Nellie rubbed her forehead as she shut the door to her tent. Her hair soaked through the bathrobe wrapped around her body and as soon as the lock had gone on the door, she stripped to change into clean, dry clothes. By the time she'd pinned her wet hair up and gotten dressed, her body already screamed at her for more sleep. But no such luck, as a knock on her door forced her up.

She almost slammed the door closed again when Hawk stood at her door. She didn't have the energy to deal with decoding his intentions. But the oddly serious expression that he flashed her way made her pause. "What's wrong?"

"Do you have an extra tape I can use?" He gestured inside towards her recorder. "I have an idea for BJ's anniversary, but I need a tape recorder."

"No. I don't record anything to send back to Jack," she told him. "Sorry. Ask Charles." Then she paused for a moment. "What's your plan?"

"I've got Peg's mailing address. While Beej is in Post-Op, Klinger's placing a call to her to see if she can record a home movie," he told her. Then he smirked. "She'll be on board."

Nellie nodded. "A nice idea. If you need help, let me know."

"Winchester the Great might listen to you more than me," he suggested. "Wanna take a crack at getting me a tape?"

Nellie scoffed at him. "Oh, and Hawkeye the Great doesn't think he can do it?" She didn't wait for a response, though, and nodded. "Fine. I'll talk to him."

"That's great. Leave it under my pillow when you get it."

Watching as Hawkeye sped off to do whatever else apparently needed to be done, probably a Post-Op shift, she sighed. What a fantastic start to the day. Nellie rolled her eyes and went back inside to slip on her boots. 

She found Charles just in time. He was loading a medical bag into one of the jeeps. She jogged over. "Hey, Charles, wait up."

"Come to gloat, Major?" he snapped.

Nellie put her hands on her hips. Glaring at him, she pointed a finger right as his face. "Drop the holier than thou act right now. I'm not in the mood." When he didn't respond, she just nodded. "Hawkeye has an idea for a gift for BJ for his anniversary, but he needs a blank tape for a recording. I don't have any. Think you can spare one?"

"You can't be serious," he muttered. "You want me to gift those cretins one of the few connections I have to civilization?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Major, I know that both of them can be a handful, and a damn pain in the ass, but do it for Peg and their daughter Erin. Peg actually likes to put up with BJ, so let her have this one, small connection to her husband."

At first, Charles didn't respond. Then he waved her off. "Oh, very well. One tape. But they better not break my recorder."

"I'll let them use mine."

"Good. Now if you'll excuse me, my execution awaits."

Nellie watched as Charles climbed up in the jeep next to Goldman. The engine revved, and soon she was left standing in the center of the compound alone. As dust settled back down around her feet, she frowned. She hadn't really planned to give Hawkeye her tape recorder, but she supposed it was the least she could do for BJ.

Finding Charles' unused tapes wasn't difficult, and soon she'd slipped her tape recorder under Hawkeye's bunk and the tape under his pillow. She checked her watch. She was supposed to help catalog the Supply Room at noon with Margaret. 1200 hours rapidly approached.

She found Margaret giving orders to Kellye and Jan on the way. When they'd nodded and sped off, she moved over to her. "Ready?"

"Let's get this done," Margaret agreed. "Are you feeling better this morning?"

Nellie shrugged. "A bit. Dinner just didn't agree with me."

She didn't have to be a genius to see that Margaret didn't entirely believe her. But as they pushed through into the Supply Room, ceiling-high shelves towering around them stacked with hundreds of boxes, she stayed quiet. Margaret took a clipboard off the wall by the door. 

"Right. Let's start with the medications," she told Nellie. 

For nearly an hour, she and Margaret pulled down boxes ranging in size from fitting in the palm of her hand to nearly too big to take off the shelf. They went through pharmaceuticals, instruments, gloves and masks. As they worked, Nellie stayed mostly quiet, bantering with Margaret only a little. She had too much on her mind.

Too much Hawkeye, really. She couldn't accept the level of disappointment she felt at his sudden distance. She berated herself for it; there was no reason to rely on him. The level of affection she'd developed would only complicate her work in Korea. Nellie realized she probably should've listened to Margaret's warnings. But all the internal yelling in the world couldn't change the fact that she had been extremely hurt. And that pissed her off.

"Right. That's the last one," Nellie told Margaret. She shifted the last box of surgical gowns onto the bottom shelf and wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. "I'm due in Post-Op soon."

"Have you had lunch?" Margaret asked her. 

Nellie shrugged. "I'll grab it after Post-Op." The frown that Margaret shot her way made her shuffle in place. She crossed her hands over her chest and shrugged. "It's fine, Margaret. It's not like the food is any good."

"Just be careful. The last thing we need is one of our own surgeons passing out from lack of food," she scolded. Then she narrowed her eyes. "If Pierce did something to you, I'll kill him."

"Nothing happened," Nellie snapped. "Leave it alone."

Margaret gave a sharp, disbelieving laugh. "That'll be the day. Pierce has no self-control. I swear that man wouldn't know a good thing if it bit him on the face."

"I never said that wasn't true," she agreed. "But he has nothing to do with me putting off lunch for a couple hours, Margaret."

A bit of a lie, but what the head nurse didn't know wouldn't kill her. So as Margaret just begrudgingly accepted her explanation, she said nothing else. They split in the middle of camp. Margaret had to take the list of supplies to Klinger, and she went straight into Post Op.

The little boy that BJ had worked on the day before lay sleeping. He couldn't have been much over ten, his dark hair disheveled as he lay in the hospital bed with his foot in a cast and a few scrapes bandaged. On the floor next to him, his grandfather had a bamboo mat and sat in silence. Other than the Korean civilians, only eight other patients lay in Post-Op, a miracle really. 

They'd been inundated with casualties recently. Most of them were minor, but less than fifteen in Post Op at a time was low. At the other end BJ sat filling out progress reports at the desk while Bigelow and Able handed food out to anyone well enough for solids. At her entrance, BJ looked up and nodded. "Here to give me a bit of a break?"

She nodded with a smile. Pulling on her lab coat, she hooked her stethoscope around her neck and looked at the papers he'd been working on. Then she glanced at him. "Any updates I need to know?"

"Nope, but if Soon Chi wakes up, try healing his funny bone." Bj flashed a small smile and stripped off his own coat. "How's lunch today?"

"Like usual," she lied. "Good luck."

He nodded and moved back down the aisle. With a small sigh, Nellie all but collapsed into the desk chair and watched Post Op. It didn't take long for her to shift out Jack's letters. She'd not taken the time to read the last one yet, and figured it to be as good a time as any. 

"Dear Nellie,

"Not too much is going on here, these days. General Hanover was transferred to the Pentagon, and as his aid, I'm there now too. Technically I'm active in the army now, I suppose, but I'll only be here. But hey, this means I can work on a promotion to Major. Can't have my little sister outranking me. That'd just be shameful.

"I thought I might attend the reunions this year. I think it's time I finally reconnected with the boys. I wish you were here to go with me, but I'll be fine on my own. Dog's is at the end of May, and Easy is holding one later this year. If General Hanover will let me off for a few days, I'm going to go.

"I hope you've got people around you who you'll go see in five to ten years. If you don't, though, you can just come to mine. But I should ask how you're doing? You talked a lot about Hawkeye in your last letter, and about the boredom there. Can't say we were too bored in the foxholes in Europe, but being stuck in one place in Korea probably isn't easy. 

"Write to me when you can.

"Love, Jack."

A pit formed in her stomach reading that he'd been activated. She knew it would amount to nothing; he wasn't about to be sent to combat with the history he had in his files. But it still made her uneasy. And the fact that he'd decided to finally attend the Company reunions gave her mixed feelings. On the one hand, she'd been hoping he would go eventually to reconnect with his units. On the other, she'd always intended to go with him to pick up the pieces if something set him off.

"If you stare at the paper long enough it might just combust," BJ said.

She glanced up. BJ stood in his lab coat again, stethoscope around his neck and clipboard in hand. Then she looked at her watch. It had been half an hour already. How long had she spent in thought at the desk?

"I'm pretty powerful BJ, but not that powerful," she replied. Nellie flashed him a small smile. "Enjoy the rest of your shift."

"Enjoy isn't the word I would use," he muttered.

With a small laugh, she took off her lab coat and doctor paraphernalia. Her stomach ached for food. Even if food wasn't what she'd call the slop in the mess tent, she had run out of excuses to allow herself to use alcohol as a substitute for actual food. By the time she reached the Mess tent, though, most of the food had been eaten and all she ended up with was mashed potatoes and a crunchy piece of bread.

Nellie reread the three letters from Jack over lunch. It offered some distraction, between his funny stories about Cindy and her Maltese to the woman who'd run into him at the park with her German Shepherd dog, to his decision to attend the Dog Company reunion that month, and Easy later on. With the distraction, she managed to down her whole tray of food. She counted that as a victory even if it hadn't been much to begin with.

The afternoon passed with its usual monotony. A nap midday, time outside in a lawn chair reading after that, a walk around the full camp as the sun inched towards the horizon, everything as boring as usual. When dinner came and went without Nellie seeing BJ, she wondered if he'd gotten stuck in Post-Op.

Nellie walked straight into him when the door to Klinger's office swung open as she reached it. After a brief apology, she looked past him into the office and saw Klinger getting on the phone. "What's up?"

"Our loyal bloodhound is trying to track down a harmonica for the kid," he explained. "Now, if you'll excuse me, Charles was an hour late. I've got a date with my bunk."

She laughed and let him pass. As she stepped into the clerical office, Klinger nodded to her and continued his bargaining over the phone. She lingered there for a moment. Then she made her way to Post-Op. Charles stood glaring at a clipboard, shoulders shrugged and face drawn. She didn't want to poke the bear, so she just said hello, did a quick check of her patients, and then hurried out.

Wandering around the camp at night was never the smartest thing to do, but she was going stir crazy. Nellie knew she'd only been there a couple of months, and that often soldiers had to go much longer between R&R breaks. But if she didn't find some way to break up the monotony besides drinking herself to death, she was going to explode. 

Maybe she needed an instrument. It had been too long since she'd played the guitar, but tracking one down might be a good idea. As she strolled between pools of light from various army lamps, she considered it. After three laps around the compound, a commotion broke her train of thought.

A shout and the sound of someone falling made her stiffen. Nellie raced in the direction of the sound, and paused in shock as she found Charles half upright, clutching his bleeding face and pushed against the doors to Post Op. Kellye helped Charles up, and Hawkeye converged on him at the same time as Nellie.

"What the hell happened," Hawkeye demanded. 

Kellye sighed. "Some visiting Major punched him."

"I often have that same urge but I've never crossed that line myself," Hawkeye tried to joke. He grabbed Charles and helped him back into Post-Op. "Nellie, go get a medkit."

She wasted no time. Pushing past both of them as Charles settled onto an empty cot, she found the various materials they'd need in Pre-Op. By the time she'd brought them back, Kellye had started cleaning the blood off his face.

"Do you want help?" Nellie asked him. 

But Hawkeye just shook his head. "No, I've got it."

With a lingering look at Hawkeye tending to Charles, she just sighed. The way he turned serious the moment casualties were involved, even one like Charles, always impressed her. Even while he cracked jokes at the other surgeon's expense, he never stopped caring for him. 

Nellie groaned internally and left Post Op in a hurry. She needed a goddamn drink. Too much to think about. Even as her own conscience warned her against drinking when she felt like she needed it, Nellie chose to ignore it, and soon found herself working on another bottle of whiskey.

"Attention! Attention! Wounded on the way. Clear the compound, first medical team to the chopper pad. Places everyone!"

She'd only been relaxing for an hour when the alarm went up. Even as she pulled up her boots and raced out the door, the sounds of the war returned. A cacophony of voices sounded around her. Everything was so loud between the shouts, the whir of the chopper blades, and the revving of ambulance engines that she didn't even try to make anyone out. Instead, she grabbed a flashlight from Klinger and ripped open the back of one of the ambulances. 

Nellie dashed up. Her boots slammed into the metal steps and floor. The whole damn thing was full, no vacancies. Not a surprise, but not a pleasant reality. She started on the left. But as soon as she looked at the first patient, she stopped. Blue shoulder patch with red fire up from the bottom, a white wing down the side, and a parachute.

Airborne. These were airborne troops. Her throat clenched as she thought about Jack. But as one of the nurses pushed past her, she forced the memories down and turned the flashlight from the shoulder patch to the wrap around the man's stomach. She had work to do.