Sometimes You Hear the Bullet

Starsky watches M*A*S*H.

Written for the LJ me_and_thee_100 challenge 66: bullet.

Ever since M*A*S*H started airing several months ago, Starsky looked forward to Sunday nights. He’d seen the movie a few years earlier, and got a kick out of the way both the film and the series poked fun at the absurdities of army life and the ironies of war. A light-hearted comedy about a surgical hospital in the middle of a war zone? You had to admire the chutzpah that could make the concept work, not to mention sell it to the network.

Tonight, though, things got heavy. Real heavy.

“Sometimes you hear the bullet,” Hawkeye said to his wounded friend.

Tommy was gonna die, Starsky knew it, so he turned off the TV before he had to watch it happen.

But he couldn’t turn off the memories.

He’d heard a lot of bullets during his tour of duty in ‘Nam. Fired around him, fired at him, even fired by him. He’d seen men fall, brought down by the small, deadly missiles of destruction. A part of him mourned the waste, the loss. Yet here he was: still a soldier, in another kind of war.

He wondered if those who fell heard their bullets.

He wondered if he’d hear his.