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If Hawkeye thought about it, there was one definitely moment of truth in the entire damn war. And it was on the back of that smelly yellow motorcycle.
He had never felt so surreal and yet so simultaneously grounded in his entire life. Part of him was flying, nowhere near his body, nowhere near Korea, nowhere he could even pin down. But part of him was solidly there, on that bike, feeling the warmth of B.J.’s back pressed against him, the feel of B.J.’s jacket balled up in his hands around his torso, every single bump they hit on their way to the chopper. And it was that part of him that tuned in enough to hear B.J. say, ‘That was some goodbye you gave Houlihan back there.’
‘I’d have liked to do the same to you, you know.’
There it was. It was out of his mouth before he knew what was happening. And all the drunken late night moments, all the tension, all the sleeping in each other beds after Charles was resolutely passed out on the other side of the tent, everything that had been ignored and denied in the daylight was right there, hanging next to them as they rushed up the hill.
And in the pregnant ten second space that followed, he panicked. Against all logic and reason and gut instinct, he panicked. He almost let go of B.J.’s jacket and fell off the bike. But he stayed pressed against him, head close enough to B.J.’s just long enough to hear his response.
‘Yeah. I know. Me too, Hawk.’
And there it was. That was it. The rawest, most terrifying, most true moment of the entire hellish ordeal that had been his life in Korea.
‘Me too, Hawk.’
And then before he knew it, he was off the bike, and it was back to the way it had always been between them. Even their goodbye embrace wasn’t half as much as they wanted it to be. But they’d both said it now, and that was something.
Hawkeye was glad the chopper pilot wasn’t the chatty type. It made it easy for him to turn his face away, and blink the tears out of his eyes so he could read B.J.’s last message to him as it shrunk away into the fading countryside.