I: Introduction
MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors was written by Richard Hooker (with the help of WC Heinz) and published in 1968. It was adapted into the 1970 feature film by Robert Altman (with a screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr.), which starred Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt, with Robert Duvall, Sally Kellerman, René Auberjonois, Roger Bowen, Fred Williamson, and Gary Burghoff.
From these came the long-running hit TV series (1972-1983) whose original cast included Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, Larry Linville, Loretta Swit, William Christopher (except for the pilot episode, which had George Morgan as Father Mulcahy), Timothy Brown, and Burghoff. Both the film and TV series use the story’s setting, a US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War, as an allegory for the Vietnam War.
Neither Hooker nor Altman liked the TV series, feeling it took the story in the opposite direction of its original purpose. In contrast to the liberal, anti-war stance of the series, with its tendency to advocate progressive causes (e.g., opposition to discrimination against blacks, tolerance of gays, equality of the sexes), Hooker was politically conservative. In fact, the novel uses a number of racial slurs (particularly against Asians, as opposed to Alda’s Hawkeye calling out US troops for referring to Koreans as “gooks”; only bigotry against blacks is judged by Hawkeye as wrong), and its protagonists tend to refer to women as “broads.” In the film, the MASH unit’s dentist wants to commit suicide because a moment of erectile dysfunction has made him worry he’s become a “fairy.”
Here‘s a link to a PDF of the novel, a link to an audiobook of it, and a link to quotes from the film.
II: Political Background
As for the contrast between the liberal TV series and the conservative/apolitical novel and film, though, I’d place these contrasting stances at the centre-left and right of a continuum. For as noble as it may be to talk about ending war, as is often wished for on the TV show (as opposed to the novel’s doctors’ indifference to the issue, and instead just wanting to finish their time in the army and return home), the real left-wing stance, the one that is truly to be contrasted with the general stance of the entire MASH franchise, is that the US Army should never have meddled in Korea in the first place, as was the case with Vietnam, too, the aforementioned allegory of the story.
Conventional wisdom would have us believe that, during the Cold War, the capitalist ‘free world’ had to contain and stop the spread of communism, therefore both North Korea and North Vietnam had to be stopped by American military intervention. Actually, as had been revealed years later, the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify greater American involvement in Vietnam was a lie. Similarly, the conventional narrative that a North Korean invasion of South Korea, which would involve Soviet and Maoist Chinese involvement, started the war was also based on dishonest accounts from hawks like MacArthur, as is related in IF Stone‘s Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951. These wars were just exercises in, and excuses for, US imperialism.
It is further assumed that South Korea is the free, liberal democracy, and that North Korea is the brutal, totalitarian dictatorship. Actually, South Korea has been occupied by the US ever since just after the end of WWII, hardly giving the people a breather after the Japanese occupation of the land, with its exploitation of Korean ‘comfort women.’ US troops soon would also use Korean women as prostitutes to satisfy the men’s lust.
As for the ‘totalitarian DPRK,’ while it’s surely difficult living there because of Western economic sanctions placed on the country, living in a place that provides (or at least strives to provide…sanctions notwithstanding) free or affordable housing, healthcare, education, and other basic needs is far better than living in a country of cutthroat capitalism, the kind that causes the poverty dramatized in films like Parasite. People in the West might also want to reconsider how ‘free’ they are in a world drowning in neoliberal capitalism.
So when we contrast the TV series of MASH, on the one side, against the novel and film, what we’re really dealing with is a culture war of liberal vs conservative, not left vs right. Everyone knows that conservatives are on the right, of course. Liberals, though, are properly understood to be swaying whichever way the political wind happens to be blowing at the time. During the decade that the TV series was on the air, that political wind blew in a relatively leftward direction. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should be able to understand which direction liberals have been blowing under leaders like Clinton, Obama, Biden, Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau, etc.
Seen in a broader political context, conservatism vs liberalism is just moderate-to-extreme right-wing infighting. This context will help us understand the MASH franchise as a whole.
III: Foreword, Chapters One and Two
After a brief foreword–in which Hooker explains how the paradoxical combination of stress from overwork and nothing-to-do boredom, from living and working in a MASH unit during the Korean War, made some of the staff into insubordinate, scruffy, badly-behaved alcoholics (i.e., the Swampmen)–the book goes into a description of Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly (Burghoff), and where he is from–Ottumwa, Iowa. He’s called “Radar” because he has ESP: he can “receive messages and monitor conversations far beyond the usual range of human hearing.”
Radar, sitting at a poker game in the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic of the 4077th MASH, can hear the commanding officer of the unit, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (Bowen; Stevenson), shouting into his phone in his office that he needs two surgeons. In the film, Radar demonstrates his ESP by saying Blake’s words just as Blake is saying them, standing outside, by a chopper with wounded.
The two doctors that the 4077th will get are Captains Benjamin Franklin Pierce, or “Hawkeye” (Sutherland; Alda), and Augustus Bedford Forrest, or “Duke” (Skerritt). Hawkeye got his nickname from his father, who read The Last of the Mohicans; he’s from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Duke is from Georgia; the character never appears in the TV series, though in a season 3 episode, when asked what happened to “that surgeon you had from Georgia”, the answer given is, “He got sent stateside!”
From the physical description given Hawkeye in the novel, Sutherland looked a lot more like him than Alda. He and Duke steal a jeep and drink a bottle of alcohol on their way from Transient Officers’ Quarters at the 325th Evacuation Hospital in Yong-Dong-Po to the 4077th. Both men are married and with kids; but that won’t stop them from fooling around.
They come into Ouijongbu, where they drive past The Famous Club Service Whorehouse, which has contributed much to the venereal disease problem faced by the US Army Medical Corps. An American flag is seeing flying from its central edifice. Such signs as these, in combination with the irreverent attitude of Hawkeye, Duke, and the other Swampmen to be introduced later, illustrate the imperialist encroachments on Korea.
Hawkeye’s plan on arriving at the 4077th is for him and Duke to work so hard as surgeons that they outclass the other talent there. They’ll thus be able to get away with their insubordination and other acts of naughtiness.
Arriving at the 4077th, Hawkeye and Duke go into the mess hall and meet Blake, who already thinks they’re “a pair of weirdos.” He tells them they’ll be living with Major Hobson in his tent; Blake would have Radar told of the order, but Radar’s already there to take them, thanks to his ESP.
The film takes Hobson and merges him with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), who is a captain in the novel, but because of this merging, becomes a major in the film and TV series. Hobson’s/Burns’s praying for everybody is comical and annoying to the non-religious Hawkeye and Duke, who insist that Blake get him out of their tent; the two also insist that Blake get a chest surgeon. This will result in the arrival of Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre (Gould; Rogers).
IV: Chapter Three
McIntyre is from Winchester High Medical School, in Boston. His face is hiding inside a parka hood when he meets everybody, and at first he seems aloof, laconic, and introverted. Hawkeye finds him familiar, though.
It’s when Hawkeye offers McIntyre a martini that he finally comes out of his shell, happily accepting the martini but insisting on olives for his, Hawkeye’s, and Duke’s drinks. He has a bottle of olives in his parka pocket, so all three can have one.
Hawkeye is still trying to remember where he’s seen McIntyre before. One day, the latter picks up a football that’s just landed at his feet. He throws a perfect pass to Hawkeye, who’s now racking his brain trying to remember who McIntyre is. Finally, he realizes that McIntyre is “Trapper” John, an old football player from the Boston/Maine area.
He got his nickname after being caught fooling around with a woman in the ladies’ room at the Boston and Maine train. She said to the conductor, who found her with McIntyre, “He trapped me!”
It’s interesting how, when Hawkeye finally remembers, he says, “Jesus to Jesus and eight hands around, Duke!” Trapper is replacing a major who prays to Jesus. Trapper, in Chapter Seven, will dress up as Jesus in a scheme to raise money to help a Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon (played by Kim Atwood in the film, and by Patrick Adiarte on the TV show), go to the US to study in a university there. There’s a lot of Christian imagery in the novel and film, though it’s usually presented in an irreverent way. Chaplin Father Mulcahy (Auberjonois; Christopher) is well-liked, but derogatorily nicknamed “Dago Red” for his mixed Irish-Italian descent and his red hair.
V: Chapter Four
In this chapter, we learn that the tent that Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are sleeping in will be called The Swamp, hence the three are known as the Swampmen. A sign, in big capital letters saying THE SWAMP, is painted in red on the door of the tent.
It’s called The Swamp in part because the tent resembles “the kind of haunt one might come across in a bog”…in other words, the place is a mess. It’s also the centre of social activity in the 4077th, where the three doctors do their boozing.
When one combines the Dionysian messiness of The Swamp with the sloppiness of the three doctors–that is, their often being unshaved and without the short haircuts one would expect of not just army men, but men of pre-Beatles Western society–we see in their sloppy appearance, as well as in the (often mean) pranks they pull on others and their general contempt for authority, a personification of the kind of mess the US army left Korea in by the end of the war.
A certain group of people are mostly marginalized in the novel, film, and TV series–the Koreans, played mostly by Japanese-American and Chinese-American actors. (The situation with Ho-Jon, to be dealt with below, is one of the few exceptions to the rule of marginalization.) As I said above, racial slurs against Asians are used a number of times in the novel, including by our presumably sympathetic Swampmen. As I’ve also mentioned, Ho-Jon is one of many Korean houseboys, there to do menial chores for the American army hospital staff–in other words, their servants. Finally, I’ve mentioned the reality of Korean prostitution for American GIs, something acknowledged in the novel, but never judged.
This marginalization and racism should form the backdrop of what is the biggest issue of the Korean War, but one rarely given scrutiny in the West: how the US military bombed and destroyed pretty much everything in North Korea. 20% of the total population was killed. The US made a messy swamp, if you will, of North Korea. This reality might help Westerners to understand why the DPRK now has nuclear weapons–not to attack other nations, but to defend themselves. The collective trauma the surviving North Koreans suffered from those bombings meant they were determined never to let it happen again.
Audiences are charmed and amused by the Swampmen’s wisecracking, pranks, and general defiance of US military authority. While I am in principle sympathetic to such defiance, one must take into consideration the fact that one shouldn’t just defy authority for its own sake; one should instead look into the evils caused by that authority and direct one’s defiance against it with an aim to stop those evils.
The Swampmen in the novel and film aren’t interested in directing their defiance with such aims. They just want their fun and games (golf, football, drinking, poker, chasing women, etc.) to be uninterrupted by the officious military. Unlike the more progressively-minded Hawkeye and Trapper of the TV show, the novel’s and film’s Swampmen are just self-absorbed hedonists. As such, they fit in well, ironically, with the US empire’s depredations in East Asia.
One example of a victim of the Swampmen’s depredations is a Protestant chaplain named Shaking Sammy. In Chapter Four, we learn that this chaplain has a bad habit of writing overly optimistic letters to the families of wounded soldiers without inquiring into whether or not these soldiers’ wounds could have resulted in lethalities. Shaking Sammy will tell the soldiers’ families that all is well, and the soldiers will be home soon, for example…yet the soldiers in question could be dead, thus cruelly getting the families’ hopes up, only to be crushed when the truth is known to them.
He’s been warned repeatedly not to send such misguidedly optimistic messages, yet he still does it. Furious with Shaking Sammy, Duke and Hawkeye have him see them use their .45s to shoot all four tires of his jeep. Justice has been done, it seems.
Soon after dealing with a particularly difficult patient who, it seems at first, isn’t going to live, yet with the help of Father Mulcahy’s “remarkably effective Cross Action,” the doctors are able to save the wounded soldier after all. Hawkeye and Duke, very drunk, decide to show their gratitude to Mulcahy for his prayers.
They do so in the form of what Hawkeye calls “a human sacrifice”, and for their sacrificial victim, they choose Shaking Sammy, imagining in their total inebriation that Mulcahy will appreciate this ‘gift.’ Tying Sammy to a cross and surrounding him with a pile of hay and assorted inflammable junk on the ground, Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are lying on mattresses by him. Duke has a Molotov cocktail in his hand, and it looks as if Sammy’s about to be immolated.
Indeed, the contents of a gasoline can are poured on the debris surrounding Sammy as well as on him. Mulcahy watches the scene in horror, hoping to stop the Swampmen. Duke lights the Molotov cocktail and throws it at Sammy, who screams. It turns out, though, that it wasn’t gasoline that’s been poured on him and his “funeral pyre.” The Molotov just sizzles and goes out.
So no, they didn’t kill Sammy, but they gave him one hell of a scare. This is an example of how mean and excessive the Swampmen’s pranks can be. Another example, from the film, is the famous dropping of the shower tent, exposing the nakedness of the beautiful but disliked head nurse before the entire camp, publicly humiliating her.
The Swampmen know they can get away with this kind of scurrilous behaviour because of their skill as surgeons, and because of how needed they are when the wounded come into the 4077th, as will be the case soon after the prank pulled on Shaking Sammy. Three companies of Canadians will be coming in, flooding the 4077th with casualties, as Hawkeye is aware. The surgeons can’t operate while under arrest.
Tying Sammy to a cross and making him into a “human sacrifice,” a chaplain made into a kind of lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, is an example of the novel’s use of Christian imagery to ridicule religion. As I said above, the Swampmen stick their tongues out at authority, including the authority of the Church, not to right any wrongs inflicted by the powers-that-be, but simply to be enfants terribles for the sheer fun of it. However ill-conceived the optimism may be of Sammy’s letters, he has been cruelly and unusually punished for them.
VI: Chapter Five
Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski (played by John Schuck) is the dentist of the 4077th. He’s known as “The Painless Pole” because of his amazing skill at doing dentistry without it hurting his patients. His dental clinic is also where poker games are played, so he is the most popular man in the outfit. Apart from poker and dentistry, his greatest hobby is women.
He’s well-endowed, too…so much so that whenever he takes a shower, other men stop by to see his equipment with awe and admiration. I suspect he’s bipolar, though, since according to the novel, he suffers monthly bouts of depression, each one lasting anywhere from twenty-four hours to about three days. On one particular occasion, he tells the Swampmen he wants to commit suicide because of one moment of impotence.
Hence the song, “Suicide Is Painless,” as the MASH theme music, heard in instrumental form on the TV show, and for the film, with a lyric by Mike Altman, the then 14-year-old son of Robert Altman (music by Johnny Mandel). The song is sung twice in the film, first by “The Mash” (John and Tom Bahler, Ron Hicklin, and Ian Freebairn-Smith) during the opening credits, then by Ken Prymus (playing Private Seidman) during the scene of Painless’s suicide attempt.
Duke and Hawkeye suggest that Painless use a “black capsule” to kill himself with. The Swampmen et al have no intention, of course, of letting Painless kill himself; their plan instead is to cure him of his suicide ideation by, ironically, indulging him in it. This plan, along with their helping Ho-Jon to go to an American university, is one of the few genuinely charitable acts of the Swampmen in the novel or film, which in turn makes them even remotely likable.
They plan to put amytal, a barbiturate derivative with sedative-hypnotic properties, into Painless’s “black capsule.” They figure he’ll take it after getting him drunk, then when he wakes up, he’ll be OK.
On the night of the supposed suicide, everyone will have a party for Painless in his dental clinic/poker hangout. The party is called “The Last Supper”; in the film, there’s even a shot of all the men seated at a pair of long tables as a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.
Painless is more or less at the centre, where Christ is in the painting. So this scene is another example of MASH using Christian imagery and concepts irreverently. Christ, after His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepted His impending death on the Cross; Painless is about to die (or so he thinks). Christ was raised from the dead; Painless will rise from…well…a death-like state, anyway.
The irony here is that Painless’s salvation will come by a suicide attempt, the ultimate loss of faith, whereas we are saved by Christ through faith. In wanting to save one’s life, one will lose it; but in losing one’s life for Christ, one saves it (Luke 9:24). His yoke is easy, and His burden is light (Matthew 11:30). Suicide is painless. ‘Tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wished (Hamlet, Act III, Scene i). Fittingly, Mike Altman’s lyric quotes “to be or not to be.”
Suicide is painless because, of course, life is painful. Part of the ostensible purpose of religion is to provide solace for that pain. One ‘loses’ one’s life, for the sake of Christ, or to attain nirvana, to achieve painlessness…hence the Painless Pole is a kind of Christ figure, if comically so.
Koreans were historically Buddhist and/or Confucian, and such thinking is still quite influential there today, but it has waned somewhat in the modern world, with today’s influence of secular thinking and Christianity. We’ll learn that Ho-Jon is Christian, and with his trip to the US to study there, he’ll be further inculcated with such Western ideas.
The point is that Western imperialism’s encroachment on Korea has its cultural as well as military aspects, so the Christian imagery in MASH is apt, even if presented irreverently. The irreverence is just part of the theme of defiance of authority for its own sake: it never rights wrongs. As long as liberals can enjoy imperialist privileges in the countries the West occupies, they’ll give the finger to authority all they like, and it won’t make a real difference to the occupied.
Anyway, to get back to Painless, in the novel, while he’s sedated from the amytal in the black capsule, a blue ribbon has been tied to his cock (implying the return of his sexual prowess), he’s been hooked to a harness and dropped from a helicopter (Is this to imply that he’s supposed to believe that he died, harrowed heaven, then had a resurrection back on Earth?); all of this has apparently ended his depression and suicide ideation. As for the film, during his sedation, the gorgeous nurse, Lt. “Dish” Schneider (played by Jo Ann Pflug in the film and by Karen Philipp on the TV series), has been asked by Hawkeye to sleep with Painless and thus allay his fear that he’s becoming a “fairy.” She does so, and his depression is cured.
VII: Chapter Six
This chapter deals essentially with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), a captain before the film and TV series promoted him to major. Hawkeye hates him more than anyone else. Burns will never admit his faults as a surgeon, blaming any problems or deaths on someone else, or they’re held to be acts of God. He also has a $35,000 home and two cars back in the States; he has no formal training in surgery, having learned from his father.
On one occasion, a patient in Burns’s care dies after a rather simple hospital staff worker, Private Lorenzo Boone (played by Bud Cort) tries to use a non-functioning suction machine on the patient. Burns claims Boone killed the patient. Not being very bright, Boone assumes Burns’s opinion, as a doctor, is of infallible authority, and he is overwhelmed with guilt and weeps over the death.
Duke sees this exchange, and he hits Burns. In the film, it’s Trapper who sees it and hits him; in the novel, Trapper hits him on a later occasion.
Burns will develop a mutual admiration for and romantic interest in the new Chief Nurse, Major Margaret Houlihan (Kellerman; Swit). While in the book and the film, Burns will be kicked out of the 4077th and sent stateside after he physically attacks Hawkeye for taunting him about his (in the novel, only rumoured) sexual relationship with her, in the TV series, both Burns and Houlihan will stay at the MASH and personify the hated army authoritarianism that the Swampmen rebel against. But again, it’s a self-absorbed, American antagonism between the two sides that has little, if anything, to do with leaving the Koreans alone.
VIII: Chapter Seven
This is the chapter in which the Swampmen raise money to help their Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon, go to the US to study in university there. As I said above, this is one of their few charitable acts in the novel. Even with this one, though, there are some qualifying factors to consider.
As I’ve tried to argue from the beginning, the Americans shouldn’t have been in Korea in the first place. A few scruffy American doctors sticking their tongues out at military authoritarians does nothing to compensate for the damage caused to the Koreans by occupying, bombing, prostituting, and forcing capitalism on them.
If the Koreans had wanted to pursue socialism after the end of the Japanese occupation, then that was their prerogative. Imposing starvation sanctions on the DPRK, and then claiming disingenuously that their problems are all because ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ has been a tried-and-true tactic that Western imperialism had used on a number of occasions, including Cuba and Venezuela. If ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ then just let the countries attempting to build it fail on their own, and after a few months, they should be running back crying to the capitalist West for salvation. Instead, consider what Cuba, burdened with an economic embargo from the 1960s, has been able to achieve.
Ho-Jon would be properly described as an Asian Uncle Tom. He thinks his Swampmen masters are “the three greatest people in the world.” Sure, the three doctors are good to him: they allow him to spend time with them in The Swamp when he isn’t shining their shoes, doing their laundry, etc.; they help him with his English. All of this can be seen as simple rewards for the boy’s loyalty to them. Accordingly, they like him as much as he likes them.
Ho-Jon still has to fight in the war, though, despite the attempts of Blake and the Swampmen to intercede with the Korean government…he’s seventeen at the time, and he gets wounded, with a mortar fragment in his chest. He thus returns to the 4077th to be operated on by Hawkeye and Trapper.
After the surgery and Ho-Jon is getting better, the Swampmen are debating which college would be the best one for him to study in. After briefly considering Dartmouth and Georgia (the latter being a place where the KKK won’t take kindly to an Asian being there), the Swampmen agree on Androscoggin College. Hawkeye writes to the dean, who replies, saying Ho-Jon will need a thousand dollars a year. To raise the money, which will probably add up to five or six thousand, including travel and expenses other than the aforementioned tuition, the Swampmen decide to have Trapper, as hairy as he is, dress up like Jesus, and sell photos of ‘Him.’
Mulcahy doesn’t like the idea of religion for money, but the Swampmen know “there are a lot of screwballs in the army” who will buy the photos for laughs and souvenirs, and there doesn’t seem to be any other way to raise money for Ho-Jon. Once again, MASH uses Christianity irreverently, and we see in it more of Western culture imposed on Korea.
By “more of Western culture impose on Korea,” I mean that Trapper’s clowning around in a Jesus outfit in South Korea and making money from the photos is a symbolic presentation of Christian missionary work and capitalism nosing their way around Asia to spread their influence among the locals. Ho-Jon is already a Christian–that is, he’s been indoctrinated with Western values and ethics–and he’s about to be educated in an American university. The Swampmen are content to work to raise money to send their friend there and be further indoctrinated. Consider in this connection how much money the American government has given to South Korea to keep the country under its spell.
IX: Chapters Eight and Nine
A soldier whose father is a US Congressman has been wounded, and the Congressman wants Trapper to fly to Japan with an assistant doctor, Hawkeye, and do emergency surgery on the boy. The doctors’ major motivation in going to Japan, though, is to play golf there. They even bring their golf clubs with them.
When they get there, Hawkeye reconnects with an old friend, “Me Lay” Marston, who is an anesthesiologist and helps a Japanese doctor run a pediatric hospital that doubles as a whorehouse. In fact, the place unabashedly calls itself “Dr. Yamamoto’s Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse,” or FKPH&W, for short. This openness shouldn’t be all that surprising, for of course, the US military has been known for frequenting such places in East Asia, as I’ve mentioned above.
When the doctors are going to the operating area, an army nurse tries to stop them. During the operation, a colonel shows his disapproval of their barging in to the place. Neither of these people deter the doctors, obviously. Examples of their usual defiance of military authority can be seen in the film. Again, though, this defiance of authority is just about two men who want to get the surgery out of the way as soon as possible so they can play as much golf as they can get in. They don’t want to wait around for the right people to arrive so they can be authorized to operate. They’re not even dressed as doctors: they’re all scruffy and have their golf clubs with them. Military authority isn’t an oppression to be overthrown–it’s just an inconvenience.
Later, while Trapper and Hawkeye are playing golf, some women caddies there get the impression that Trapper is Jesus when Hawkeye says the Lord’s name in vain after Trapper has hit a good shot. Hawkeye still has some old Jesus photos of Trapper on him, so he gives them to the “bimboes…[who] are on a real Christian kick.”
Though it looks as if Trapper and Hawkeye are planning to get laid, and they even hope to hang out in FKPH&W, speaking of which place, Me Lay wants the two doctors to take care of a half-white, half-Japanese baby, the result of an American john and a careless prostitute there. The doctors deal with the baby’s medical problems and talk Me Lay into adopting the orphan.
That officious colonel, who doesn’t approve of the Swampmen’s dealings with the baby, is blackmailed with photos of himself in bed with a prostitute, so the doctors won’t get in trouble. After all of these adventures, though, the doctors must rush back to the 4077th to deal with a huge, seemingly endless deluge of wounded, which is what Chapter Nine is all about.
X: Chapter Ten
This chapter starts with a description of Captain “Ugly John” Black (played by Carl Gottlieb in the film, and by John Orchard in the TV series), the 4077th’s anesthesiologist, how important he is to the hospital, and how his work is never done. He’s called Ugly John in the novel as an ironic joke: he’s actually “the handsomest man in the outfit.” He also hates everyone in the Commonwealth Division: Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.
Later on in the chapter, a new doctor arrives who is christened by Trapper with the nickname of “Jeeter.” He shares some martinis with the Swampmen, and as he’s getting tipsier and tipsier with each drink, Jeeter reveals how horny he is for the women there. He gets advice from Hawkeye on how he can get his hands on a nurse; while Hawkeye offers a few suggestions, he’s not sure which one is the best, so Trapper suggests that Jeeter announce his availability to all the nurses in the mess hall.
By now so drunk that he’s staggering, Jeeter goes to the mess hall with the help of the Swampmen, and standing at the doorway, he announces his availability in the crudest and most aggressive terms possible, shocking everyone there. Trapper can’t resist inspiring him to say he’ll start by screwing “Hot Lips” Houlihan.
Now, “Hot Lips” has been Major Houlihan’s official nickname, much to her chagrin, ever since her sexual relationship with Frank Burns. Trapper is the one who has christened her with the nickname, though in the film, it’s inspired by her telling Burns to “kiss [her] hot lips,” not knowing that a microphone has been surreptitiously placed by her in her tent where she and Burns have been making love.
Another surgeon, Roger the Dodger, arrives at the 4077th, and he’s inspired to shout out “Hot Lips Houlihan,” which will provoke her all the more.
In the novel, she races into Col. Blake’s tent, fresh from the showers and wildly irate. There’s no reference to a prank involving the shower tent dropping and exposing her nakedness to the whole 4077th, as in the movie, but it’s easy to see how the filmmakers took the idea of the prank as implied in the novel.
When she goes into Blake’s tent, the ends of her hair are still wet, and the strap of her shower cap is hanging from an end of her towel. She obviously ran out of the shower tent before she was finished in there, because the Swampmen, “those beasts, those THINGS,” have upset her so severely. She threatens she’ll resign her commission if Blake won’t do anything about them.
Blake couldn’t care less if she does. He never properly disciplines any of the Swampmen. As she says, the 4077th “isn’t a hospital…It’s an insane asylum,” and Blake is to blame for not using his authority to stop men like McIntyre from calling her “Hot Lips.”
This incident, especially as it’s represented in the film, underlines another unsavoury aspect of the original MASH that makes nonsense of the more progressive aspects of the TV series: its sexist attitude towards women. Houlihan may be a major, but she’s given no respect. In the TV series, especially the later seasons, much is made of her as a spokeswoman for sexual equality in the army.
Not so in the novel or film, where women are called “broads,” chased by the men for sex, objectified and exposed as described above, had orders barked at them by the Swampmen to do such things as cook for them, etc. All of this fits in line with the imperialist project of trying to control the entire Korean Peninsula, as well as Japan, where in both US-controlled places, there is prostitution provided for the GIs. A huge part of world domination is in controlling its women, as of the 2020s, just under 50% of the global population.
I never found the film’s shower scene with Houlihan amusing. It always came across to me as a mean, humiliating, demeaning prank devised by the immature Swampmen, all just to find out whether or not she’s a natural blonde. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as charmless as army authoritarianism may be, cheap pranks like these are not the way to deal with it; they’re often not even funny.
Houlihan will try to get Blake in trouble by informing General Hammond (played by G. Wood) of how out of control the staff of the 4077th are. Ultimately, nothing will be done about it. Indeed, the general goes so far as to say, “Screw her.”
XI: Chapter Eleven
Blake has been sent to Japan for temporary duty at the Tokyo Army Hospital. He’s been replaced by Col. Horace DeLong for the three weeks that Blake is gone. DeLong, another regular army guy, will be quite dismayed with the erratic behaviour of the scruffy Swampmen, though he will come to respect Hawkeye for his skills as a surgeon.
Bored during a spell of no wounded, and suffering in the heat, the Swampmen get some amusement by pretending they’ve gone insane. They speak of mermaids as if they were real, and they tell DeLong that when they catch a mermaid, they’ll “screw the ass off her.” They figure that if they can convince DeLong that they’re nuts, they’ll be sent to some psychiatrists in Seoul for a while, then get sent back to the 4077th in time for when more wounded come.
To add to the craziness about mermaids, Hawkeye says he’ll agree to DeLong’s plan–to have the Swampmen go to the 325th Evac for psychiatric observation–if he can get “a shot at the epileptic whore,” an idea inspired by a psychiatrist Hawkeye once knew who had a female epileptic patient; she’d go crazy every time her husband tried to have sex with her. Hawkeye hopes to find such a prostitute in Seoul during the Swampmen’s rest and ‘therapy.’
They go to the 325th Evac, meet a psychiatrist named Maj. Haskell, and do their crazy routine with him. They act as though Hawkeye is the worst case. When Haskell meets Hawkeye, the latter makes a number of incoherent remarks to seem crazy.
The Swampmen also find a place where they can get at the “epileptic whore”–Mrs. Lee’s, whose brothel’s girls are “velly clean.” They visit the place, but don’t end up trying the prostitute with “hysterical convulsion[s].”
XII: Chapter Twelve
Hawkeye gets the idea to have the 4077th set up a football team. He considers certain men in the unit, including one named Vollmer, to be a centre, then Jeeter as a second string halfback, among others, all of whom have had football playing experience, according to Hawkeye. Their new team can play against that of the 325th Evac, a team coached by General Hammond.
Since Hammond’s team is really good, Hawkeye knows someone who can be a ringer to ensure that the 4077th can beat the 325th Evac: Captain Oliver Wendell Jones–“Spearchucker,” (Williams; Timothy Brown in the TV series) an excellent football player who’s become a neurosurgeon. When Duke hears the man’s name, he (correctly) assumes that Jones is black, flaring up Duke’s racial prejudice.
Hawkeye gives Duke a slight chiding for calling Jones a “nigra,” and when Duke meets Jones and taunts him a bit, Jones puts him properly in his place. This is the first time in Hooker’s novel that someone is called out for using racial slurs or otherwise demonstrating racial bigotry. Since the novel was published in 1968, it is safe to assume that, because of the Civil Rights movement, conservative Hooker knew he couldn’t get away with racism against blacks the way he could racism against Asians at the time. Still, calling Jones “Spearchucker,” a nickname he accepts because he “used to throw the javelin,” is plenty racist as it is.
The Swampmen go to Blake to make a twin request that is really one: they need a neurosurgeon, Jones specifically, and they need him also for the 4077th’s new football team. Blake remembers that Hammond coaches the 325th Evac team, and that Hammond’s sense of how to coach a football team is years out of date; Blake also knows that with Jones playing for the 4077th, they can beat Hammond’s team and make a lot of money. After all, people bet on these football games, and so a profit can be made on them.
When Blake agrees to set up the new 4077th football team, insisting that he be their coach, Hawkeye is pleased and tells the other Swampmen, “Henry believes in free enterprise, too.” Note here the combination of capitalism with the liberal concession of having a black man on the football team. Of course, the far more progressive stance of the TV series includes far greater respect for blacks…the dealing with “Spearchucker” early on notwithstanding.
The character had been written out of the TV series by the end of season one because it had been understood that there were no black surgeons in MASH units during the Korean War, and so the sitcom’s creator was concerned, apparently, with maintaining historical accuracy (about something most people probably wouldn’t have known, anyway; and actually, there had been several black surgeons at the time). Hmm: a TV series–one that ran for just over a decade about a war that had lasted for only a little over three years, that was meant as an allegory about the Vietnam War, and which had men in the early 1950s with shaggy 1970s hair instead of short, army haircuts–fired a black actor because of concern about historical accuracy? Speaking of racism…
Then again, continuing to call a black man “Spearchucker” over and over again would have been problematic in itself for a TV show that was to be more politically progressive, anyway. In all of this, we can see how the contrast between the show, the film, and the novel is not a conservative/liberal dichotomy, but rather a continuum between the two supposedly opposing political stances.
XIII: Chapter Thirteen
When the players of the new 4077th football team are practicing, they’re awful, but not hopeless. When the game happens, it turns out that Hammond has a few pro footballers of his own for his team, so the 4077th will have to find ways around such obstacles…including cheating. One of the pros, for example, is surreptitiously given a sedative during a pileup in order to incapacitate him.
One way to think about this football game is to allegorize it as a war, except that instead of it being a war between the capitalist West and the ‘dirty commie’ North Koreans and Chinese, it’s a war between the scruffy anti-authoritarians and the military authority, as personified by Hammond’s team. Such an interpretation seems fitting, since throughout the novel and the film, we get very little of the actual Korean War, apart from all the wounded needing surgery.
This war-allegory ties in with what I’ve been saying on and off throughout this analysis: there’s very little concern with the actual war and the damage that was done to the Koreans at the hands of US imperialism. All the MASH staff care about is themselves. They deal with the horrors of war not by demanding a stop to it or by making fun of anti-communist hysteria (as happens from time to time in the TV series), but instead by indulging in pleasure: boozing, sex, golf, and now, football. They oppose the military not because of its imperialism, but because it gets in the way of their fun.
The football players are profiteering from bets on the game, just as there are profiteers in war. The team opposing that of the 4077th are called, significantly, “the enemy” in the novel. The game is a war, a comically self-absorbed one between Americans and Americans, with the Koreans so marginalized this time that they’re not even present.
One of the major reasons for divergences from the film and the novel (and even Lardner’s script, for that matter) is Altman’s encouragement of his actors to improvise, to allow more creative freedom for them and to have more spontaneous interactions between them, adding more realism. One result of this indulgence in MASH is, during the football game, Schuck as Painless saying, “Alright, bud, your fucking head is coming right off,” making this the first time in a mainstream Hollywood movie that that word was ever said…and allowed.
Another example of the 4077th team cheating is when Radar uses his ESP to listen in on the upcoming plays Hammond’s team is planning. They also use a trick involving Vollmer hiding the football and walking it over to the enemy’s side while everyone else is kept busy and distracted. As a result, the 4077th wins the game 28-24, and they make a huge profit.
This blatant disregard for the rules, as well as the contempt shown for authority, can be seen to represent the real political stance, if there even is one, of the Swampmen–they’re anarchists. Yet their penchant for making profits makes them a most dubious kind of anarchist…’anarcho’-capitalists! I told you this novel/film was far from left-wing or progressive.
XIV: Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen, and Conclusion
The days of the deployment of Hawkeye and Duke in South Korea are numbered, so between now and when they get sent home, Blake is having them teach two new doctors how to do “meatball surgery,” which is a set of surgical short-cuts, since saving the lives of the wounded is the priority, and not daintiness, which can be left to the doctors in, say, Tokyo.
In the final chapter, Hawkeye and Duke finally leave the 4077th and go back to the States. They do a lot of drinking on the way, and they engage in a lot of their usual naughtiness, including at one point shirking certain medical duties by pretending to be chaplains. Finally at home, they rejoin their wives and kids in Maine and Georgia.
In the TV series, though, of course, Hawkeye (as well as Frank Burns) have not gone home, and Hawkeye (played by the ever-so-charismatic Alan Alda) is a bachelor. The show truly was an allegory of the Vietnam War, the last years of which overlapped with the film and the first few seasons of the series. As a result, the TV show, with its eleven seasons, ended up turning a three-year-war into an eleven-year quagmire, if you will, in ironic imitation, it seems, of Nam.
The more progressive liberal stance of the TV show, as I said above, should be seen as on a continuum with the more conservative vision of Hooker and Altman, since the one progressive stance of consequence–that the US army should never have been in Korea in the first place–is never even considered, not in the novel, the film, or the TV show.
Infinite Ocean 
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