Thanks, that worked, and it's so simple! Weird that the tome doesn't make it clear. They should change this:
To force DATE fields to convert to their results (ie so that they become static dates), reflecting the date on which the merge was performed, simply embed them in a QUOTE field coded along the lines of:
{QUOTE{DATE}}
To this:
To force DATE fields to convert to their results (ie so that they become static dates), reflecting the date on which the merge was performed, simply embed them in a QUOTE field by pressing Ctrl+F9 twice to get two nested pairs of field braces, and type QUOTE after the first brace and DATE after the 2nd brace, like this:
{QUOTE{DATE}}