MASH COMPARED TO THE LUCKY 13TH

A good story needs tension, and we usually get our tension from a conflict between good and evil. I think it is important that in my case I separate good and evil from politics and religion. The writers of M*A*S*H did a good job of that, and it went over big. There were arguments over whether to treat enemy soldiers in their hospital or not, and such things as that. Hot Lips and Frank Burns were thought of as Republicans a time or two, but mostly it was not political. Father John Francis Patrick Mulcahy was the only chaplain around, but he was very tolerant of other beliefs. There was no religious conflict.
I thought about how I lived in similar conditions in Korea, only in a helicopter company rather than a MASH. I was in a MASH once, which was about four miles from us. I had some unidentified pain or other. While I was laying there a Red Cross woman kept coming around offering me cigarettes. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I accepted and smoked them. I had smoked before, but hadn’t gotten addicted. This time I did. It was not a very expensive habit at that time and in that place. Cigarettes were 15 cents a pack or $1.10 per carton.
The guy in the bed next to me at the hospital had a circumcision and then got a bad infection. Another guy I knew got something in his eye one night. Somebody took him over to the MASH. Several doctors worked on him, they had a real struggle getting the object out of his eye. It seems that all of them were quite drunk. We had a doctor in our own compound, but I imagine he was drunk too. The man carried a flyswatter with him everywhere he went. Each time he finished a fifth of his favorite Canadian whiskey he would take a little black and yellow ribbon off the empty bottle and tie it on his fly-swatter. He had quite a few ribbons there. It was about five years after the war ended, so I don’t think there was anything to be stressed about other than boredom.
I thought about one of the pilots we had in Korea. He was a very likeable guy, but he did at least two things that he should be faulted for. He took a pretty 16-year-old Korean girl out of an orphanage. I don’t know what pretense he used or if any was necessary, but he took her as his mistress. He promised to marry her, though he had no such intention. When he went home he left her there with no way to take care of herself. She was forced to become a prostitute. He also had a bad habit of flying over into North Korea just to see if he could get by with it. One day he came back with bullet holes in his helicopter that were quickly and secretly patched. It seems to me that such antics could have gotten the war started all over again.
We had the loveable old colonel character too, only he was a major and when he became a lieutenant colonel, he got shipped elsewhere. We had several Frank Burns types. There were no Hot Lips characters as we had no women in our helicopter company.
One young and not very bright guy was given permission to go out hunting. He shot one of the bulls that the Korean farmers used to pull their plows through the rice paddies. Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between evil and stupidity.
One day I was sitting at my typewriter when I heard shouting coming from outside. I went out to see a helicopter hovering over the field. The H-21 was sometimes called a “flying banana” as that was the shape of it. The rear landing gear was ripped out of the banana’s belly and just swinging by its upper attachment. It had no way to land because if it had come down to the ground it would have turned over and the rotary wings would have torn into the blacktop breaking up the helicopter and throwing debris everywhere.
At the controls were a captain and a young warrant officer who was instructing him. The captain jumped out of the helicopter and ran away leaving the warrant officer to keep the thing in the air. It looked like a very difficult and dangerous situation. Gasoline was leaking where the gear had torn out and we wondered what terrible thing would happen if the gas ran out and the engine stopped.
At that moment two level headed persons took charge. Doesn’t that kind of remind you of Captains Benjamin Pierce and B.J. Honeycutt? One was a warrant officer, one of only two of our pilots who didn’t drink and the other was a Sergeant First Class, a good family man, who headed up one of the platoons of mechanics. They got the men rolling 50-gallon drums out to form a platform for the helicopter to land on. They sent some of the men to pull the mattresses off of our beds to throw on top of the steel drums; thus forming a bed for the banana to lie in. The pilot at the controls maneuvered the chopper over onto the bed. Then the fire trucks came and sprayed the whole area with foam. Finally the helicopter could be shut down.
There was a hearing into why the captain broke the landing gear off the helicopter. He claimed that the malaria pills he was taking had spoiled his depth perception. He had flown small helicopters before, but was afraid of the big one. He most likely took a little liquid courage, but the inquiry board let him get by with the malaria pill excuse.
One would think that tearing the landing gear off was a freak accident, but it happened again. I wasn’t around to witness that. It was carrying passengers, some entertainers with the USO I heard. That one was set down in a farmer’s field nearby.
Our choppers did carry some famous entertainers at times. At Christmas time Bob Hope came with his show. He was accompanied by the very beautiful Jayne Mansfield and her then boyfriend Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay. I think most people who will read this are familiar with the fourth of their five children. She is Mariska Hargitay who plays Olivia Benson on the Law and Order SVU television series. Those of us in the helicopter company other than the pilots and the crew chief did not get to see these famous people. They mostly were entertaining the infantry troops up north.
I told you about that guy who went to the MASH with something in his eye. He was the son of an army general. I was a barracks sergeant in charge of one of the Quonset huts. In the pidgin language of the time and place, I was a “hoochy honcho.” Jerry, the general’s son, was in my hoochy. One morning when reveille sounded I woke up and looked over at Jerry. I think he must have gotten one of those “Dear John” letters from back home, because he had really tied one on the night before. We very conveniently had a night club right on the grounds and Jerry had been down there drinking lots and lots of sloe gin. The vomit that covered him was spotted with red maraschino cherries. He was very pale and didn’t move. The thought flashed through my mind that he was dead. He wasn’t. We all went out to morning formation without him. I reported that he was sick when he wasn’t there to answer roll call.
Around noon I got someone to help me and we took Jerry to the shower which was located next to the water tank which was over at the compound fence. We had no running water in the hut. I made him shower with his clothes on so his clothes would get clean too. He slept the rest of the day.
One time in the middle of the night I awoke to what I thought were firecrackers going off. I thought, “Oh, those drunken pilots are having another big party.” Boston down in the front corner showed me where a bullet passed through, in one side, past him, and out the other side. Then I got the whole story. A friend of mine, Moore, was corporal of the guard that night. Moore was out walking around the company area when he came upon a Korean civilian who had no business being there. He had no weapon with him, so he captured the guy by hitting him over the head with a flashlight. When he did that another Korean started shooting. Moore hung on to his prisoner and no one was hit by the gunfire, but the second civilian with the gun got away. The guy Moore had caught was turned over to the Korean authorities. We heard later that they tortured the man to death but he never revealed who his partner was or what they were doing in our compound.
Springtime in Korea is a good time to be someplace else. That’s when they plow up the rice paddies to get ready to plant the next crop. The paddies are fertilized with human excrement. The stench is hard to believe. I remember going somewhere in a helicopter. It was so nice to get up in the air out of the stench. But, when we came back down it was still there.
In the autumn the army sent us new and better stoves to heat our Quonset huts with. They didn’t send any stove pipe. I guess they assumed that we’d use the stove pipe off the old stoves. The problem was that the new stoves took six-inch pipe and the old stoves had four-inch pipe. I don’t know how they handled the problem in the other Quonsets, but in ours we decided to buy some proper pipe on the black market. Everyone gave his share of cartons of cigarettes to pay the pipe maker. I still suspect to this day that what really happened was that someone had sold our pipe on the black market and we simply bought it back.
A time or two our cooks got caught stealing our food and selling it on the black market. I imagine that there were a lot more times that they sold our food and didn’t get caught. Then we’d have to eat some terrible, awful rations.
I told you about that pilot that didn’t drink. He got a medal for not drinking. One cold winter night there was an emergency. A Korean woman was having a great deal of difficulty giving birth to a child. She needed to be in a bigger and better hospital somewhere. I saw the helicopter take off into a blinding snow storm. I was told that the two non-drinker pilots were at the controls. There had not been anyone else in the company sober enough to fly the mission. Apparently they were successful in their mission because a high-ranking general flew in one day and gave them medals. We had a big ceremony.
I told you about the stench. I don’t think that was ever mentioned in the M*A*S*H stories. There was something else missing from M*A*S*H, dogs and rats. Dogs liked to come live in the U.S. Army compound because no one there wanted to kill and eat them. Koreans would kill dogs and then cook them whole over an open fire. It wasn’t just some tale the guys were telling; I saw it for myself down by the river. We liked having the dogs. They ate rats, and we had plenty of those. One time the mess officer and a cook went into the mess hall at night and each got a big long spoon. They went around killing rats. I didn’t see it, but I heard they killed close to a hundred. One night a guy woke up to find a rat in bed with him.
We were located in beautiful valley a few miles outside of Uijongbu north-northeast of Seoul. There was a mass grave nearby. There were all kinds of rumors as to who died there. Since I don’t actually know the truth I won’t make any guesses. One Sunday afternoon one guy came walking into the compound twirling a human skull on top of an arm bone. He said that he found it in a foxhole up on the mountain. I didn’t see the dog tags, but I heard that what he’d found was the remains of a British soldier.
We were told that the compound we occupied had been occupied by Turkish soldiers during the war. We heard two stories about Turkish soldiers. One was that when they take their sword out of its scabbard they cannot put it back without using it to draw blood. If nothing else they have to cut themselves. The other story was that when they caught a thief trying to get into their compound they would behead him and hang his head on a post by their front gate. They never mentioned that on M*A*S*H.
We got a new lieutenant in our company. He was not a pilot. I think he was just some guy somebody else wanted rid of. When it came to the posting of the guards one evening this guy shows up as officer of the guard. He was wearing a hunting knife in addition to his normal .45 caliber pistol. He seemed really strange. Rumor had it that he caught a thief, cut the ligaments in the guy’s legs and then dumped him out of a helicopter. I don’t know how he got up in that helicopter to throw the guy out since he wasn’t a pilot, so maybe someone helped him. I don’t know how true that was, but I do know that lieutenant wasn’t there anymore after that. I think he was more Frank Burns than Frank Burns was. Or, maybe he was doing like Max Klinger and bucking for a Section Eight, that is, trying to get out on an insanity plea.
I made a lot of friends in the 15 months I was in that compound. I know it sounds like the place was a lot of fun, but when it came time for me to leave and head back to the good old U.S.A. I was very happy to leave. I still enjoy watching M*A*S*H on late night television. It is funny. But, the real thing – that wasn’t so funny.

A DRIVE THROUGH MEMORIES

Preface
I wrote this piece for Creative Writing class at Longview Colllege. I hope that I have handled this story in a creative way, but for the most part, it is not fiction. It is only fiction in that I could not have told all these stories on one short drive. I did tell Faye some of these stories, with less detail, as we drove to church, but this was written later as I sat at home in my study visualizing the route we had taken. I wrote these stories as I visually came to each location on the route where they happened. I might say that they are in geographical order. These stories cover a lot of years. They are all true stories, as far as I know.
Dale Douthat, October 29, 2006

My wife’s sister Faye was visiting us. My wife Fern and I took her to Unity Temple on the Plaza where we occasionally attend church. As we left from our home in Independence and passed through our neighborhood and then through Kansas City’s Inner City on our way to church, I was reminded of days gone by and told Faye little stories about the places we passed.
As we passed a patch of woods along Blue Ridge Boulevard, I told Faye, “A human skeleton was found in those woods just a very few years ago. It was after that big ice storm that pulled down tree branches and electric lines. A lineman had gone up a pole at the edge of that woods I was telling you about. He looked down into the woods and saw the skeleton. Independence CSI came to investigate. At first all they could tell was that the skeleton was a woman’s as it was wearing women’s panties. When the story was in the newspaper, a man read it and came forward. That was in January and his wife had disappeared in July. He had not reported her as missing as she was a mental case and often disappeared for long periods. It turned out that the skeleton found was his missing wife.”
As we rounded the corner up a side street that was a shortcut over to Highway 40, we passed a vacant lot. I told Faye, “A woman was murdered somewhere not long ago, and the murderer dumped her body on that vacant lot. I saw that on the 10 o’clock news on Channel Five.”
We passed the I-70 Drive-In Theatre. I told Faye, “Some say it’s one of the very few drive-in movies left in America. There used to be several drive-in movies along Highway 40.” Faye was visiting from Bethany, Missouri where she lives now. Faye is a young 85 years old. She lived in Kansas City and worked at Hallmark Cards years ago, even before there were any drive-in movies. She even lived in New York City awhile during World War II; but spent most of her life in our home town of New Hampton, Missouri up near the Iowa line. Faye speaks with a lot of double negatives and aints, but she is a very intelligent woman. Double negatives and aints are part of the New Hampton vernacular. In New Hampton most words or names that end in a, end with the long e sound. I fall into that vernacular at times myself even though I didn’t live there but a few years and have been gone from there quite a few years. My son, the grammar expert in the family, says that he can hear me change gradually when we travel up that way.
We passed a large trailer court and I was reminded that the Heart of America Airport used to be there. I told Faye, “When I was a boy of nine or ten, we used to pass here on the way in from Odessa to visit relatives in the city. Out there where all those trailers are was an airport. I’d sure hate like hell to fly in or out of this place now; there are too damn many towers around it.”
“I remember you telling stories about almost running into towers in other places,” said Faye.
“Yeah, I came very close to a tower down by the Country Club Plaza one time when I was taking a look at the Plaza lights. Another time I came way too close to that tower up by Ray and Lucy’s house when I flew in low to buzz them,” I said. Ray was Faye and Fern’s brother who died recently. He and his wife Lucy had lived on a farm a few miles north of New Hampton.
On the other side of the road from the trailer court was where a drive-in movie used to be. I told Faye about the giant fly swatter we have which has printed on it “Heart of America Drive-In, the Largest Drive-In Screen in the World.” Whether it was the largest screen or not I cannot say, even though we watched a lot of movies there back in the early 1960’s. There was also a bowling alley along there. The building still stands. It is a place where they sell rocks now.
As we passed another trailer court I was reminded that Fern and I used to live there with our baby daughter Vanessa. Vanessa is 46 years old now, which gives us a picture of how long ago that was. I told Faye, “We used to eat at the McDonalds down the hill once in a while. The three of us could eat for about a dollar as hamburgers were fifteen cents; French fries were ten cents, as was a Coke.”
“One time we were out walking on the new Interstate Highway 70 that was being constructed. Two-year-old Vanessa pointed at the moon and said ‘light.’ We were proud that she had noticed. It was quite amusing to us at the time.”
We turned south on Cleaver II Boulevard which follows the route Van Brunt Boulevard once took. “The Duce,” as the police call it, now goes from this point all the way to the Country Club Plaza. As we sped up the hill past the Veteran’s Hospital, I was reminded of an accident that had occurred on that boulevard many years before. There was a supermarket at the bottom of the hill. I think it was the Justrite Market. Some men had robbed the supermarket and were fleeing up the hill with the police in pursuit when they crashed into the rear of another car. The people in that car were killed. The people who were killed were visiting the city from Bethany, Missouri. Bethany is the town where Fern and I both went to high school, so we were somewhat acquainted with the people who died. Faye didn’t remember them as she didn’t live in Bethany back then.
A little further along we passed a spot where Fern and I had stopped to allow two deer to cross the road in front of us not long ago when we were on our way home from church. As we rounded a curve and headed on west along what used to be called Brush Creek Boulevard, there was a flock of Canada geese grazing in the park. I told Faye, “It is amazing how well wild animals are adapting to city life these days. I think we see wild life more often here than when we come up home.”
“Hunting isn’t allowed here where it is up home. If this trend continues, all the wildlife will live in the city where they can avoid hunters,” chimed in Fern.
We passed the Watkins Funeral Home and I told Faye how Watkins was a city councilman and how Bruce Watkins Drive had been named after him.
A little past the Navy Reserve Center we saw a sign that read “Ivanhoe Neighborhood.” I told Faye, ”My paternal grandparents lived in that neighborhood all of their adult lives. My father was born right up there a couple of blocks on Euclid.” I could not point to my grandparents’ house as it was torn down to make way for Bruce Watkins Drive.
Up to the left I could see the new Paseo High School. I told Faye, “My parents lived in a house near the high school when I was born; it was my first home.”
“I was working evenings at the AT&T Data Center, the largest data center in the world at that time, located at 63rd and Euclid, on the day old Paseo High was imploded. I don’t really understand how imploding works, but it seems to me that if you exploded a building it would throw chunks all over and there would be collateral damage.”
“As I drove down past here, a mighty strange sight appeared at my left. Oh how I wish I would have had my camera along. The old school had been reduced to rubble EXCEPT for the front doors and everything above them. The implosion left a dramatic sculpture that would have made an excellent monument to the old school. The next day as I passed I saw that the accidental sculpture had been torn down. How sad.”
When I was telling Faye about how some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins had gone to school there at Paseo High, I was reminded of something else. My cousin Forrest Young had been a student at Paseo High in 1950. Forrest decided to skip school one day. He borrowed a car from a friend and he and another friend took off. It was something of a freak accident. A spring shackle on the car broke and that somehow broke both boys’ necks. It is said that they did not suffer. They died instantly.
“There weren’t any seat belts in those days,” said Fern.
“I’m don’t know if belts would have saved their lives in that case or not,” I said, “I think it’s just that cars weren’t built as safe as they are now.”
Cleaver II passed from what used to be Brush Creek Boulevard onto what used to be 47th Street. We passed the “abortion clinic,” more properly called the Family Planning Center.
On our right appeared the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. In the middle of the front lawn stood a giant shuttlecock like the ones some folks play badminton with, only many, many times larger. I knew there were four shuttlecocks, but I wanted to tell Faye more about the shuttlecocks. “There are four of them. They each weigh 5,500 pounds. They are eighteen feet long and about sixteen feet across.”
The Nelson-Atkins is being remodeled and added to at present. I am looking forward to seeing the place when it is finished.
The art museum reminded me of the time my dad took my 7-year-old brother and 9-year-old me there. When we got back to Grandpa and Grandma’s house, Dad told Mom about the statue of a completely naked couple at the gallery. Mom was shocked. I’m sure she vowed that we would never go there again; however, when my entire sixth grade class from Odessa went a few years later, I was allowed to go along. The naked statue was still there, but no one seemed to notice or care that it was naked.
As we entered the Country Club Plaza, Cleaver II Boulevard once again became 47th Street. We attended church at Unity Temple located at 47th and Jefferson.
Being in the Unity Temple on the Plaza reminded me of the time I drove an 89- year-old retired and legally blind school teacher from her home in Bethany, Missouri to Kansas City. “Remember Minnie Kennedy?” I asked Faye. “I brought her down in the OATS bus one time. She wanted to ‘see’ the wood carving of the life-sized Last Supper which was on display at Unity at that time, and she wanted a new hat from Macy’s which was then where the Barnes and Noble book store and the Pottery Barn on 47th Street are now. I think I can say that Minnie and I were friends after that.”
After church we went out the back way and turned on Nichols Road. I told Faye and Fern, “We are passing through where my great-grandfather Spickert had a corn field. I was passing this spot with my Grandmother many years ago. As we passed by on 47th Street, she pointed to the stores and shops at our left.” She said, “My dad used to have a corn field right there.” I believed her story, but I’ve told that story to others who thought I was trying to say that my family got rich from selling that farm land. That is certainly not true. He owned a dry-goods store at 42nd and Woodland. He was never rich, and I doubt that he owned the land where he grew the corn.”
We headed east along Ward Parkway which became Swope Parkway which became Blue Parkway. As we passed along Brush Creek, I told Faye, “For many years Brush Creek had a concrete bottom. A powerful and not-so-honest politician named Tom Pendergast owned Redi-Mixed Concrete Company in Kansas City and wanted to sell some concrete, so he got the city to put the concrete bottom in the creek. A big flash flood occurred here in 1977 when it rained eleven inches in 24 hours. Brush Creek flowed out of its banks causing a lot of damage to the Plaza stores. In the area, that flood caused 25 deaths and property damage came to 80 million dollars. I think there was another such flood a few years later causing property damage, but I don’t think anyone was killed in that one.”
”I kind of remember that,” responded Faye.
We passed a few other memories as we headed east to Blue Springs along highway 350 and then north on Highway 7, but by then I was talked out. Even a blabber mouth like me gets tired eventually.