Doc filstrup had recruited a dozen off-duty paramedics from neighboring burrville to dress up like stretcher bearers and soon a constant line of stretchers was making its way from the melee to a makeshift field hospital, where nurs es dressed in florence nightingale-style period dress applied bandages and decided which haigs and hockmeyers should be declared "dead" and retired from the fight.
The hospital was soon overrun and bodies began to be laid out on the grass. Finally, one of the nurses interrupted Doc Filstrup up in the bleachers. "Doc, it's time for you to get busy. We've patched all the superficial wounds we can, but Toby Hockmeyer has a compound fracture, Peewee Haig may lose an eye and I think Curley has a broken jaw. We need your help, now!"
Two days later, General Troop was at the Pentagon arguing his case. "General O'Rourke, we need to utilize this event to train our Special Forces people in hand-to-hand combat. If they can survive what I saw in Varmint County this week, they'll be invincible.
"The two clans usually issue an invitation to the young men of the county to join the melee as `honorary Haigs or Hockmeyers for a day' but not many accept the offer. We can take a company of our best men down there and get them bloodied and combat-ready in a few short hours. It would be the ultimate Ranger School graduation exam, whether they could survive without major injuries."
"I can see just one problem with that sugges tion," General O'Rourke noted. "We have service regulations against drinking on duty, but all the Haigs and Hockmeyers are fortified with the Haig's "spring run" distilled spirits. It's why they don't feel any pain. In fact, our Air Force buys the excess from the Haig clan for jet fuel additive.
"Besides, we already invest a lot of money in training our soldiers. We just can't afford the battlefield losses we would suffer from participating in Varmint County's 4th of July."
"This is the high point of our 4th of July cele bration," Doc told the visiting generals. "The Haigs and Hockmeyers will now re-enact the Battle of McCracken's Nose. They were on opposite sides during the Civil War and have been feuding for the past 150 years. They used to shoot at each other with some regularity, then agreed that it was time to end the feuding, but they needed some way for their young men to blow off steam and keep the feuding tradition alive, without all the actual bloodshed."
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