MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors Read online

  MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

  Richard Hooker

  Before the movie, this is the novel that gave life to Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Hot Lips Houlihan, Frank Burns, Radar O'Reilly, and the rest of the gang that made the 4077th MASH like no other place in Korea or on earth.

  The doctors who worked in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) during the Korean War were well trained but, like most soldiers sent to fight a war, too young for the job. In the words of the author, "a few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety of ways and degrees."

  For fans of the movie and the series alike, here is the original version of that perfectly corrupt football game, those martini-laced mornings and sexual escapades, and that unforgettable foray into assisted if incompleted suicide — all as funny and poignant now as they were before they became a part of America's culture and heart.

  Richard Hooker

  MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

  Forward

  Most of the doctors who worked in Mobile Army Sur­gical Hospitals during the Korean War were very young, perhaps too young, to be doing what they were doing. They performed the definitive surgery on all the major casualties incurred by the 8th Army, the Republic of Korea Army, the Commonwealth Division and other United Nations forces. Helped by blood, antibiotics, helicopters, the tactical peculiar­ities of the Korean War and the youth and accompanying resiliency of their patients, they achieved the best results up to that time in the history of military surgery.

  The surgeons in the MASH hospitals were exposed to ex­tremes of hard work, leisure, tension, boredom, heat, cold, satisfaction and frustration that most of them had never faced before. Their reaction, individually and collectively, was to cope with the situation and get the job done. The various stresses, however, produced behavior in many of them that, superficially at least, seemed inconsistent with their earlier, civilian beha­vior patterns. A few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety of ways and degrees. This is a story of some of the ways and degrees. It’s also a story of some of the work.

  The characters in this book are composites of people I knew, met casually, worked with, or heard about. No one in the book bears more than a coincidental resemblance to an actual person.

  1

  When Radar O’reilly, just out of high school, left Ottumwa, Iowa, and enlisted in the United States Army it was with the express purpose of making a career of the Signal Corps. Radar O’Reilly was only five feet three inches tall, but he had a long, thin neck and large ears that left his head at perfect right angles. Furthermore, under certain atmos­pheric, as well as metabolic, conditions, and by enforcing complete concentration and invoking unique extra-sensory powers, he was able to receive messages and monitor conversations far beyond the usual range of human hearing.

  With this to his advantage it seemed to Radar O’Reilly that he was a natural for the communications branch of the service, and so, following graduation, he turned down various highly attractive business opportunities, some of them legiti­mate, and decided to serve his country. Before his enlistment, in fact, he used to fall asleep at night watching a whole succession of, first, sleeve stripes, and then shoulder insignia, floating by until he would see himself, with four stars on his shoulders, conducting high-level Pentagon briefings, attending White House dinner parties and striding imperiously to ring­side tables in New York night clubs.

  In the middle of November of the year 1951 a.d., Radar O’Reilly, a corporal in the United States Army Medical Corps, was sitting in the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital astride the 35th Parallel in South Korea, ostensibly trying to fill a straight flush. Having received the message that the odds against such a fortuitous occurrence open at 72,192 to 1, what he was actually doing was monitoring a telephone conversa­tion. The conversation was being conducted, over a precarious connection, between Brigadier General Hamilton Hartington Hammond, the Big Medical General forty-five miles to the south in Seoul, and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Braymore Blake, in the office of the commanding officer of the 4077th MASH, just forty-five yards to Radar O’Reilly’s east.

  “Listen,” Radar O’Reilly said, his head turning slowly back and forth in the familiar scanning action.

  “Listen to what?” Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski, the Dental Officer and Painless Pole, asked.

  “Henry,” Radar O’Reilly said, “is trying for two new cutters.”

  “I gotta have two more men,” Colonel Blake was shouting into the phone, and Radar could hear it.

  “What do you think you’re running up there?” General Hammond was shouting back, and Radar could hear that, too. “Walter Reed Hospital?”

  “Now you listen to me …” Colonel Blake was saying.

  “Just take it easy, Henry,” General Hammond was saying.

  “I won’t take it easy,” Colonel Blake shouted. “If I don’t get two …”

  “All right! All right!” General Hammond shouted. “So I’ll send you the two best men I have.”

  “They better be good,” Radar heard Colonel Blake answer, “or I’ll …”

  “I said they’ll be the two best men I’ve got,” Radar heard General Hammond say.

  “Good!” Radar heard Colonel Blake say. “And get ’em here quick.”

  “Henry,” Radar said, his ears aglow now from the activity, “has just got us two new cutters.”

  “Tell ’em not to spend it all before they get here,” Captain Waldowski said. “You want another card?”

  Thus it was that the personnel of the 4077th MASH learned that their number, and perhaps even their efficiency, would shortly be augmented. Thus it was that, on a gray, raw morning ten days later at the 325th Evacuation Hospital in Yong-Dong-Po, across the Han River from Seoul, Captains Augustus Bedford Forrest and Benjamin Franklin Pierce, emerging from opposite ends of the Transient Officers’ Quar­ters, dragged themselves, each hauling a Valpac and trailing a barracks bag, toward a jeep deposited there for their use.

  Captain Pierce was twenty-eight years old, slightly over six feet tall and slightly stoop-shouldered. He wore glasses, and his brown-blond hair needed cutting. Captain Forrest was a year older, slightly under six feet tall, and more solid. He had brush-cut red hair, pale blue eyes and a nose that had not quite been restored to its natural state after contact with something more resistant than itself.

  “You the guy going to the 4077th?” Captain Pierce said to Captain Forrest as they confronted each other at the jeep.

  “I believe so,” Captain Forrest said.

  “Then get in,” Captain Pierce said.

  “Who drives?” Captain Forrest said.

  “Let’s choose,” Captain Pierce said. He opened his barracks bag, felt around in it and extracted a Stan Hack model Louisville Slugger. He handed the bat to Captain Forrest.

  “Toss,” he said.

  Captain Forrest tossed the bat vertically into the air. As it came down Captain Pierce expertly grabbed it at the tape with his left hand. Captain Forrest placed his left hand above Captain Pierce’s. Captain Pierce placed his right hand, and Captain Forrest was left with his right hand waving in the air with nothing to grab.

  “Sorry,” Captain Pierce said. “Always use your own bat.”

  That was all he said. They got into the jeep and for the first five miles they did not speak again, until Captain Forrest broke the silence.

  “What are y’all anyway?” Captain Forrest asked. “A nut?”

  “It’s likely,” Captain Pierce said.

  “My name’s Duke Forrest. Who are y’all?”

  “Hawkeye Pi
erce.”

  “Hawkeye Pierce?” Captain Forrest said. “What the hell kind of a name is that?”

  “The only book my old man ever read was The Last of the Mohicans,” Captain Pierce explained.

  “Oh,” Captain Forrest said, and then: “Where y’all from?”

  “Crabapple Cove.”

  “Where in hell is that?”

  “Maine,” Hawkeye said. “Where you from?” “Forrest City.”

  “Where in hell is that?”

  “Georgia,” Duke said.

  “Jesus,” Hawkeye said. “I need a drink.”

  “I got some,” Duke said.

  “Make it yourself, or is it real?” Hawkeye asked.

  “Where I come from it’s real if you make it yourself,” Duke Forrest said, “but I bought this from the Yankee government.”

  “Then I’ll try it.”

  Captain Pierce pulled to the side of the road and stopped the jeep. Captain Forrest found the pint in his barracks bag and opened it. As they sat there, looking down the road, flanked by the rice paddies skimmed now with November ice, they passed the bottle back and forth and talked.

  Duke Forrest learned that Hawkeye Pierce was married and the father of two young sons, and Captain Pierce found out that Captain Forrest was married and the father of two young girls. They discovered that their training and experi­ence had been remarkably similar and each detected, with much relief, that the other did not think of himself as a Great Surgeon.

  “Hawkeye,” Captain Forrest said after a while. “Do y’all realize that this is amazing?”

  “What’s amazing?”

  “I mean, I come from Forrest City, Georgia, and y’all are a Yankee from that Horseapple …”

  “Crabapple.”

  “… Crabapple Cove in Maine, and we’ve got so much in common.”

  “Duke,” Hawkeye said, holding up the bottle and noting that its contents were more than half depleted, “we haven’t got as much of this in common as we used to.”

  “Then maybe we’d better push on,” the Duke said.

  As they drove north, only the sound of the jeep breaking the silence, a cold rain started to fall, almost obscuring the jagged, nearly bare hills on either side of the valley. They came to Ouijongbu, a squalid shanty town with a muddy main street lined with tourist attractions, the most prominent of which, at the northern outskirts, was The Famous Curb Service Whorehouse.

  The Famous Curb Service Whorehouse, advantageously placed as it was on the only major highway between Seoul and the front lines, had the reputation of being very good because all the truck drivers stopped there. It was unique for its methods of merchan­dising and outstanding for its contribu­tion to the venereal disease problem faced by the U.S. Army Medical Corps. It consisted of a half dozen mud and thatch huts, prefaced by a sign reading: “Last Chance Before Pek­ing” and surmounted by an American flag flying from its central edifice. Its beckoning personnel, clad in the most colorful ensembles available through the Sears Roebuck cata­logue, lined the highway regardless of the weather, and many drivers who made frequent trips to the front and back fastidiously found their fulfillment in the backs of their trucks, rather than expose themselves to the dirty straw and soiled mattresses indoors.

  “You need anything here?” asked Hawkeye, noting the Duke saluting and nodding as the jeep chugged through the waving, cooing colorama.

  “No,” the Duke said. “I shopped in Seoul last night, but something else bothers me now.”

  “You should know better, doctor,” Hawkeye said.

  “No,” Duke said. “I’ve been wondering about this Colonel Blake.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Henry Braymore Blake,” Hawkeye said. “I looked him up. Regular Army type.”

  “You need a drink?” Duke said.

  Out of sight of the sirens now, Hawkeye pulled the jeep to the side of the road once more. By the time they had finished the bottle the cold, slanting rain was mixed with flat wet flakes of snow.

  “Regular Army type,” the Duke kept repeating. “Like Meade and Sherman and Grant.”

  “The way I see it, though, is this,” Hawkeye said, finally. “Most of these Regular Army types are insecure. If they weren’t, they’d take their chances out in the big free world. Their only security is based on the efficiency of their outfits.”

  “Right,” the Duke said.

  “This Blake must have a problem or he wouldn’t be sending for help. Maybe we’re that help.”

  “Right,” the Duke said.

  “So my idea,” Hawkeye said, “is that we work like hell when there’s work and try to outclass the other talent.”

  “Right,” the Duke said.

  “This,” Hawkeye said, “will give us enough leverage to write our own tickets the rest of the way.”

  “Y’all know something, Hawkeye?” the Duke said. “You’re a good man.”

  Just beyond a collection of tents identified as the Canadian Field Dressing Station, they came to a fork in the road. The road to the right led northeast toward the Punchbowl and Heartbreak Ridge; the road to the left took them due north toward Chorwon, Pork Chop Hill, Old Baldy and the 4077th MASH.

  About four miles beyond the fork, a flooded stream had washed out a bridge, and a couple of M.P.’s waved them into a line with a dozen other military vehicles, including two tanks. They waited there for an hour, the line lengthening behind them until the line ahead began to move and Hawkeye guided the jeep down the muddy river bank and across the floorboard-deep stream.

  As a result, darkness was settling on the valley when, opposite a sign that read “THIS IS WHERE IT IS— PARALLEL 38,” another, smaller marker reading “4077th MASH, WHERE I AM, HENRY BLAKE, LT. COL. M.C.” directed them to the left off the main road. Following direc­tions, they were confronted, first, by four helicopters belong­ing to the 5th Air Rescue Squadron and then by several dozen tents of various shapes and sizes, forlornly distributed in the shape of a horseshoe.

  “Well,” Hawkeye said, stopping the jeep, “there it is.”

  “Damn,” Duke said.

  The rain had changed to wet snow by now, and off the muddy road the ground was white. With the motor idling, they could hear the rumble of artillery.

  “Thunder?” Duke said.

  “Man-made,” Hawkeye said. “They welcome all new­comers this way.”

  “What do we do now?” Duke said.

  “Find the mess hall,” Hawkeye said. “It figures to be that thing over there.”

  When they walked into the mess hall there were about a dozen others sitting at one of the long, rectangular tables. They chose an unoccupied table, sat down, and were served by a Korean boy wearing green fatigue pants and an off-white coat.

  As they ate they knew they were being looked over. Finally one of the others got up and approached them. He was about five feet eight, a little overweight, a little red of face and eye, and balding. On the wings of his shirt collar were silver oak leaves, and he looked worried.

  “I’m Colonel Blake,” he said, eyeing them. “You fellows just passing through?”

  “No,” replied Hawkeye. “We’re assigned here.”

  “You sure?” the Colonel asked.

  “Y’all said you all needed two good boys,” Duke said, “and we’re what the Army sent.”

  “Where you guys been all day? I expected you by noon.”

  “We stopped at a gin mill,” the Duke told him.

  “Let me see your orders.”

  They got out their papers and handed them to the Colonel. They watched him while he checked the papers and then while he eyed the two of them again.

  “Well, it figures,” Henry said finally. “You guys look like a pair of weirdos to me, but if you work well I’ll hold still for a lot and if you don’t it’s gonna be your asses.”

  “You see?” Hawkeye said to Duke. “I told you.”

  “You’re a good man,” Duke said.

  “Colonel,” Hawkeye said, “have no fear. The Duke an
d Hawkeye are here.”

  “You’ll know you’re here by morning,” Henry said. “You go to work at nine o’clock tonight, and I just got word that the gooks have bit Kelly Hill.”

  “We’re ready,” Hawkeye said.

  “Right,” Duke said.

  “You’re living with Major Hobson,” Henry said. “O’Reilly?”

  “Sir?” Radar O’Reilly said, already at the Colonel’s side, for he had received the message even before it had been sent.

  “Don’t do that, O’Reilly,” Henry said. “You make me nervous.”

  “Sir?”

  “Take these officers …”

  “To Major Hobson’s tent,” Radar said.

  “Stop that, O’Reilly,” Henry said.

  “Sir?”

  “Oh, get out of here,” Henry said.

  Thus it came about that it was Radar O’Reilly, who had been the first to know they were coming, who led Captains Pierce and Forrest to their new home. At the moment, Major Hobson was out, so Hawkeye and Duke each selected a sack and lay down. They were just dropping off to sleep when the door opened.

  “Welcome, fellows,” a voice boomed, followed by a medi­um-sized major, who entered with a warm smile and offered a firm handshake.

  Major Hobson was thirty-five years old. He had practiced a good deal of general medicine, a little surgery, and every Sunday he had preached in the Church of the Nazarene in a small midwestern town. The fortunes of war had given him a job for which he was unprepared, and associated him with people he could not comprehend.

  “You fellows certainly are welcome,” he intoned. “Would you like to look around the outfit?”

  “No,” said Duke. “We been stoned all day. Guess we’ll get a little sleep.”

  “We’ve gotta fix the President’s hernia at nine o’clock,” Hawkeye said. “We’re Harry’s family surgeons. We’d ask you to assist, but the Secret Service is worried about Chinese agents.”

  “Yankee Chinks from the north,” Duke said. “Y’all under­stand.”

  Jonathan Hobson was shocked and confused, and there was much he didn’t under­stand. Soon after nine o’clock he under­stood even less. The gooks had indeed hit Kelly Hill, the casualties were rolling in, and the five men on the 9:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m. shift had their hands full.