(Seated on lawn chairs, we proceed outdoors, on the grounds of an army field hospital.)
Myself: Good day, fellow freedom fighters. We've been forced to take up residence here at the 4078 Medically Assisted Recovery Unit, or MAR unit, after the untimely destruction of my studio in my last broadcast. It's a little rugged, but nothing we haven't faced before, eh, lieutenant?
Smuthers: Yes, sir, captain, and it sure let's us know how far we've come.
Myself: Be thankful you have a tent. There's a war on, you know. People are sleeping in haystacks, getting stabbed by pitchforks.
Smuthers: Where? Who?
Myself: Out in the country, political fugitives and stranded pilots, relentlessly hunted down by sadistic mercenaries.
Smuthers: Show me.
Myself: I can't, I'd give them away.
Smuthers: How do you know about them?
Myself: Classified. Sorry. And now that that's settled, let me introduce my first guest. She's a nurse who works right here at the 4078th, Lieutenant Constance Martindale, RN! (Enthusiastic cheers. Enter Martindale, uniformed and fit. She stops to salute, which I immediately return, on my way to ushering her to her seat.) Listen to that crowd! They love you.
Martindale: Aw, they're just trying to embarrass me.
Myself: I'm sure they're grateful for a good nurse. Tell us about your job here.
Martindale: Well, I work in the outpatient tent, providing extra healing to the special cases.
Myself: Who are the special cases? Burn victims?
Martindale: Anyone who might be taking too long to recover, or with mysterious aches and pains.
Myself: Fakers? Why waste any more time on them?
Martindale: On the contrary, captain, these soldiers are legitimate casualties of war, and it is our obligation to do all we can to get them back on their feet after the sacrifices they've made.
Myself: You're quite right. Forgive my crass question. They say you have a very high rate of success with your patients. What are you giving them that they didn't get from the other doctors and nurses?
Martindale: (After a thought) I suppose you could call it tough love.
Myself: Tough love? Please explain.
Martindale: I take a fly-or-fall approach to healing with my patients. By the time they get to me, they've had enough coddling and they need the firm hand of discipline. If a patient won't get out of his wheelchair, I dump him out. If he won't go to the bathroom unassisted, I let him crawl there, after tying a power cord around his ankle with a microwave attached to make it harder for him.
Myself: What about when he won't eat?
Martindale: That's when I really get tough.
Myself: What do you do? Hit him on the head with his food tray?
Martindale: No, I make him smoke a big fat joint.
Myself: Well, I must say, I like your style. Whip 'em into shape, that's what I always say. But are these simple methods always enough? How do you handle the holdouts?
Martindale: I don't like to use the machine on them if I can avoid it, but it is the most effective way to treat a patient who insists on lagging behind in his healing.
Myself: The machine, eh? So that's what they get. Heh heh. Sounds pretty heavy. What does it do?
Martindale: You're better off not knowing.
Myself: No, I want to know. And I'm sure these people want to know. (I hold my arm out to the audience, which draws Martindale's eye to a corporal near the front.) So?
Martindale: Corporal Prewitt? Is that you? I thought you wanted to sleep!
Prewitt: (Paralyzed by fear) I know that's what I said, lieutenant, and I know I shouldn't be here, but I just thought if I could just come out for a second, it wouldn't make a difference. It's a lovely day.
Martindale: (Smiling warmly) Yes, it is.
Prewitt: (Succumbing to tears and whimpering) Oh God, I couldn't help it! I just changed my mind, is all. Please don't punish me. I'll be good.
Martindale: Why would I do that? (MP's move in on Prewitt.)
Prewitt: (Shakily raising his voice) Sure, that's what you said last time, just before you put me on the machine! NO! DON'T PUT ME ON THE MACHINE! I WON'T LET YOU! (The MP's seize him and start to drag him off.) Let go of me! I'm a patient in this country's armed forces! (Exit Prewitt in custody.)
Martindale: You were saying, before we got sidetracked?
Myself: I don't recall. Probably not important. Let's hear it one more time for Lieutenant Constance Martindale, RN, for showing us that fear is sometimes the best medicine. (Big cheers.)
COMMERCIAL
Myself: Chopper pilot, Captain Fred Fanbelt, risks his neck every day to rescue our wounded from the frontline fighting. Let's give him a hero's welcome. (Solid cheers. Enter Fanbelt.) Captain, I think I speak for us all when I say that I'm glad you could make it here. You're a brave man. (Applause.)
Fanbelt: Thanks, but I seem to be safer than the men on the ground.
Myself: No, you're not! You're a sitting duck up there, especially when you sit still in the sky. They have these new bazooka launched SAM's that could easily home in on you and blast you to pieces.
Smuthers: Dave!
Myself: But they jam a lot, I hear. Sorry. It must be hard on you to descend into that hell every day and look upon so much pain and misery. How do you cope with it?
Fanbelt: Well, you learn to see what you want to see.
Myself: I'm not sure I follow you.
Fanbelt: It's a simple matter of mind over matter. If I don't like what I see, I make it invisible.
Myself: What do you mean? How do you do that?
Fanbelt: I just close my eyes and think hard.
Myself: You mean, for a solution?
Fanbelt: No, for a disappearance. When I open my eyes again, it's gone.
Myself: Well, what are you, a genie or something? You can't just make things vanish.
Fanbelt: Sometimes our brains do things that are over our heads.
Myself: Give me an example.
Fanbelt: Okay, the wounded.
Myself: What about them?
Fanbelt: I don't see them anymore.
Myself: Are you mad? You can't miss them. There's an army hospital right there.
Fanbelt: Where?
Myself: (Pointing) Right there! The tent with the big red cross on a white field!
Fanbelt: Yes?
Myself: Can you see it?
Fanbelt: No.
Smuthers: It does look a little cluttered over there.
Myself: I wouldn't joke about this. Our boys are depending on this man. We can't have a chopper pilot flying around in an unbalanced state. Have you visited the psychiatrist yet, captain?
Fanbelt: I went down to his office.
Myself: And what happened?
Fanbelt: He couldn't see me.
COMMERCIAL: Hate Camp
(Uniformed youth march in step to a menacing drumbeat.) Keep an eye on this bunch: enemy youth. There's nothing cute about these children. Weaned on lies and hate. Trained to win by cheating. Sneaky little fuckers. Sure, they're small, but they fight like hyenas, and are a lot harder to shoot. Look at them. The only thing they've learned from their schoolbooks is how to feed a fire. They've read no free speech. Hell, they're illiterate. All they have are pictures, violent pictures: boots stepping on heads, bullets driving into stomachs, boulders falling on coyotes... What little else they might need to know awaits them at hate camp.
(A boy walks through the woods, carrying a small sack. Disturbing music.) Here's the new recruit, a boy of ten. He came to them for fun and friendship. He wanted to play baseball. They tied him up and blindfolded him and pelted him with uncooked lentils until he realized his error. (He comes to the front gate of a camp, fenced with barbed wire and watchtowers, and is met by a guard.) Now he keeps his mouth shut through a gauntlet of wedgies and finger pokes, all designed to crush his humanity and reduce him to the primitive condition of a senseless, rabid predator. (He holds up his sack to be examined, but the guard is so repulsed by its smell that he flings open the gate and rushes the boy through.) Only after he has brought them a strangled puppy will they give him back his pyjamas and allow him to use a spoon for his oatmeal. The next day, he'll be conscripted into the army and shipped off to the front.
(The front. Patriotic music.) But this hate will ultimately betray him. Out of ammunition and surrounded by flame throwing tanks, he will follow a puppy into the centre of their kill zone, hoping to club the animal with his spent panzerfaust. So he must advance to his doom, he and all boys like him, for only in an eradicating burst of righteous combustion, fuelled by 100 octane American gasoline, can such deeply rooted evil surely be purged. (The boy dies in a roaring inferno. Pan out to a burning torch of liberty. Conclude music on a happy high note.)
Myself: It's long been said that an army marches on its stomach, and no one probably knows it better than Sergeant Morty Stockwell, the camp cook! (Mixed boos and laughs. Enter Stockwell, tough and thickset. He lumbers to his flimsy seat, which struggles to support him.) Sorry about that. I forgot how unpopular army food is. Don't listen to them. I enjoyed the stew very much.
Stockwell: Thanks.
Myself: Where'd you learn to cook?
Stockwell: Prison.
Myself: They teach that in there?
Stockwell: They teach everything.
Myself: Why'd you get into it?
Stockwell: To get my hands on a cleaver. I didn't trust the other inmates.
Myself: Right. Good thinking. And how do you like your job here? Do they send you enough supplies?
Stockwell: They send enough, but the eggs are powdered and you get tired of the menu after a while. That's when I take my gun for a stroll in the bush.
Myself: Is there game out there?
Stockwell: Big game, if you know where to look. I use my heat sensitive visor and stalk them at night.
Myself: Did you spot one yet?
Stockwell: I trapped one. That's what I used for the stew.
Myself: I thought that tasted like real moose. I haven't had that in ages. It must have been hard to haul back here.
Stockwell: Not really. The trap I used made a light job of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment