Not sure how much it has changed since Korea, but now doctors in the Army have a rank that relates to their experience and training. If a doctor has a civilian practice for 15 years and decides to join the military, he will start at a rank equal to a doctor who has spent 15 years on active duty. I’ve encounter full colonels with less than a year in the military. Obvously that takes a strange set of circumstances and is not common.
The last MASH unit in the Army was the 212th in Germany and they deactivated/covererted to a CSH a few years ago. I was on the staff of their next higher organization in the late 90s and they were commanded by a lieutenant colonel.
I remember the episode when Hawkeye found out that Colonel Potter was coming to the 4077. “He must be senile. Why else would they dump him in a MAS*H?”
Brit Army but was shown an American Army training film when on a combat medics course(I wasn’t a medic but we were multi trained)called Medecine in Vietnam,it was a hell of a lot more gory then the fluffy MASH programmes.
The two things that still stick in my mind were a Black bloke who had been hit by napalm and you would have sworn he was caucasian because with the upper skin layers burnt off he was exactly the same as us whiteys(How do you like them onions BNP?) and another shot of a pair of tweezers removing a round from something jelly like and sucky,which as the camera pulled away you could see that it was a spent in someones eyeball.
They showed it just before lunch which was unusually for an Aldershot course steak,I think as a joke to put people off eating,it worked for many as it was an all arms course but not for me because I cadged their steaks off of them as they didn’t seem to be very hungry.
I thought the T.V series was simplistic tripe,never saw the movie.
My National Guard duty unit was a MAS*H. This was between 1987 and 1993. Our company commander was a Captain and the Hospital Commander was a Lt. Colonel. The XO was a Major. We didn’t have a full bird, even when activated and sent to Iraq for Desert Storm.
The book and movie can be summed up in a couple quotes:
Hot Lips: [About Hawkeye] I wonder how such a degenerated person ever reached a position of authority in the Army Medical Corps.
Father Mulcahy: He was drafted.
and
The Sgt driving Hawkeye and Trapper around town: God damn Army. (Repeat as needed)
Oh, and something about booze.
These, I suspect, reflected some of the experiences of many stationed in Korea.
In the movie, said by Bobby Troup,who wrote the song, “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66.” For which he probably ALSO made more money than Altman did for MASH.*
I’m catching the first year of MAS*H on ION-TV, and it is much grittier and dark than I remember. It was only when Alan Alda took over that it got to be so sacchrine and trite.
Before playing Potter, Harry Morgan had a guest spot as a senile visiting general who moved the MASH across the road, just to show that it was in fact a mobile unit.
Actually, Harry Morgan as General Steele (‘three e’s, not in a row’) wanted to move the hospital closer to the front. Moving the hospital across the road (and then back the next day) was done by Frank Burns during a temporary commanding stint while Potter was at a medical conference in Tokyo.
Yeah, I’m not getting the “saccharine” and “trite” comments. Even after the much-maligned (unfairly, imo) Alda played more of a role in the production. In its mid-to-later years, MAS*H showed a corpsman having a nervous breakdown because he found his little brother’s dead body; a North Korean spy preferring to go to her almost certain death by torture rather than accept the doctors’ misguided help; Hawkeye yelling at a woman to shut her baby up ending with the kid getting smothered; and, famously, Fr. Mulcahy remembering what it’s like to see doctors warming their hands over a patient’s steaming open wounds. One of my favorite silly but darker gags involved Hawk/BJ putting a toe-tag on a drunk Frank calling him “emotionally exhausted and morally bankrupt,” which led Frank to getting taken away to the front as a corpse. And then there’s one of my favorite exchanges between Winchester and Col. Flagg, the psycho ‘intelligence’ officer:
Sure, the later seasons added some punniness and could sometimes err on the side of mawkishness, but there was a lot more of the incisive, witty stuff that included enough of the gruesome reality of war to make the show a brilliant com/drama much deeper than those earliest seasons. IMO, of course.
