be another self-flagellating, emotionally gaunt ramble. “You’ve got it all wrong, Hawkeye. I don’t have to forgive anything, especially not now, when you’re confessing to me and not God. It’s God who’s obligated to forgive you, not me. I forgive you because I want to, even if it means nothing to you at the time, even if I never tell you. I forgive you for bad pranks and bad jokes and singing off-key in the showers, plus every time you beat me at poker or basketball. It has never occurred to me to forgive you for the 3% of these boys who don’t make it home, because I’ve seen exactly how far you’d go to see that they did. I’ve seen you, Hawkeye, and I know you, and I don’t have to forgive you anything, but I do because you deserve it—for the things you actually do as well as the things you take on despite not having to. I forgive you.”The silence that stretched between them was so complete that Francis began to think he must have been hung up on, that his little speech was too mushy for Hawkeye and he had said too much, expressed too much of what was better left unsaid. Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned the off-key singing.Klinger snored on.“You know,” Hawkeye started, in a tone that would have been almost him, almost blasé and conversational, had it not been for the hitching of his breath. “When I was a kid in Crabapple Cove, one of my 4th grade teachers, Mrs. Wakulich, would tell us again and again about how Jesus died for our sins out of the goodness of his heart. She said he’d already seen everything bad we’d ever do in our whole lives, and still chose to die for us, even knowing how bad we could be. I didn’t trust the guy a lick after that, and every day in Korea has made it seem stupider than I thought it was as a kid. You’re telling me Jesus died to save the men who order little boys over these ridges? Who don’t send us our medical supplies because we forgot to submit a requisition in triplicate? Who make us hide in buses like fucking sardines, quiet as church mice?” A louder thump than last time, and Francis hoped he was punching something instead of banging his head against it.“Sorry, sorry again. I know you love the guy, so I hope you don’t think I think you’re stupid for loving him. It’s just that,” a shuddering, unsteady breath. “Francis, you almost make me believe someone could be that good.”Francis put a hand over his eyes, leaning over the table like he could somehow escape the pressure of his friend’s esteem, the grief at being so far from him, at not having the words to express what that meant to him. He wished they had met at another time, in another place. He wished it wasn’t a war that had brought them into each other’s orbits, that divine providence was kinder.“Thank you, Hawkeye. I can’t tell you what that means to me.” He weighed his soul against Hawkeye’s and found his own lacking in truthfulness, in honesty. “Can I be honest with you, my friend?”“Sure, Francis. You’ve let me be more honest than I’m usually capable of, so give it right back.” There was a chuckle buried somewhere in the grief they had both found themselves mired in. For Francis it was like a lifeline.The receiver was sweaty and heavy in his hand, and tears had already dried on his cheeks and tightened his skin, making the night feel even hotter, even more oppressive. If he kept his eyes closed, he could almost pretend he and Hawk were in the same room, close enough for him to lean into his airspace. In the distance, artillery fire pierced the night’s silence, a harbinger of the patients who’d likely be there too soon.“When we’re in the operating room, and it’s been hours of nothing but young men torn apart and put back together… when the shelling is closer than it should be, like it is now, I find myself struggling to see the hand of God as well. God was easy to see back home, when I could take a ride down the road in the CYO van and not expect to find someone bleeding out in the gutter. Churches are built to help us see God, in all their gold and stained glass and high ceilings, but the OR isn’t built that way. The ceiling leaks and has blood stains that I doubt will ever come out, it’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and the smell is about as far from incense as you can get.” He pictured OR as it appeared in his mind’s eye most often, dust hanging precariously in the air, swirling in the wakes of nurses and orderlies after a mortar blast had shaken it free from the ceiling. In a shaft of light from the grimy windows, he saw the swirling steam coming off a young man’s cracked open ribs, Hawkeye’s gloves gathering condensation as he warmed his hands over the fire of a young man’s precarious life. “But even in this horrible place, I see God in you. It wasn’t God that answered my prayers when that soldier began to choke when it was just Radar and I—it was you. Maybe God’s hands are not as apparent in the OR, but as long as yours are, at least it gives those young men a chance at salvation.”It was too much to say, and not enough. Hawkeye was silent on the other end, and Francis thought that maybe impending peace had made him lose his filter. If that was the case, he felt he might as well continue on. Peace had made oblivion feel so much closer, and with it how many times now someone died, or left, and he had been left holding all his care for them with nowhere to put it, not having had the presence of mind to share himself as fully as he ought.“Forgive me. What I’m trying to say is that this place makes all goodness feel so far away, and I understand your misgivings about God, because I have felt that way myself time and again over the past three years.” He couldn’t remember admitting this to anyone, even his sister, outside of confession, but he knew that if anyone would hear him without judging, it was Hawkeye. “But the fact is, if you see the potential for forgiveness you’re looking for in me, then I have to make you understand that I see the potential for salvation that I’m looking for in you. You are not a killer, Hawkeye. You have saved all of us, at one time or another, and we miss you dearly for it.”It was all so inadequate. Even expressing himself so floridly was not enough to explain what it had meant to him, watching the surgeons in OR save the lives of soldiers, civilians, children, and so-called enemies. And yet he had not mentioned the other surgeons. And yet he had softened how much he missed Hawkeye’s presence in camp to how much they all had. Even in his honesty, he could not say everything. He could admit his doubts in God, who he had devoted his life to, but couldn’t tell Hawkeye how much he meant to him. The shame of cowardice clung to him under the guise of sweat.When Hawkeye spoke again, he didn’t sound so confined, and Francis pictured him standing, his elbows on the top of the nurse’s station, a hand in his hair. A detail he did not need to picture, but could not help himself against.“Gee, Francis, you sure know what to say to a girl losing her mind.” He still sounded strained, but also fond and tired, a combination Francis was more familiar with than the muted, sickened Hawk he’d spoken to half a day ago. “I miss you too. All of you, I guess. Or most of you. Maybe not Charles, and I bet Rosie’s already been liquidating my stuff to pay off my tab, but joke’s on them because I’ve been slowly switching everything in my and Charles’s lockers for a month.”Francis laughed, louder than he intended to because of his relief at hearing Hawk joke at all. Behind him, Klinger snorted, rolled over, and continued to snore.“Hey, I’d talk to you about how much we love each other all day, but Sidney’s cutting me off. Something about doctors knowing you’ve gotta get sleep to get better or whatever. Maybe if I was a doctor—which I am—I’d have thought of that myself.“ More irritated now, but clearly directed at Sidney and not at him. He felt for Sidney, but was at least happy that he’d managed to not upset Hawk, even if he felt it was close. “Listen, I gotta go back to my padded room, but I’ll be back soon if they’re stupid enough to let me do surgery again. Thanks for getting out of bed so late on my account.”“You know I hope you finally get to go home, but if you get sent back to us, we’ll be waiting! Thank you for calling and sharing this with me, Hawkeye.” He heard mumblings on the other side of the line, undoubtedly a nurse trying to get Hawkeye to return the phone. “As for your confession,” he blurted, trying to catch him before Hawkeye surrendered the phone, “I forgive you, Hawk, for everything you’ve done and everything you think you’ve done. I hope you find it within yourself to forgive your own sins.”Another mumbling, and a few footsteps which were almost certainly Hawkeye dancing away from whoever was trying to scoop up the phone.“Thank you, Father. We’ll see. They wanna lock me back up now, and I don’t think I can hold onto the receiver if they call the big orderly out, so goodbye, farewell, and amen!”There was a final shuffle, one of Sidney’s more forced laughs, and the thunk of the receiver being returned to its cradle. Francis was left in snore-punctuated silence, sitting half curled into himself, his head almost level with the radio table, the phone kicking up bursts of static every once in a while. For a long time, he simply sat in that almost silence, his eyes still closed and his cobbled together image of Hawkeye burned on the inside of his eyelids. Eventually, he rose, not because he particularly wanted to, but because he heard a chopper in the distance and knew it was almost certainly on its way to them. When he opened his eyes, Hawkeye was gone again, with only the half-collapsed officer’s club and his unmade bed in the Swamp to say he’d been there.But there was no time for that kind of mourning, because now the chopper blades were accompanied by honking ambulances, and Klinger breezed past him, only stopping at the door when he realized the priest wasn’t automatically following him.“You alright, Padre? Hawk doing okay?” He quirked a thick eyebrow, eyes furtive between the approaching casualties and the temporarily frozen vicar.Francis shook himself, a little too literally, and pasted on a game smile, moving to follow Klinger out into the muggy, lonely night. “Getting better, I think. He says he misses us, and that he knows you’ll be jealous if he ends up getting sent home over all this.”Klinger rolled his eyes, going through the motions of opening the back of the ambulance and half-removing the first litter, waiting for the Father to take the other side before carrying it over to set their first patient down in the dirt commonly known as triage. “Y’know, I’m worried he’s gonna be real surprised about that. Korea’s looking prettier and prettier to me every day.”Francis didn’t have to turn to know that Klinger was looking beyond him, to Soon-Lee, who he could hear speaking quietly to a Korean casualty—from the North or the South, he could not tell, and he knew Soon-Lee didn’t care. It seemed that shrapnel tore through everyone just the same. Even with the best among them gone for now, he could still see so much to be faithful to in this hellacious war.Two days later, to save their small group of POWs from becoming patients, Father Mulcahy would run into artillery fire to unlock their open-air cell and immediately fall prey to his own foolish bravery. When he woke up not long after, to a mumbling BJ and the feeling that God was further from him than ever, it was Hawkeye’s voice ringing in his ears, reminding him of the bells at the seminary that had called them to prayer.