Henry: All I know is what they taught me at command school. There are certain rules about a war, and rule number one is that young men die. And rule number two is that doctors can’t change rule number one.
Stop giving him crap. The instructors in command school never taught Henry his wife’s name! 
And remember when Henry was in L-U-V? Obviously he wasn’t wrapped tightly enough, if you get what I mean. 
OK OK, important question here: Frank Burns – does he or does he not eat worms?
You tell 'em, Ferret Face! 
I was trying to point out (poorly) why Farr had acting credits on the same year he was in the military. He was drafted after his career started.
Interesting. I read about one American* in the RAF, who had joined up pre-Pearl Harbor and served in Bomber Command, flying Lancasters, IIRC. When the war ended he returned home and found a draft notice awaiting him. They were extremely unsympathetic to his pleas. So before they could induct him he went and joined up the USAF. Ended up flying B-29 in Korea and B-52 early on in Vietnam.
*From memory, he was the born the son of British immigrants, his father had been at the Somme in fact.
Continuing my theory that the 4077th was a dumping ground for people with memory issues …
There are cases worse than not remembering your family history. Some people couldn’t remember their own name!
E.g., there was Sidney Freedman aka Milton Freedman, Col. Potter aka Gen. Steele, and many of the nurses and other background characters.
Never mind the real winner here of Col. Flagg aka … too many to mention.
The mental dissonance also extended to the Koreans: KPA, ROK and general civilians who kept popping up in different personas and even on different sides.
Maybe it was gas fumes. Ask Abed.
Total fanwank: He was drafted or enlisted at 18 in 1944, so in 1940 he was 14?
Both “Der Fuehrer’s Face” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” are from 1943.
Well, he’d be 17, right? Still a “kid”?
That’d make him 19 or so in 1945, and just 5-7 years to finish college, medical school, complete a surgical residency…
Was his original nickname “Doogie” ?
Trying to construct a workable timeline for MASH* is a fool’s errand, as many people have figured out. Apart from the various anachronisms, and the “year-long” episode mentioned by Skywatcher (which took place in the 9th season, but began at the end of 1950–suggesting that the first 8 seasons had all taken place within about 6 months), they often seemed to forget that they were making a period piece.
This is evident in some of the very '70s hairstyles that show up in later episodes, but also in lines of dialogue that treat the World War II era as something from an earlier generation, even though for the characters it would have ended only five years before. Thus we have references to Hawkeye listening to World War II songs “as a kid,” or Trapper seeing Ted Williams at Fenway Park during his internship.
To return to the OP’s actual question, I think that the mention of Frank’s family coming to American in 1927 is similar. The joke is that Frank has the fierce patriotism of someone whose ancestors were fighting alongside General Washington at Valley Forge–when in reality his family were quite recent immigrants. I doubt that the writers gave it any more thought than that, and I really doubt they expected anyone to start doing the math to work out whether Frank had been born yet when the immigration happened. They just forgot how "recent’ 1927 would have been for the characters, since for the writers it surely felt like quite a while ago.
Again, interesting. I know about the draft, but I was wondering if maybe the military gave him leave to appear in the movie (his part in it is very small). It would have been good publicity, especially if he was in Special Services, as were many other Hollywood actors (e.g., Leonard Nimoy).
Bill Mauldin of Stars and Stripes and Up Front fame wrote a book called In Korea, in which Willie or Joe (I don’t remember which) serves as a civilian war correspondent, telling about his experiences there in letters to his old buddy back in the States. It mirrored Bill’s own experiences during the Korean War.
I read the book when I was in junior high, and highly recommend it.
I agree with all this (and you see it all the time - in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” people who were supposedly born in 1981 talk about 1980s culture as if it were theirs (Buffy and Cordelia bond over the cool James Spader is, and Xander quotes Michael Jackson songs from “Thriller”)).
Ooooh, I don’t know about alla that.
I’d say it is more than believable.
It’s the truth.
You think the culture of rape and sexual harassment is non-existent in the US Military across all branches? Gee. Really? :dubious:
Yes. Imagine dropping a shower wall therefore exposing an unclothed female member of the U.S. military today.
It’s not perjury if it’s not material to the case.
Not sure if this is a whoosh, or a comment on Frank’s likely ignorance of American history, but there was no fighting at Valley Forge. It was a winter encampment.
More like a quick typing of the first Revolutionary War name that occurred to me. Substitute “Trenton” or “Yorktown” if you’d like.
Take it from me: Fighting the cold is fighting.
MASH exists in three incarnations, novel, movie, and TV series. (Yes, there were multiple novels after the first. They’re not relevant to anyone except the heirs to Hornberger’s estate.) The novel was very much set in the Korean War, by and about someone who was there, as a slice-of-life piece. The film was a Korean War film for a Vietnam War audience with an anti-war message. The TV series was primarily a sit-com, by and for people who largely expected sit-coms to be fairly escapist, and was groundbreaking to the extent it injected some notes of drama and pathos and shut off the laugh track when they were visually showing the gore. (… I’m not bashing the TV series. I love it and have for years. One of the writers, Ken Levine, has a wonderful blog and is very generous with stories from the old days and takes on modern TV culture and is now even doing a podcast on top of that. But compared to what a modern show could do, MASH* is fluff.)
My point is, only two of those pieces of media could even have a consistent timeline, given the constraints each of them operated under, and it’s possible none of them could be absolutely 100% accurate in their history, given the fallibility of human memory. The TV series did a fairly good job keeping its own story straight, given the usual lack of internal consistency of sit-coms of that era.
And now it seems so old-fashioned and of its era. It’s interesting how little ground the groundbreaking works of the past managed to break.
And speak of the devil, from today’s post on Ken’s blog:
It’s his Friday Questions post, where he collects questions over the week and answers a selection on Friday. Questioner in bold.
And yet in the same time, I think All in the Family did far more groundbreaking. MASH broke ground, All in the Family changed TV for the better by a much larger extent. I mean Mary Tyler Moore show broke ground but is completely tame by today’s standards. SOAP broke ground but no more than MASH really. Then there was All in the Family. I wish the show’s humor held up more because it was probably the greatest sitcom in TV history, but I would rather watch the Dick Van Dyke Show or Barney Miller then All in the Family.
There’s an episode on now that’s taking place as the Chinese cross the border. That happened in October 1950. But the cast for this episode includes Col Potter and BJ. So that implies all the episodes with Col Blake and Trapper John took place before then; in what would have been the first four months of the war.