Acknowledging that the sitcom, MASH, was well written and researched, is it possible the nursing staff had no rank? Toward the end of the “Cease-Fire” episode, Col. Blake gives a farewell speech that begins addressing the officers, the NCOs, nurses, and guest wounded, etc…
Is this to say the nurses (other than perhaps the Head Nurse) had no rank and/or were neither Officers nor NCOs? What were they considered?
Margaret Houlihan was a major, and at least one of her staff was a lieutenant, so they did seem to have military ranks.
Prior to 1943, WAAC and WAC ranks were equivalents, as they were auxiliary troops. In September 1943, they became regular Army personnel with the same rank structure as the men. Wiki, of course.
Note that while officer ranks for licensed professionals in the US military today are technically full and substantive officer ranks, they in fact exist in a slightly special social sphere, being commissioned in a separate manner than most combat-oriented officers. It is almost unheard of for such an officer to run around giving orders to privates or be granted command of a base or ship. In other words, the rank is very much a “professional courtesy” thing.
There is even a program to grant commissions to veterinarians, which could certainly be helpful if we ever go back to mounted cavalry charges. If not, there are still plenty of guard dogs to be taken care of.
FWIW, in reference to the program MAS*H, there is a backstory where MAJ Houlihan is said to have earned her rank, having joined the Army before she became a nurse, worked her way up through the ranks, then doing her nursing training under the auspices of the military, much in the same way the COL Potter became a doctor after previously being an enlisted man in the cavalry in WWI. That’s why MAJ H. is entrusted with being the head nurse, and gives orders to the enlisted men on the base in a way that the other nurses do not.
PS: The K-9 corps is huge. There are guard dogs, military police dogs, dogs with the bomb squads, and search and rescue dogs, just to name a few. Veterinarians are vital to the military.
Not really. Officers in the U.S. military are more-or-less split between line officers and restricted/special/staff officers. This only affects which billets and positions they fill, not their rank or authority. A doctor who is a (non-Navy) captain/O-3 can still give a lawful order to a PFC/E-3 and that PFC would still be required to carry out/follow that order. The special staff officers, such as doctors, nurses, veterinarians, chaplains, and judge advocates still have enlisted personnel who work with and report to them. The entire military rests on the foundation of good order and discipline, which means that having “honorary” officers who have no authority but still have a military mission would not work too well.
Vets actually do quite a lot more. The U.S. Army is the only service of the U.S. military that has dedicated, uniformed veterinarians and they provide both animal health services to the working dogs (guard/MP/bomb disposal) of all of the services as well as provide limited free animal health services to the personal pets of U.S. service members. One of the bigger, less well-known functions of Army veterinarians is to inspect the food supply of food brought in to foreign and deployed posts to ensure that it is safe for troops to eat. Army veterinarians are also on Civil Affairs teams that would go into friendly or enemy territory that has been secured by combat arms forces in a war zone and help assess any animal health needs of the local populace.
The Nurse Corps as a permanent branch in the Army Medical Department was established in 1901.
Don’t forget if the Army is also trying to Win Hearts And Minds ™ of the local populace, it might be useful to have someone who can treat a local’s water buffalo.
Registered Nurses enter the armed forces as 0-2 (1st LT or LtJg). Doctors and Lawyers enter the armed forces as 0-3 (Captain/ Lt).
This seems to be pretty Navy-specific. The Army does not use the terms or categories LDO/UDO you mention.
robert_columbia is talking about taking actual commands of ships or units. Even your cite agrees with him. LDOs will not take command of ships.
A military doctor’s orders are limited to things necessary in the scope of his specific job. A military doctor can order a PFC to clean a bed pan, for instance, but could never order a PFC to take out a machine gun bunker! If an Army Division jumps into combat with parachutes, and they’re all scattered across the countryside, they end up congregating into LGOPS (Little Groups of Paratroopers) as they make their way to the assembly area. A misdrop could put them miles and miles away from where they’re supposed to be. The leader of the LGOP would never be a military doctor, nurse, chaplain, Jag lawyer or any similar officer. While not officially “honorary” as robert_columbia describes it, it’s still a pretty good explanation. A lowly CPL would be in charge of a small group consisting of all privates, and a Doctor captain.
Similarly, if placed in a POW camp together, everyone is supposed to follow the orders of the highest ranking service member, unless it’s one of these special officers whose rank doesn’t count.
I’m an O-3, 27A (Judge Advocate) in the Army, so I’m aware of that, though that was the only easily available cite I could find that explains the distinction, regardless of precise terms each service uses. I have occasionally heard the term “line officers” in the Army, but it’s not that common.
This is getting into somewhat of a thread-jack, but I never said that they would. But special/staff branch officers can and do command units, but they are typically not combat arms units.
Not necessarily true. As I previously stated, a special/staff branch officer would never be in a billet or position to command combat arms units or personnel, their status as officers in a non-combat situation stands. Therefore, if a Major, O-4, nurse walked past a random SPC, E-4, who was horsing around and acting in an otherwise unsafe manner with others, the MAJ could order the SPC to knock it off. Lawful orders are lawful orders, and there is no restriction that the officer giving them, regardless of whether they are a special/staff branch officer or not, has to relate them to that special/staff officer’s own job. But, as with everyone else in the military, the special/staff branch officers have their own lane and tend to stick to it as the situation requires.
That would all depend on what the situation is and what mission is being performed. As I stated above, doctors command medical units, so that doctor captain may very well be in charge of a small group of enlisted if that doctor is a medical unit company commander. If the enlisted service members were combat arms personnel and they were in a combat situation, doctors and chaplains generally do not carry weapons and instead rely on other personnel for protection. Doctors have a unique status under the Geneva Conventions and even if captured, are not considered POWs, but instead protected “retained personnel” that are supposed to be allowed to be released. Doctors who carry weapons and especially ones who involve themselves in combat missions jeopardize their protected status.
There were registered nurses in my basic training unit. They were Spec-4s for training. After basic they would go to leadership school and during leadership school, they would be buck sergeants. If they wanted to be officers, they had to go to OCS, like anyone else. They were allowed to go right after leadership school, but they also had the choice of remaining NCOs. I don’t think RNs have automatically gotten officer rank since the 1970s.
RNs who enter after having all their training do get a nice enlistment bonus, though.
Doctors and lawyers who enter without having done ROTC have to go through basic and OCS. They do get Captains rank as soon as they finish, though, instead of LT rank. Chaplains too. A lot of people looking to fund law or med school join the ROTC. They then owe the military a certain number of years of doctoring or lawyering.
That is not correct. The direct commission program is just that, you get your commission directly. They hand you your rank and send you to a short school to learn which hand to salute. Doctors, lawyers, chaplains don’t have to go through OCS.
There are also other animals, including companion animals owned by families that are treated by the base vet. (I know a vet vet.)
It seems to me that a professional (doctor, nurse, IT specialist, whatever) is going to be in a position to give plenty of orders, just like any other officer. They’re just going to be giving different sorts of orders, to a different set of people. All of those people will work with assistants and other underlings, and will need to be able to tell them what to do for their jobs. When a military doctor tells an orderly “Go get me a long-nosed hemostat and 200 ccs of saline solution”, that’s an order, just as much as a combat officer telling a grunt “charge that hill and establish a defensive position on the top”. And if you’re going to be giving orders in the military, then you need the rank to back that up.
My wife was a USAF JAG in the 1980s. This is pretty much how it went. The slang name was “salute school”. It was essentially a short intro into living within military society and operating the legal bureaucracy of the service.
This is a link to the USAF’s current commissioning program for medical pros of all flavors, lawyers, & chaplains: Officer Training School (OTS) - U.S. Air Force It seems to have become a bit more … military … than it was in the Cold War 1980s.
Yes, and doctors and nurses can also give orders to their patients, and those count as actual orders.
As for ordering troops to charge the the hill, random infantry officers can’t just round up enlisted men and start telling them what to do either. There is a chain of command, and you can’t waltz into the barracks and start barking orders just because you’re an officer. That doesn’t mean that the enlisted guys can ignore the orders, it means that the officer giving orders he shouldn’t give gets in trouble. And in some cases you absolutely can ignore direct orders, the obvious example is that a general can’t order a guard to let him into a restricted area without showing his ID just because he’s a general.
It’s been a while since I watched MASH, but I believe I have seen all the episodes at some point, and I have the impression that most, if not all, the nurses (except Margaret) were lieutenants.
The nurses in MASH certainly wore their lieutenant (and very rarely captain) bars much of the time. However, the nurses in the 4077th tended to be treated sociologically as a separate “special class”, which would not be entirely incompatible with the general military culture circa 1950 might be when it comes to gender matters (the corps was all-female at the time; it was not until 1944 that the nurses’ ranks were made equally substantive rather than “equivalent” and unlike the doctors, nurses were not drafted). So it would sound right especially when being addressed by an old-timer like Potter.
Of course in the show at times the relations between the doctors and the nurses trended to resemble more those between the men’s and women’s dorms at a college in the 70s than they would those of a within-few-hours’-drive-of-the-frontline military unit in the 50s. But then again the 70s/early 80s was the context in which it was being written.
I heard that when the Selective Service / Draft was in effect that the only women who could be drafted were Doctors and Nurses.
Ladies and Gentlemen, regarding medical officers commanding combat troops allow me to present MG Leonard G. Wood M.D., Medal of Honor Winner (in part for commanding a unit that had lost its officers), and Chief of Staff of the Army. You should read his bio in Wikipedia. He was quite a guy.
I used to love betting Army guys that there had been a non-combat arms General who served as CoS of the Army. Easy winnings. There’s even a base named after him.
And yes nurses are officers. I had a friend who retired as a nurse Colonel.