Yes, they were churning out scripts fast, and for a long time. They just didn’t bother with that kind of consistency. Some writer had a story idea based on the characters as defined by the actors at that time, they wrote that story. If Potter is a by-the-books military man, it’s fun to make him a vet of 3 wars. They fudge the ages to get it to fit. Later, when Henry Morgan is excessively old to be in service, they write a script about how Potter is old and fearing his age. They wrote the scripts to fit what they wanted, not some planned out database to keep everything straight.
Um, it’s Hawkeye’s second war, Borelli wishes him luck on his third war. Kinda a moment of “damn, there’s gonna be another one? This one ain’t over yet.”
Frankly, there are any number of responses available whether it is Hawkeye’s first or second war. Not conclusive.
Just to inject a little reality and personal experience into this, my father and most of his colleagues were medical corps for the Second World War. One of them ran an evacuation hospital on Omaha Beach. Another ran a surgery on Guadalcanal that was close enough to the front that small arms fire came in to the working tents. Dad was not recalled for Korea and I don’t recall that any of the other doctors were either.
When I was on active duty in the late 60s and early 70s many of my senior officers were WWII veterans. My first boss jumped in Operation Market Garden and my last boss took a 105 mm battery into Normandy. One of my judges had humped a BAR across Europe and another one had been in on the Philippians invasion. They had all gotten their professional education on the GI Bill after the war, had been recalled for Korea and stayed on. That means most of them had something like 20 years service under their belts, maybe a bit more, when I knew them.
Hawkeye wants nothing to do with his sidearm and goes so far as to say “I hate guns!” You can tell Potter is ready to kick his ass (or worse) for refusing to defend himself while the two men are under fire.
The only way I can picture Pierce in WWII is as a very young CO assigned to a medical unit.
What would the status of a CO with an undergraduate degree be? Officer material? What about after the war? Medical school on the GI Bill, and subject to the draft again in a national emergency?
I don’t think Klinger was ever portrayed as a Muslim. Once they got over his cross dressing, they did explore his background, but he was never seen as a Muslim.
I remember a making-of special, late in the TV series’s run or maybe even at the very end of it, which mentioned that they had interviewed virtually every former MAS*H doctor they could find in order to get more story ideas. By the end of the series they were so desperate for ideas that they kept a board on the wall in the writers’ conference room; even the most insignificant, banal story fragments were written on 3x5 cards and stuck up there. One of them, I remember, was Alan Alda’s observation that he could fake-sneeze pretty well. They then used that in one episode where he had a cold and was sneezing a lot.
Are you possibly remembering the episode where Hawkeye gets a whiff of a wounded soldier’s moldy clothing which then triggers a psychosomatic allergic attack based in long-repressed childhood memories of an idolized older cousin abusing him?
That just shows that his mother tongue is Arabic not that he is Muslim. Arab Christians and Jews use “Allah” as well. Both the character and the actor are Arab.
There were some pretty strange scripts even in the beginning. Somebody stumbled onto a random factoid about Korea’s gold production and it got worked into the show. I think Larry Gelbart is the one who said it’s the worst episode they ever did.
The quote I’m thinking of is from AfterMash when Father Mulcahy was afraid of having lost his hearing, only to have it restored in an operation. Klinger goes crazy happy, rejoicing that he and his wife had both prayed for the Padre: “She prayed to Buddha, I prayed to Allah!”
Then again, AfterMash probably isn’t in continuity
