Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

223 Pages·1997·0.56 MB·English

by  Richard Hooker

M A S H
Richard Hooker

Contents
Foreword 6
1
When Radar O’Reilly, just out of high school, left
Ottumwa,… 9
2
Nine days after the arrival of Captains Pierce and
Forrest… 21
3
Several weeks after the departure of Major Hobson,
it was… 28
4
For several weeks following the identification of
Captain John McIntyre… 35
5
Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski, of Hamtramck,
Michigan, and Dental Officer… 44
6
The other doctors in the 4077th spent a great deal… 55
7
Each doctors’ tent at the MASH had a young Korean… 66
8
Trapper John McIntyre had grown up in a house
adjacent… 78
9 102
In the middle of a hot, humid and bloody afternoon…
10
The business of doing major surgery on poor-risk
patients can… 116
11
The temperature at noon, day after day, was between
95°… 136
12
With the end of summer, the baseball that the
Swampmen… 154
13
Colonel Henry Blake was busier than he had been
since… 163
14
For the next two days, Henry spent his spare time… 184
15
The days passed, among them Christmas and New
Year’s. On… 199
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

Foreword
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 pa-
tients, they achieved the best results up to that time in the
history of military surgery.
The surgeons in the MASH hospitals were exposed to ex-
tremes 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
6
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.
7