Peacetime

I've been a M*A*S*H* watcher for as long as I can remember. So long that I am pretty sure I've really seen every episode they ever made, most of them repeatedly.

There was a sense the whole time, especially toward the end, that everyone was holding their collective breaths till peacetime, and that when it came, something special was going to happen with Hawkeye. What it was, no one knew, least of all Hawkeye. But I never quite believed him when he claimed he would simply exult, party, speed away in gleeful, unencumbered relief.

I felt that he'd never be able to get away from what those years had done to him, and that he'd feel like he was missing a limb to be parted from those friends, those comrades in his brutal, incessant fight against death.

By the time the end came, I was proven righter than I really would have liked.

He'd broken down and was in an asylum trying to collect enough pieces of himself to be put back into his M*A*S*H* unit. He was frail, something he'd never shown evidence of before, even in those moments where he'd show some pain.

He did make it out, of the asylum, and then out of Korea, but we weren't sure at all how he was going to be, afterward. And I suppose that is only right. What we really wanted to see, which was never (of course) going to happen, was him and BJ flying away together, brothers. Because we knew that even in his Maine paradise Hawkeye was going to feel like he'd lost his twin.

I bring this up because I recently found myself making a large leap towards something I've always wanted to do. Not just something, the thing. And I find that, like Hawkeye, I'm not able to simply exult, party, and speed toward it in gleeful unencumbered relief.

Too much has gone before, perhaps. It's been too long a battle, and I am not certain if I still possess the ability to believe in it, to take it in. I'm damn well going to try, because I do believe (or 85% of my self does) that I deserve to have it, to do and be what and who I want to be.

But the battlescars are not insubstantial, and they are not pretty.