LIFE Magazine - LIFE M*A*S*H

M*A*S*H

THE ICONIC SIGNPOST ON the set at Malibu Creek State Park, a rustic, 8,000-acre area about 25 miles outside of Los Angeles.

M*A*S*H

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e-ISBN: 978-1-54785-492-9

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CONTENTS

IN ADDITION TO LAUGHS, WE gave the audience permission to feel bad, said series cocreator Larry Gelbart of the shows gritty verisimilitude, like this moment from a 1974 episode. America was feeling pretty rotten then, we were at war in Vietnam. And once the war stopped, we didnt start feeling really terrific right away, if we ever will again about that situation.

Foreword

Chapter 01

Chapter 02

CHAPTER 03

Chapter 04

Chapter 05

CHAPTER 01

FROM PAGE TO SCREEN

Before M*A*S*H laid siege to TV, it was a shaggy-dog novel and a ribald hit film that shocked and titillated a war-weary nation. Audiences had never seen anything like it.

MAJOR MARGARET HOULIHAN (Sally Kellerman) arrives at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the 1970 movie.

IN 1968, AN AMERICAN SURGEON NAMED H. RICHARD HORNBERGER JR. PUBLISHED HIS FIRST NOVEL.

At the time, he was practicing in Maine, but early in the previous decade hed served as a surgeon in the Korean War, at the 8055th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, the acronym for which provided the book with its title. Hornberger enlisted the help of sportswriter W.C. Heinz, and the two men, using the pseudonym Richard Hooker, published a loosely fictionalized account of the surgeons wartime experience. MASH : A Novel About Three Army Doctors, was the worlds introduction to Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, a married father of two young sons from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Few called the man by his lofty given name, however; Pierce was known to most simply as Hawkeye, a sobriquet bestowed on him by his father. The only book my old man ever read, explains Pierce, was The Last of the Mohicans. (Hawkeye is an alias of Natty Bumppo, the protagonist of James Fenimore Coopers novel.)

Hawkeye affectionately dubs the ramshackle medical tent to which hes been assigned the Swamp, partly because it looked like the kind of haunt one might come across in a bog. He soon befriends the other two doctors referred to in the novels subtitle. John McIntyre, a thoracic surgeon from Boston, has his own quirky nickname: Trapper John. He earned the moniker when a woman with whom he was having a romantic assignation in the lavatory of a Boston & Maine railroad car disingenuously told a porter who walked in on them that McIntyre had trapped her. A third doctor, Duke Forrest of Georgia, somehow remains nickname-free despite a head of red hair.

The trio toils near the front lines of the warring countrys 38th parallel. During the intervals when there isnt a crush of incoming casualties, they blow off steam with dry martinis and randy rendezvous with nurses. The character of Forrest didnt make it to the TV series, but these twin pastimesnarcotizing and womanizingremain staples for Hawkeye and Trapper in the adaptations. Trapper asks Hawkeye, You have a lot of trouble with women, dont you? Hawkeye replies, Every chance that I can.

Their nemesis in the med tent, Major Frank Burns, pretends to be above the fray when it comes to carousing. I dont waste my time drinking and chasing women, the hypocrite tells Pierce and McIntyre in one episode of the TV show, to which Hawkeye retorts, Were thinking of chasing only drinking women. Eliminates one process. The affairs remain consistent subplots in the series until the very end. I cant say that Ive loved you all, Hawkeye announces to the nurses near the conclusion of the final episode. But Ive loved as many of you as I could.