MASH 11 MASH Goes To San Francisco

by Richard Hooker+William Butterworth

  Speaking as soldier to soldier, the Eighth Army surgeon told the chief nurse of the 4077th MASH that the only reason he wasn’t shipping her home in disgrace was because she was a good operating-room nurse and was needed at the 4077th.

  “Think what you like about those two clowns with the private still and the barber’s chair, Margaret,” he said, “they’re first-class surgeons, and that’s the bottom line. I had a moment or two to observe that simpering jackass, Frank Burns, at work on the table, and my first reaction was to have him sent home on the next plane. The only reason I’m not doing that is because he’d love it, and, more important, if I keep him here, he can empty bedpans, sweep the floor, give social-disease shots, and free the enlisted men for more important things.”

  “I’m sorry, Sammy,” Margaret said. “I really am.”

  “Soldier to soldier, Major,” the general said, “you’re blinded by love for that jackass.”

  “You really think so?” she asked, on the verge of tears.

  “You can take it from me, Major,” the general said. “I’m a doctor, and we know all about things like that.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” the general said. “You keep that jackass out of Colonel Blake’s hair, and you keep him out of Hawkeye and Trapper John’s hair.”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Houlihan said, snapping to attention and saluting. Saluting required that she raise her right hand (with the arm attached, of course) so that the extended fingers touched her eyebrow. As she raised her arm, the pectoral muscles grew taut, lifting those organs contained in what the quartermaster general referred to as “Container, bosoms, with harness, heavy duty, winter and summer, M1940B4, size 38 D” into a rather spectacular position.

  The general’s mouth dropped open. It was all too clear what Major Burns saw in Major Houlihan, although what she saw in him he couldn’t imagine.

  “Carry on, Major,” he finally snapped, and then marched out of her tent, went back to his helicopter, and flew back to Seoul.

  Despite her good intentions, Major Houlihan was not able to restrain the emotions in her magnificent bosom. In the operating room, she was as quick as anyone else to block Frank Burns’ way whenever it appeared that he might be approaching one of the patients with surgery in mind. But if it wasn’t quite literally a matter of life and death—in other words, out of the operating room—her emotions got the best of her. Whenever she laid her soft brown eyes on Frank Burns’ bewildered little boy’s face, whenever she saw the hurt in his eyes after one of the others (truth to tell, usually Hawkeye or Trapper John) had hurt his sensitive feelings by some masculine cruelty, the desire to wrap him in her arms and comfort him swelled up in her bosom and overcame logic and common sense.

  It must be admitted, too, that neither Dr. Pierce nor Dr. McIntyre were entirely blameless in the matter; their conduct was certainly (and admittedly) not that expected of officers and gentlemen of the Army Medical Corps.

  An officer and a gentleman, for example, would not dream of rigging the nurses’ shower tent wall so that it would come tumbling down while the chief nurse was at her morning ablutions. This happened, to Major Houlihan’s obvious discomfiture and the great glee of the ambulatory ward, while said ambulatory patients “happened” to be walking by.

  And it took the exact antithesis of an officer and a gentleman to conceive, much less execute, the foul idea of placing the microphone to the hospital public-address system under the springs of Major Houlihan’s cot, so that the entire hospital became privy to the most intimate of discussions between that officer and gentlewoman and Major Burns.*

  (* During this incident, shortly before cheers, whistles, and applause announced that they were not quite as alone as they had presumed, Major Burns told Major Houlihan that her lips burned like a holy fire. When Major Houlihan stuck her head out of the tent to ascertain the cause of the cheers, whistles, and applause, Captain Pierce cried out, “Here she is, gang! Let’s hear it! Three cheers for Hot Lips Houlihan!” For some reason, the unfortunate appellation stuck.)

  Major Houlihan and Major Burns remained the best of friends for about six months. (The friendship ended when Major Houlihan became aware that Mrs. Frank Burns and the four little Burnses back in Hillandale, Ohio, were a fact, not just another scurrilous rumor spread by Doctors Pierce and McIntyre. But that is another, somewhat sordid story, on which we will not dwell.)

  During that six-month period, Hot Lips remembered afterwards with remorse and chagrin, she was Frank Burns’ willing partner in what Major Burns referred to as “straightening this circus out.”

  While Colonel Blake was physically on the premises, of course, nothing toward that end could be accomplished, for Colonel Blake apparently preferred what Major Burns thought of as a three-ring circus to a G.I. MASH. But the moment the colonel’s Jeep passed out of sight down the dirt road to the main supply route, Major Frank Burns, by the Army’s immutable laws of seniority, became the hospital commander.

  And as hospital commander, his powers vis â vis saluting, reveille, shining boots, and performing that quaint choreography known as close-order drill were limitless, at least so far as the enlisted men were concerned—which is why he came to be held in such passionate loathing by Hawkeye and Trapper John.

  The very first morning Major Burns found himself hospital commander pro tem, he appeared at the bachelor officers’ quarters occupied by Captains Pierce and McIntyre. Major Houlihan had provided him with a brass whistle, which he blew immediately upon entering the tent.

  “All right, men!” he cried, in creditable mimicry of the sergeant who had conducted the medical officer’s indoctrination program at Fort Sam Houston. “Let’s hit it!”

  “You blow that whistle again, pig-eyes,” Dr. Pierce responded, “and I’ll make you eat it!”

  “You officers are in charge of this morning’s close-order drill!” Major Burns said. “Hop to it!”

  In perfect duet, Captains Pierce and McIntyre suggested that Major Burns perform a physiologically impossible act of attempted self-impregnation.

  “What did you say?” he asked, shocked to the quick.

  Both doctors repeated the suggestion, this time pronouncing each syllable with great clarity, so there would be no chance whatsoever that they would be misunderstood.

  “You just wait till I tell the colonel what you said!” Major Burns said, fleeing the tent. “He’ll fix you!”

  Despite the threat (which he indeed carried out), Major Burns was momentarily frustrated. Under similar circumstances, he would take his problem to Major Houlihan, who, drawing upon her greater military experience, would tell him what subsequent steps to take. But he could not take this defiance of his legal authority to Major Houlihan, for that would mean repeating verbatim what Hawkeye and Trapper John had told him to do, and Frank Burns had been told by his mother never to use language like that in the presence of a lady.

  So he himself conducted close-order drill for the enlisted men. This posed an awful problem for Doctors Pierce and McIntyre. While they found the idea of marching to and fro to Frank Burns’ somewhat nasal orders repulsive, the idea that the troops should be doing it, with equal reluctance, while they hid behind their officer status and relative immunity, was even more repugnant. So, attired in a blanket (Dr. Pierce) and a silk dressing gown (Dr. McIntyre), Hawkeye and Trapper John, muttering naughty words not very much under their breath, joined the enlisted men.

  It only happened that once. (During that night, party or parties unknown burned all of Major Burns’ footwear; it being difficult, if not absolutely impossible to march on a rocky field in one’s bare feet, close-order drill was temporarily abandoned.) But once was enough, and close-order drill was not the only means by which Major Burns attempted to infiltrate what he thought of as “soldierly behavior” into the 4077th MASH. Because the enlisted men’s mess (which also served as their recreation center) did not meet Major Burns’ Pattonesque standards of neatness and decorum,
he (a) tore down and burned what Doctors Pierce and McIntyre regarded as one of the finest displays of pulchritudinous art in Korea and (b) suspended the sale of beer.

  Providing the troops with a wee drop with which to water down their cares was simply a matter of operating the still on a twenty-four-hour (rather than an eight-hour) basis, but the enlisted men’s art gallery was lost forever, and that was obviously unforgivable.

  When Colonel Blake returned from his business in Seoul and opposing sides brought what they considered to be statements of misbehavior on the part of others to his attention, the colonel, although his sympathies clearly lay with the troops and Trapper John and Hawkeye, was placed in a somewhat delicate position.

  While he did not condone the shutting off of the troops’ beer and the destruction of the art gallery, neither could he condone all-night drinking parties in bachelor officers’ quarters by the troops. And while he did think that, as fellow officers of the command, Captains Pierce and McIntyre had had every right to give Major Burns the benefit of their thinking vis â vis the enlisted men’s morale, he had to agree with Major Burns that being called a “miserable chicken-bleep son of a blap” by Captains Pierce and McIntyre did go a bit beyond the language permitted for officers when addressing a superior.

  What Major Burns thought of as “the Great Mutiny” died not with a bang but a whimper. The sale of beer was resumed in the enlisted men’s mess, and a fresh start made on the art gallery. (The colonel declined, however, an eleven-by-fourteen inch color photograph of Major Houlihan, taken the day the shower-tent wall fell down and offered by Captains Pierce and McIntyre as the first work of art for display in the new art gallery.) And while the colonel continued the “temporary” abandonment of reveille and close-order drill, he also flatly forbade any further reference to Majors Burns and Houlihan as “Romeo and Juliet,” “Beauty and the L’il Beastie,” or anything else that suggested their relationship was somewhat unmilitary, not to mention unchaste.

  The uneasy truce lasted until the next time Colonel Blake was ordered from the 4077th MASH on temporary duty and Major Burns again took command by virtue of his rank. Possessed of what Hawkeye referred to as a “weasel-like shrewdness,” Major Burns did not, this time, attempt to enforce his notions of proper military behavior on the male officers, but rather restricted himself to harassing the enlisted men and the nurses.

  In the case of the latter, Captains Pierce and McIntyre scheduled professional medical lectures (which had priority) whenever Major Burns’ “order of the day” called for close-order drill, trench digging, or whatever. But this left the enlisted men, again, catching all the nonsense. Hawkeye and Trapper John were always able to frustrate Frank Burns’ plans eventually, but it was usually after the fact. And before countermeasures could be put into play, the troops suffered.

  Like seven or eight million others who have answered their draft boards’ summonses only to find a slimy viper curled round the flagpole, Hawkeye and Trapper John vowed solemn retribution against their viper, such retribution to take place after they had been discharged.

  Unlike the others, however, Hawkeye and Trapper John did not let this burning desire for sweet justice flicker out and die when they went home. It is true, of course, they didn’t go through with their announced intention to roast ex-Major Burns, a la the Apache custom, upside down over a slow fire, nor did the opportunity present itself to tie Frank Burns’ major extremities to four large horses and send the horses galloping off in four different directions.

  They eked out their revenge in more subtle ways.

  Each March 13, for example, Florists’ Telegraph Delivery delivered to Dr. Burns’ Hillandale, Ohio, residence one large potted passion flower, together with a card reading, “Thinking of You on Our Day.”

  March 13 was the anniversary of the day Hawkeye and Trapper John had, after slipping Major Burns a strong sedative in his tea, encased him to his neck in plaster of Paris; they took some pleasure in knowing that Mrs. Burns would not know this.

  And through the year, as they thumbed through magazines, they carefully tore out, and filled out, in Major Burns’ name, all the postage-paid business-reply coupons, offering such things as lifetime subscriptions to the Bee-Keeper’s Journal (“Send no money till February!”) or a complete record library for only 99 cents down and $18.90 a month for the rest of one’s life.

  They had met, face to face, just once in all the years that had passed. Dr. Burns had left the practice of pediatric medicine for a specialty that was both inimical to pediatrics and paid better. He was the founder and president of the Burns Vasectomological Institute, where $250 (“Easy Terms Available”) bought a fifteen-minute quasi-surgical procedure known in the trade as tube-snipping.

  Even physicians engaged in such a noble enterprise as making irreversible contributions toward zero population growth needed rest, relaxation, and the company of their peers. Dr. Burns had gone to New Orleans, Louisiana, to attend the National Convention of the American College of Tonsil, Adenoid and Vas Deferens Surgeons (more popularly known as the TA & VD Society). By coincidence, Dr. Pierce and Dr. McIntyre had happened to be in the Crescent City at the same time. The press of their duties, however, had been such that no opportunity had arisen to, as Dr. Pierce told Dr. McIntyre, “Give old Frank what he really deserves.”*

  (* The details of the visit of Doctors Pierce and McIntyre to New Orleans have been recorded for posterity, for those with an interest in the extraordinary, in a neatly glued-together volume entitled, M*A*S*H Goes to New Orleans (Pocket Books, New York).)

  What Doctors Pierce and McIntyre felt that Dr. Burns really deserved cannot be reported in a fine, morally uplifting volume such as this without resorting to the most shameless euphemisms. Suffice it to say that when the telephone in Dr. Pierce’s office rang they had just completed phase one of project “Where Frank Walks.”

  Phase one had involved dealing with chemists who worked for the nation’s largest herbicide manufacturers. They now had in their hands a product known as Dichlorobichloroalkamkydchlestrolal B13 (short title DCC-B13), .001 cc of which was absolutely guaranteed not only to instantly kill any grass it came in contact with, but also to so contaminate the surrounding soil, for a distance of eighteen inches, that grass would not grow there again for at least three years.

  Dr. Burns, when he could spare the time from counting the money the Burns Vasemological Institute brought in, was a devoted golfer. And Hawkeye and Trapper John had recently learned that, after having been denied admission on twelve separate occasions, Dr. Burns had finally been admitted to membership in the Hillandale Country Club.

  So, when the telephone rang, Dr. Pierce and Dr. McIntyre were lovingly injecting one syringe-full after another of Dichlorobichloroalkamkydchlestrolal B-13 into the soles of a brand-new pair of golf shoes. Miss Miller was writing—in a hand obviously female and full of loops, whirls, and little circles instead of periods and dots—a little letter to accompany the shoes, telling Dr. Burns they were the little gift of someone who admired him from afar but was too shy to tell him so to his face.

  With a little bit of luck, Frank Burns’ first round of golf on the Hillandale links would be something that would be remembered for years.

  Chapter Three

  “If you’ll forgive my saying so, Doctors,” Student Nurse Barbara Ann Miller said, “this is really rotten!” She giggled with delight.

  “I should hope so,” Dr. Pierce replied, “considering what this Dichlorobichloroalkamkydchlestrolal cost us.”

  “Fish-eye Frank Burns, M.D., must really be a terrible man!” Miss Miller said.

  “You know that professional ethics forbid me to comment adversely on either the professional skill or moral character of a fellow healer,” Dr. Pierce said, “but you said it, sweetie!”

  This was when the telephone rang. Miss Miller grabbed it on the first ring.

  “Dr. Pierce’s office,” she said. “Dr. Pierce is in conference and cannot be disturbed unless in case of
medical emergency.”

  She blushed at the reply and extended the phone to Hawkeye.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she confessed.

  “Did you tell him that I’m not talking unless there’s a medical emergency?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “And he said that unless you come on the line, there will be a medical emergency.” Curiosity got the better of Dr. Pierce and he reached for the phone. “Did he say what kind of an emergency?” he asked, covering the phone with his hand.

  Barbara Ann Miller nodded her head and blushed. “Well?”

  “He said unless you got on the phone in two seconds he personally would bust your gluteus maximus,* Doctor.”

  (* The gluteus maximus are muscles inside what is commonly known as the rump. Dr. Grogarty knew this, as most physicians do, and consequently this is not exactly what he said he was going to bust if Hawkeye did not answer the phone.)

  “Who the hell is this?” Dr. Pierce said into the phone. “And who the hell do you think you are, interrupting my conference?”

  The other three looked at him rather fondly as he said this. He was often at his best when telling someone off. What happened next, however, surprised and even shocked the others in the room.

  “Yes, sir!” Dr. Pierce said. “This is me, sir. I hope you’ll forgive me for any delay, sir. If I had only known you would be good enough to call.”

  For a moment Trapper John thought that Hawkeye was working up to some masterful sarcastic putdown of the caller, but then he recognized, from the look of pain in his friend’s eyes, that Hawkeye was really sorry about something. Curiosity got the better of him, too, and he reached up and punched the button that placed both ends of the call on loudspeakers. He did this in time to amplify the caller’s next comment.

  “And what about that bum McIntyre? Is he sober enough to talk?”