![]() ![]() He hated the anti-war sentiments ascribed to him by the public. ![]() Eventually, viewers came to see the show as a kind of allegory for the Vietnam War. The show helped the public deal with the emotional toll of Vietnam, and illustrated the harsh conditions of both conflicts for future generations. Though the show was ostensibly about the Korean War, it captured both the nation and Alan Alda’s disillusionment with the stalemate and human cost of the Vietnam War, largely through the cranky character of Hawkeye Pierce. (Credit: Chris Howes/Wild Places Photography/Alamy Stock Photo) And it helped capture the sarcasm and heart of Hornberger himself through Hawkeye Pierce, whose sarcasm and heart helped his friends and patients sustain operating conditions that were primitive and, often, nearly hopeless. Like the books he wrote, it included a strong-willed head nurse, a Korean teenager whom the doctors sent to the United States for college on their own dime, and a doctor who dressed in drag at least once. The book was adapted to a hit movie and then a TV show that helped capture life in the unit. It was the perfect moment for a novel about war: the Vietnam War was looking more and more intractable and Americans longed for a lighter take on war. It took 12 years to write MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, and another five years being rejected by publishers before the book was finally published under the pseudonym Richard Hooker in 1968. When word got to other MASH units, doctors started doing arterial repairs there, too, and after the Korean War ended in 1953, doctors who dared to do the surgery helped further medical knowledge about how to repair human arteries and other blood vessels.Īs for Hornberger, who went on to work in at the VA and in private practice, he dealt with the trauma he experienced during the Korean War by writing about it. ![]() It is thought that Hornberger was the first to flout those rules-and scenes in his bestselling book back up the theory. In 1951, Hornberger’s colleagues tell Friedman, surgeons at the MASH unit decided that their Hippocratic oath to do no harm was more important than Army regulations and began to repair arteries despite the rules.Īn operation is performed on a wounded soldier at the 8209th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, twenty miles from the front lines of the Korean War on August 4, 1952. But the realities of war wounds made this intolerable to Hornberger and other surgeons who found themselves banned from repairing damaged arteries. Army regulations for surgeons to do anything but close off a blood vessel in the case of an injury to the vascular system, or blood vessels. Friedman, a vascular surgeon who recently published an account of Hornberger’s daring surgical attempt.Īt the time, it was against U.S. “Hornberger possessed the courage and audacity to attempt arterial repair when it was forbidden, and by one account, he may have been the first,” writes Steven G. In Korea, Hornberger pioneered a kind of surgery that was prohibited during the war. Life in a MASH unit was grueling: Aside from the constant stress of warfare and long hours in surgery, the units usually picked up and moved at least once a month. The MASH concept was simple: The hospitals were located close enough to the front lines to serve wounded soldiers, but far enough away that they weren’t in danger of bombs or direct combat. The 8055 was located on the 38th parallel, which divides the Korean Peninsula and today serves as the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.Īuthor and Korean War surgeon Richard Hornberger, who wrote under the alias Richard Hooker. The tent-based surgical hospital was one of seven fully functional, tent-based hospitals that operated at various points during the Korean War. Hornberger soon found himself in Mobile Army Surgical Hospital 8055. That included just-graduated medical students and interns like Hornberger, who was drafted in 1951. Meanwhile, the United States began drafting soldiers-and doctors. The war soon turned into a tense stalemate as truce talks between North and South failed again and again. Hornberger might have gone on to a normal career as a thoracic surgeon if not for the Korean War, which began in June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea.Ī month later, the United States sent its first troops into South Korea as part of a battle against international communism. Born in New Jersey in 1924, he struggled in his pre-med program and nearly didn’t get into med school until, according to biographer Dale Sherman, a chemistry teacher recommended him as “peculiar, but worth taking a chance on” to Cornell Medical School. Hornberger’s books may have been whimsical, but his real-life war experiences were dead serious. (Credit: 20th Century Fox/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock) Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce in the television show MASH. ![]()
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