MASH: An Army Surgeon in Korea

3. The MASH in Action

:1 rl'III~ tillSII IN ll(~"'I()N When I came out of the operating tent, Choi was there. It was daylight, about four in the afternoon, and he waited. Even in the heat ofthe summer , he wore the rumpled army fatigue jacket over his strong shoulders and an army fatigue cap over his jet-black hair. "Hi, Lieutenant," he said with a Korean accent. "You come with me:' "Where?" I said. He had started to walk away but turned and gazed at me with an amused smile that we would come to know well. He would shake his head and we knew he was thinking, "These Americans are a strange loe' "Where you think? I take you to sleeping tene' And again he was off, his short slender legs chopping on the brown Korean dust. I followed without another word. I knew that saying anything more would be useless. I just followed along. Twenty-five yards from the operating tent were three brown tents with wooden doors. A dusty walk lined with small white stones and tent pegs directed us to the tent flap. Choi opened the flap for me and popped to the side like a doorman; smiling, he bowed and, with a sweep of the arm, ushered me in. I hesitated before I entered. Inside the cots were scattered. The heat rushed out the door. "I fix for you:' Choi said proudly. My duffel bag was folded at the foot of my bed, its contents placed in a footlocker. A bed table with a water glass and a pitcher separated my cot from another. One ofthe cots was occupied, and I could hear the deep, regular breathing that marks the sleep of the exhausted. Without a word, I sat on the cot. White sheets and two olive drab army blankets made the bed. It was hard like a wooden bench. "Nice?" he said. "Nice:' I said. "You sleep:' he said. "I wake you for chow:' "Thanks:' I said, and I swung my swollen legs up on the cot and lay 44 MASH down in the heat. I looked at the dark brown ceiling of the tent and, in spite of the previous eighty hours, my eyes were wide open. This was not my idea of the army. My idea of the army was Walter Reed in Washington or, in the worst case scenario, an assignment as a battalion surgeon on loan to an installation hospital. That was our picture of army life when the war started: a nice easy job pulling a rotation in some quaint army hospital. Little did we know what we were in for when we headed for Korea. Little did we know that the MASH was made for mobility , vicious combat, and improvisation. That was the story of the MASH in action. Evacuation ofthe wounded from the combat site to the hospital was always one ofthe foremost problems facing doctors in wartime. The primary goal of the doctor-and of the tactical commander-was to treat the wounded soldier and return him as quickly as possible to his unit. That kept the strength of the combat units high and reduced the need for inexperienced replacements. Both medical officers (concerned with bed space in the hospitals) and personnel officers (concerned with the replacement chain) worried about the duration ofrecovery and the time needed for evacuation. As a result the concept of tactical mobility for surgical units was not new. Medical personnel have always recognized the importance ofremoving the wounded from the field of battle and conveying them by the quickest possible means to the rear area for medical care. Litter carriers, horses, ambulances, boats, and railroads have all been used to evacuate the wounded for emergency medical care. From early times tactical units have taken medical support with them on combat maneuvers to provide immediate care until the wounded could be evacuated. The MASH was an outgrowth of the experiences of warfare in this century. World War I had medics and doctors in hospitals and platoons of ambulance drivers to get the wounded from the battle lines to the medical care provided in stationary hospitals in the rear. Fredric Henry, in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, was an ambulance driver in the Italian army. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald drove an ambulance in the U.S. Army. The methods of evacuation were tenuous as were the methods of treatment in the hospitals in the rear. In World War I the nonfictional counterparts of...