I always thought the most unbelievable thing was how drunk they’d get, knowing that large numbers of casualties could show up at any time - they always seemed surprised when the choppers arrived. It’s not like they had enough surgeons that they could count on being off duty regardless of the circumstances. And the episode where Alan Alda’s dad was a guest star showed that Hawkeye at least wouldn’t operate when drunk.
True. A friend of mine served in a medical facility in the Gulf. The C.O. was a captain, and one of the doctors was a Lt. Colonel. They got along just fine, with the higher ranking man giving all due deference.
I have a somewhat related question.
I always got the impression that Henry Blake didn’t want to be there any more than Haykeye and Trapper did. He was a generally ineffectual leader, didn’t appear to have a military background, and was elated when he got his discharge.
So why was he a Colonel in charge of an Army unit? Maybe the book explains this better?
Can’t provide a cite, but I believe I remember Frank or Margaret sneering about Blake having a reserve commission.
They were all draftees, but at different points in the series, both Blake and Burns mentioned they’d been to “command school,” while apparently Hawkeye, Trapper and BJ hadn’t.
Frank was in the book, although he was a captain, and not a major, so Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper’s treatment of him wasn’t insubordination. He and Hot Lips did share a dislike of the Swampmen. Hawkeye eventually provoked Frank into a fight and Henry got him reassigned stateside. Duke commented, “Henry, if I get into Hot Lips and jump Hawkeye Pierce, can I go home too?”
The other character, similar to Frank, was Maj. Jonathan Hobson, Hobson was a preacher in civilian life, and his constant praying got on everybody’s nerves. Henry also sent him back to the States.
You’re kidding, right?
I’ve worked in a couple of hospitals and you do not want to know what goes on behind the scenes.
The C.E. O. and head psychiatrist of the State Hospital where I worked were both roaring drunk by noon nearly every day.
I can’t imagine in the chaos which was VietNam why things would be any different.
Stress? Dunno. They didn’t look very stressed to me!
I think the idea is that because it’s so hard to become a doctor and the medical profession has its own brand of discipline, other military personnel grant that there was little time for them to become good officers on top of all that.
I imagine there’s something similar but less pronounced with pilots.
Because Blake had been in the Army “since the dark days before Pearl Harbor”, he no doubt found himself with rank and command out of sheer seniority.
New question: Hawkeye and some of the other doctors are said to be draftees. Naturally, it’s unusual for a draftee to be given an officer’s rank. I’d like some more info on that. What other professions were likely to get you drafted and made an officer?
Basically you need a college degree to be an officer. This includes pastors, who usually hold a degree from a seminary.
The book is not the movie is not the t.v. series. All three were distinct images of their respective creations sharing only the general scenario, some characters, and a general theme of irreverence toward authority.
The book and the t.v. series were clearly set in Korea. Altman intended the setting of the movie to be ambiguous but the studio insisted on adding p.a. announcements indicating that it was set in Korea.
A state hospital or even a V.A. hospital would be run with a very different degree of discipline than a Regular Army hospital. However, you also have to bear in mind two things: first, the Army of the Korean era was less professional than the Regular Army of WWII; most servicemen were either involentary draftees or reservists called up for service, and the ranks of suitable men were somewhat diminished by the numbers who had served in WWII. Also, many politically connected or well-off people obtained deferrments, so the Army was a lot less selective about who they would take.
The second is that the MASH units are portrayed as being right out just behind the front, in locations rarely visited by flag officers, and generally an undesirable assignment for anyone with any suction, so there was both low visibility of undisciplined behavior and an unwillingness of commanders to send back even a marginally competent surgeon for anything less than gross insubordination. In the book and movie Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are very careful to not push beyond the limits of what would be egregiously insubordinate, i.e. they backtalk, play pranks, and briefly go AWOL, but they don’t steal or damage Army property, strike another officer, or commit any major crimes. The show was more loose with that convention, and they clearly did a number of things that would be court marshall offenses, but it also went on about four times longer than the actual American involvement in the Korean War, so realism wasn’t its strong point.
Stranger
ROTC was compulsory for many schools (virtually all public land grant universities) and so the vast majority of college educated males already held a reserve commission as part of their completion of the ROTC program. Once selected by the draft, the commission could be activated and transferred to the Regular Army for a standard rotation. Physicians and other professionals (such as lawyers) are almost always accorded a rank of at least captain, commiserate with their duties which may include supervising nurses and technicians who may hold junior officer or warrant officer ranks.
One nitpick about the show is that Alan Alda was clearly too old to be a junior draftee even at the beginning of the series, and by the end (eleven years of real time later) should have been a senior officer or rotated home having completed the requisite duration of service. Instead, he appears to be in the war for the entire duration, which is excessive even under wartime duress to extend rotation cycles.
Stranger
People keep mentioning this as if it meant something. The show was produced for 11 seasons. In no way does that it imply that the Korean War went on for 11 years. A television season in a fictional show is not automatically equivalent to a year in real time.
Except that it dragged out the series far longer than the premise could credibly sustain. It really would have done better as a limited run series. Instead, it suffered from concept creep; going from a satirical look at life in an army hospital to the Alan Alda Drama Show.
Stranger
This raises an interesting point, I can easily imagine someone like Pierce, in Seoul, being told ‘perhaps you’d like to be reassigned to a MASH unit, they’re much more tolerant of insubordination there.’
That depends on your point of view. The show was more popular at the end of its run than it had been at the beginning.
Yes, it was like two different shows, but both had their own virtues.
Maybe not, but they had nearly 11 Christmas episodes.
Well, Winchester wasn’t actually insubordinate in beating his CO so badly at cards, but that gloating DID earn him his MASH assignment.
With all the inconsistency from season-to-season, it’s best to treat each individual season as existing in a separate reality.
Yep according to some of my college professors of all able-bodied male students had to do 2 years ROTC (veterans and international students were exempt). Female students had PE instead (at the local YWCA, the campus gym was men-only).
Maj. Houlihan also outranked Hawkeye, but naturally was “outranked” by every doctor in medical matters. And she was only really “in command” of the other nurse (answering to the CO).
I saw an interview with Robert Mandan once where he describes talking to actual MASH surgeon for research. He talked about the episode where Hawkeye and B.J. dose a colonel with something that mimics appendicitis symptoms, and then Hawkeye proceeds to remove the man’s perfectly healthy appendix. The guy was too gung-ho, and was getting a lot of soldiers hurt and killed for no good reason. Getting laid up would lose him his frontline command.
Mandan said one of the docs he spoke to gave him the idea for the episode because they’d done that exact thing once. The only difference is that in the show, B.J. had some moral qualms about the thing. The real-life doctors did it without a second thought.