#(i found this in my drafts and ihni why i didn't post it? i can guess it's bc i saw a post about hawkeye believing he'll never leave and

[marley-manson]

I don’t think Hawkeye got more pessimistic or cynical wrt the war ending as the show/war went on.

Hawkeye says he’d make the same bet that the war was over in Ceasefire every time, and I think that holds true.

He tries to stop the war again in Peace on Us, he still goes on idealistic campaigns in the late seasons in episodes like Back Pay and Guerilla My Dreams and Blood and Guts etc, he tells his dad he’ll see him as soon as he can and he reassures BJ that they’ll all go home eventually in Period of Adjustmnt. And in GFA Hawkeye was eager for the war to end, not disbelieving. He leapt up upon hearing the announcement that both sides were preparing to sign an armistice agreement and demanded to go home since the war was virtually over. He also expected Sidney to send him home directly from the hospital and was surprised and betrayed when he didn’t.

I never get the sense that Hawkeye believes on any level including metaphorical that the war will never end or that he’ll be stuck there forever. He occasionally makes joking references to it lasting forever because the show pokes fun at itself for lasting longer than the Korean war, plus time flies when you’re having fun and when you’re stuck in a war zone time crawls so it’s an exaggeration of that, but he never loses that idealism, that knowledge that eventually this war will end and he’ll go home.

That said, I do think he got more cynical wrt losing his belief that he can do any good while he’s there. Like, that’s his thin ray of hope as depicted in Letters, and that’s what’s finally completely lost in GFA, imo. And alongside that I think you can see hints of it in the way his campaigns get less focused on achieving something after being burned so many times and more focused on just stating his mind, and even that falls by the wayside by the point of Say No More where it finally seems truly futile and he just silently walks away from the evil general du jour.

He never believes that he’s stuck in the war, and I don’t think that’s a relevant element to his story at all, but he stops believing there’s any silver lining to his time there.