It doesn’t really make sense that Henry isn’t regular army. He’s not there to be a surgeon he’s the commanding officer. He’s not going to get drafted, be made a LTC and put in charge. The job requires more than operating room skills. It might make sense for him to be a WW2 surgeon who stayed in the reserves in between the wars and then got called up. Its not so bad that it’s impossible to suspend disbelief.
As for the hair and discipline, in real life right now in the regular Army it’s much more lax in medical units than other army units. Many of the officers are direct commissions which means their only formal military training is a short course which barely teaches them to salute and put their uniform on right. Grooming standards aren’t ignored like in MASH but they are often bent to the breaking point.
He’s there because he mouthed off to a brigadier general regarding the general’s prescription of a coffee enema. He was on a plane to Korea within 12 hours of asking said general, “With cream and sugar?”
According to the MASH Wiki, the film version of Blake was a career Army surgeon. The TV version was a reservist, who was called up to active duty; I don’t think that he had served active duty previously (or, if he had, I don’t remember it ever being mentioned). I remember an episode in which Henry talked about the very limited training that he got regarding being a CO before being assigned to the 4077th.
Whether that makes sense or not, from a real-world POV, is another question entirely.
Aside from the hair, the film had what I thought was another glaring anachronism - a black neurosurgeon, Dr. Oliver Wendell Jones. The military had only just been integrated four years earlier - black cooks and latrine-diggers, sure, but no way they’d commission an African-American doctor, right?
Wrong. Dr. Alvin Vincent Blount, Jr. was not only the first African-American surgeon to serve in a MASH, he was the first to serve as Chief of Surgery. He later became the first black doctor to operate at the until-then all-white Moses Cone Hospital in his hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, after he was one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit that forced the hospital to integrate.
Look, all I know is what they taught me at command school. There are certain rules about a war. And rule number one is young men die. And rule number two is, doctors can’t change rule number one.
I realize you fought your own ignorance on that, but there a couple of other problems with your supposition.
Most of the doctors on the show were draftees. A local draft board might collude to exclude a Black doctor because they didn’t want him operating on White boys, but if an M.D. were drafted, he’d get a direct commission in the Medical Corps, regardless of race.
That would have been true before integration. A lot of people get confused about this. Even before Truman desegregated the armed forces, there were Black officers, and Black Army doctors (and Black combat infantry, another one a lot of people seem to get confused about). There were Black Soldiers in most of the specialties - it’s just that they had to serve in segregated Black units, and there was a glass ceiling on their promotions. The first Black medical officer in the U.S. Army, by the way, was Alexander Thomas Augusta, who received his commission in 1863.
That was my big beef with the show. Blake and Potter doing surgery. They were the COs. There are 200 people in the camp. They had plenty to do in the CO job. The actual COs of these camps were not practicing surgeons. Blake and Potter should not have been in the OR. It was ridiculous.
I don’t disagree, but the point I was making was not that the military allowed loose grooming standards, but that nobody in the 1950s sported 1970s hair, especially in the army.
The long hair drove me crazy back in the day. My dad was in WWII and in Korea. He and none of his contemporaries ever had such long hair/beards. It was just stupid 70’s bs.
Sitcoms back then were just vehicles for jokes. They weren’t really that invested in historical accuracy or avoiding anachronisms. They were happy if they got another season at all.
Well, I don’t think the producers were getting kickbacks from Big Tobacco. And now, we see smokers as bad guys, so seeing Hawkeye light up, would be devastating.
Mostly in older films and TV shows, they did not show that much smoking. Look at The Longest day.
Recently, however, Big Tobacco, barred from ads in many forms of media and barred from promoting their particular brand in films- pays producers a lot just to show smoking as cool. There is more smoking now in film, there there was during the heyday of smoking or in years past:
