author: aj (another_juxtaposition@hotmail.com)
codes: m*a*s*h, colonel potter
archive: permission will be given, but please ask.
notes: sabine is the queen of all things, and i am merely her little sister. and because everyone knows i like a little war.

summary: Someday the war will be over.

*

Someday this war will be over, and it will be just a matter of time until the next one begins. But this is the last war for Colonel Potter, and when they declare victory he will go home to Missouri and a wife he hasn’t truly lived with during any of the many years they have been married. That is, of course, if he survives.

It’s dark. Five miles away the shells are still dropping (he can feel it through the bed) and even Hawkeye might be asleep. He’ll ask the Father to pray tomorrow, though he’s never been sure if he believes in that. When someone teases him, he’ll say, “Well, what can it hurt?” He’ll be thinking, well, what have we got to lose?

He knows war. He knows it like the back of his hand, knows it enough to know he will always be surprised by the human capacity for destruction. In 1917, they fought the war to end all wars, only it didn’t. War itself won’t end war, can’t end war, because self-destruction is a human trait and war has nothing to do with humanity. Potter will never figure out where the meaning went, then.

War is contradiction juxtaposed against incredibility with a dash of predicted order, and civilian life has flowers hand-pressed into neat rows. “It’s a jungle out there,” he tells Mildred, and it’s the truth. There is nothing rational or usual about the 4077, except maybe Hawkeye’s hormones. Klinger will be wearing a new dress in the morning, wishing he was Scarlett O’Hara, and Potter will catch him pretending. He isn’t sure which possibility makes him more uncomfortable – keeping Klinger in Korea, or the possibility that he might actually go mad.

He was fifteen when he joined the cavalry. He joined for the horses, not the war glory, but those days have long since passed. When he was nineteen he joined his buddies in the great game of war. They liked the feeling of the uniform, heavy, scratchy wool for the European spring and Potter had never crossed the Mississippi. Fire-bombs were distant dreams. But these boys didn’t join anything, they got papers in the mail and put their lives on hold because the government believed in duty.

Because people were dying, and they are doctors, and doctors swear an oath, their arms covered in blood.

Technology changed warfare, and he knows it will continue to shift, change, more people dying in concentrated locations. More causalities, in the truest sense of the word. He won’t be around to play doctor, to order commands. His hands will be tied by the safe life he left behind when he picked up his uniform and passed the physical test.

War is not easy. He was never just a soldier; a doctor in scrubs and an army hat, answering first to colonel though his scalpel was never far from his hand. Ironic, then, that such precision is required on a battlefield where accidents often claim the most lives. People will always believe that war is about precision, but those that fight know much is due to dumb luck and adrenaline. The survival instinct of men is so strong, Potter can taste it, feeds off of it, works with it.

Three miles away there are boys with their eyes closed and tomorrow Potter will wake up before the sun, pull on his uniform, and begin to stitch them back together. These are his boys, out here, fighting for god knows what, and Potter is a military man but he won’t ever believe in checking morality at the door. There are times when he will have to, of course, and that will be when his hands will be forced to tear instead of heal. That will be when his boys are so splintered and fractured that all the authority in the world couldn’t save them. That will be when he says, disbelieving, “It’s for your own good, son.”

Someday this war will be over, but Potter’s learned from experience that there’s really no such thing as endings, just beginning after beginning after beginning.

*

the end.
  . send a flower .
    . back to the garden .