In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The Americans Who Fought the Korean War

Preface

>> ix Preface When the first episode of the television series M*A*S*H aired in the fall of 1972 I was just shy of three years old, not exactly a member of the producer’s target audience.1 But, despite my age and a few flirtations with The Dukes of Hazzard and Charlie’s Angels and in part because of syndication, I came to be a regular viewer and loyal fan of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea and its collection of unusual doctors and support personnel. I tuned in every week to watch Hawkeye and Trapper John (or, after the third season , Hawkeye and B. J. Honeycutt—the B and J standing for “anything you want”) cooking up trouble, Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger donning a dress in his futile attempt to secure a Section 8 (mentally unfit for service) discharge , and Radar O’Reilly wheeling and dealing for supplies and equipment over the Army’s archaic communication system. Decades later, I still chuckle when I think of Klinger decked out as the Statue of Liberty in honor of General MacArthur’s visit or of straight-man Frank Burns ending up asleep at an aid station near the front with a toe tag reading “emotionally exhausted and morally bankrupt.”2 Certainly, moments of bitterness and solemnity crept into the script. Who could ever forget that Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake perished when the enemy shot down his helicopter over the Sea of Japan or that Hawkeye could never brew enough moonshine in his homemade still to forget the war (late in the series Hawkeye suffered a war-related emotional breakdown)? But, week after week M*A*S*H delivered to my television set and to millions of others across the country images of Korea as a war full of much more levity and entertainment than the conflict Americans had just watched play out in Vietnam. At the same time, the jaded and worldly attitudes possessed by the main characters belonged more to the generation that weathered the sixties and seventies than to the one that came of age in the years during and just after World War II. Yet, engrossed in the happenings of the 4077th , few viewers bothered to question whether or not the scenes meticulously crafted by Larry Gelbart and others and disseminated by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) accurately reflected the experiences of the men and women who served in Korea. Strangely, in the American mind, M*A*S*H became x << Preface much more than just another television program—it became the reality of the Korean War. Not until graduate school did I begin to separate my own memories of M*A*S*H from the history of the Korean War—and then only because of a chance encounter with a group of “Forgotten War” veterans. Having decided to write on the Vietnam War, I attended a “veterans’ prom” in hopes of making some connections. As the evening wore on, I settled in with a group of men discussing their wartime experiences. It did not take long for me to realize not only that these men were Korean rather than Vietnam veterans but also that the war they were describing had little in common with the one I had become familiar with through M*A*S*H. That night I went home and began reading everything I could find on the Korean War—an easy task given the short supply of books and articles devoted to the conflict, especially in comparison to World War II and the Vietnam War. And, the more that I read, the more convinced I became that M*A*S*H’s 251 episodes spread over eleven years had not told the story of the men and women who rotated in and out of the Korean War. Maxwell Klinger had it right when he said, “I think it’s the most stupidest thing in the world. You call it a police action back home, right? Over here it’s a war. A police action sounds like we’re over here arresting people, handing out parking tickets. A war’s just killing that’s all.”3 But, the show itself, while set in Korea, more closely mirrored the perceptions and realities of the Vietnam era and of that generation of veterans. Standing in the shadow of the “Greatest Generation ” and shaded by the legacies of Vietnam, the Americans who served in Korea from June 1950 to July 1953 had yet to have their own narrative told. That realization became the genesis and driving force of this book. ...