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.