Army.*

What Hawkeye and Trapper John had had trouble doing vis à vis Francis Burns, M.D., when they were all assigned to the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Iron Triangle of Korea, had been accepting the Army's and Major Burns' notion that Dr. Burns was a surgeon. Neither Captain Pierce nor Captain McIntyre, M.C., U.S.A., were very much impressed by Dr. Burns' tailored and stiffly starched surgical greens (complete with insignia of rank on both shoulders).

'It takes more than surgical greens, no matter how well tailored, to make a surgeon,' as Dr. Pierce had said.

'Starting with knowing which end of the scalpel to hold,' Dr. McIntyre had agreed.

In private practice, it had not been at all hard to find out, Dr. Burns had been proprietor of a thriving pediatric clinic, where his surgery had been essentially limited to extracting large sums of money from first-time mothers by agreeing with their every dark and imaginative suspicion regarding their children's health. On those rare occasions when it had been impossible to find a nurse with free time on her hands to remove a splinter from the hand of one of his prepubescent patients and Dr. Burns' personal services had been required, he had proved so inept that - privately, of course - his fellow medical practitioners had referred to him as 'The Bumbling Baby Butcher of Shady Lane.'

How it had come to pass no one knew, but while passing through the Army's school for newly commissioned doctors, Frank Burns had been classified as a surgeon. There were several theories of how this had happened, ranging from a

 

*Colonel Blake, despite irresponsible reports to the contrary from people who would have known better had they been able to read words of more than one syllable, survived the Korean War and achieved high rank. A rather touching, and certainly splendidly written, account of his faithful service to his country as sort of a medical diplomat (and major general) may be found in M*A*S*H Goes to Paris (Sphere Books). This tome is a real bargain.

 

hung-over clerk punching a hole in the wrong place on the IBM card to the theory to which Doctors Pierce and McIntyre subscribed: that the North Koreans had infiltrated a secret agent into the medical training center, where, by assigning inept clowns like Frank Burns as front-line surgeons, he stood a good chance of killing off more troops than the North Korean Army would on the battlefield.

 

Major Burns' surgical ineptitude had been known to Colonel Blake, who had been, in the opinion of Doctors Pierce and McIntyre, a fair-to-middling cutter himself. Wise in the ways of the Army, Colonel Blake had, before Doctors Pierce and McIntyre arrived in Korea, done two things to keep Burns from wiping out the corps of patients. He had appointed Burns his deputy commander, in full charge of such military necessities as giving the 'Why We are Fighting Here' and 'How To Avoid Social Disease' lectures; counting the Hershey bars in the PX; and making sure that all the Jeeps had a wheel at each corner. He was also named the morale officer, the VD-control officer, the officers'-club officer, the postal officer, and the re-enlistment officer.

Colonel Blake had also had a word with Major Margaret Houlihan, Army Nurse Corps, a veteran professional soldier herself and a fine operating-room nurse. Major Houlihan had been told, soldier to soldier, that Major Burns was not to be allowed to perform any surgery of a complexity greater than trimming a fingernail unless every other doctor had fallen hors de combat.*

After the arrival of Captains Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre at the 4077th MASH, other problems developed. Colonel Blake had quickly come to understand that his two new surgeons were (a) splendid surgeons and (b) lousy officers, at least when judged by the standards of Major

 

* This little G.I. tete-à-tete resulted in a slight misunderstanding at first. Major Houlihan, who, as the senior nurse, felt a firm loyalty to her subordinates, was not fluent in French. 'If your doctors, Colonel,' she said, ‘are fooling around, they're not fooling around with my nurses. Bite your tongue, sir!*

 

 

Francis Burns, who had, upon donning his first uniform at the reception center, instantly come to think of himself as the George S. Patton of the Medical Corps.

 

As he frequently pointed out to Colonel Blake, his being referred to as 'Old Bumble Fingers,' 'El Bedpan,' and 'Hey, you!' violated every known canon of military courtesy and discipline.

Forced to choose between maintaining military discipline and providing his patients with the best cutters available, Colonel Blake had flown (perhaps 'flapped' would be a better word) in the face of tradition and appointed Captain Hawk-eye Pierce as chief surgeon of the 4077th MASH and Captain Trapper John McIntyre as his deputy.

With two exceptions this appointment pleased the entire medical staff of the 4077th MASH.

Major Burns was annoyed, of course. It was quite clear to him that since he was a major he knew more about any given subject, including surgery, than any lowly captain, and thus the appointment should have been his. He brought this logical conclusion to the attention of Colonel Blake at his first opportunity, and Colonel Blake responded with the succinct phraseology of command for which the career soldier is famous.

'Shut up, Frank,' Colonel Blake had replied. 'And get your fat ass out of my tent.'

Tears had come to Major Burns' eyes, and as he had marched out of Colonel Blake's tent his somewhat obscured vision had caused him to bump into Major Margaret Houlihan.

Although Major Houlihan was not only a first-class nurse but a professional soldier as well, under her 38D chest beat, of course, the heart of woman, and women, as a class, manifest on occasion an emotion known as the maternal instinct. This maternal emotion burst into full bloom in Major Houlihan's bosom the moment she saw Frank Burns' face with a tear running down each cheek.

She knew that this man, this boyish chap, this tall fellow who alone among the officer-doctors of the 4077th MASH had observed every subde nuance of the correct inter-officer relationship (he had, in other words, always referred to her as 'Major' Houlihan, rather than as 'Nurse,' or 'Hey, you!'), had just suffered some unbearable (and probably unspeakable) tribulation, and that it behooved her as both woman and fellow major to console him in his hour of pain.

Major Margaret Houlihan accomplished this by taking Major Frank Burns to her tent, giving him a couple of belts of medicinal bourbon, and encouraging him, as one officer to another, to open his heart to her.

Possibly it was because he was so distressed by the gross injustice of what had happened to him that Major Burns, in relating to Major Houlihan the story of his life, neglected to mention that there was at home a Mrs. Francis Burns and four little Burnses.

One thing, as they say, led to another, starting with Major Houlihan's professional medical opinion that if two ounces of medicinal bourbon had made Major Burns stop crying, four would probably make him smile. To cut a long and somewhat sordid story short, when reveille sounded the next morning, it found Major Burns and Major Houlihan in flagrant violation of a military regulation themselves. The Army frowns on two officers sharing the same cot, folding, field, wood and canvas, M1917A2, and, in fact, strictly proscribes such behavior.

'This is bigger than both of us, Frank!' Major Margaret Houlihan had cried.

'Not much bigger,' Major Frank Burns had replied. ‘I almost fell out.'

'I mean our love!' she'd said.

'Oh,' he'd replied.