Though each is happily married to a wife who awaits him back home, their service in Korea seems to offer them an opportunity to experience a kind of second adolescence. They rib one another, perpetrate elaborate practical jokes, call each other by pet names, objectify and harrass women, play golf, gamble, drink a surfeit of alcohol, and make a man cave of their shared living quarters (a tent that they famously christen “the Swamp”). Hornberger had been a dedicated fraternity member in college, and the novel’s triumvirate of young doctors (named Hawkeye, Trapper, and Duke) at times comport themselves like badly behaved undergraduates. Together, they engage in high jinks and exhibit what today might be called bro behavior. The novel’s focus, however, and its narrative, centers on a somewhat disjointed series of sketches involving a loose assemblage of colorful personalities. The book’s sometimes technical descriptions of the kinds of “meatball surgery” his characters perform in the field give it an air of authenticity. Richard Hornberger-a Trenton, New Jersey-born surgeon who had served at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War-who wrote the book with the help of the sportswriter W. Richard Hooker was actually the nom de plume of Dr. “ MASH” was mainly about decent people trying to survive an intolerable situation, making the occasion of its golden anniversary, this year, fortuitously relevant. The show was embraced by audiences and critics alike (it also spawned three of its own spinoffs), and when its finale aired, on February 28, 1983, it set a record for the most-watched television episode in broadcast history-a mark that still stands. Of these iterations, it is the last that arguably left the greatest cultural imprint, running for eleven seasons and considered by many to be the gold standard for quality programming in its day. Lost among this year’s observances of the paradigm-shifting cultural events of 1968 is the fiftieth anniversary of the book “ MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors,” a little-remembered shaggy-dog volume by Richard Hooker that engendered fourteen more novels a feature-film adaptation (directed by the then up-and-coming Robert Altman) and one of the highest-rated television series of all time. That’s one way to describe the basic plot of “ M*A*S*H,” with the added details that the protagonists are doctors and nurses in a war zone, and the setting is the Korean War. Salvation is found in small, personal connections, in wry humor, and in the forlorn hope that intelligence and decency will ultimately prevail. Each morning seems to bring some fresh hell, a reminder that the nightmare is real, and that there is no end in sight. Everyone is freaked out-overworked, irritable, unable to sleep, nerves completely shot. Patriotism has soured into ugly, gun-loving nationalism, with brown people and foreigners the targets of a nonsensical, hateful rage. The people in charge are dolts-masters of manipulation making testosterone-fuelled, incendiary moves on the world stage. Photograph from CBS Photo Archive / Getty Alan Alda, Mike Farrell, and Harry Morgan were among the ensemble cast of the long-running TV series “ M*A*S*H.” The book upon which it was based celebrates its golden anniversary this year.
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