Présentation de l'éditeur
The doctors who worked in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) during the Korean War were well trained but, like most soldiers sent to fight a war, too young for the job. In the words of the author, "a few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety of ways and degrees."
For fans of the movie and the series alike, here is the original version of that perfectly corrupt football game, those martini-laced mornings and sexual escapades, and that unforgettable foray into assisted if incompleted suicide--all as funny and poignant now as they were before they became a part of America's culture and heart.
Excerpted from MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker. Copyright (c) 1968 renewed 1996. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
With this to his advantage it seemed to Radar O'Reilly that he was a natural for the communications branch of the service, and so, following graduation, he turned down various highly attractive business opportunities, some of them legitimate, and decided to serve his country. Before his enlistment, in fact, he used to fall asleep at night watching a whole succession of, first, sleeve stripes, and then shoulder insignia, floating by until he would see himself, with four stars on his shoulders, conducting high-level Pentagon briefings, attending White House dinner parties and striding imperiously to ringside tables in New York night clubs.
In the middle of November of the year 1951 A.D., Radar O'Reilly, a corporal in the United States Army Medical Corps, was sitting in the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital astride the 38th Parallel in South Korea, ostensibly trying to fill a straight flush. Having received the message that the odds against such a fortuitous occurrence open at 72,192 to 1, what he was actually doing was monitoring a telephone conversation. The conversation was being conducted, over a precarious connection, between Brigadier General Hamilton Hartington Hammond, the Big Medical General forty- five miles to the south in Seoul, and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Braymore Blake, in the office of the commanding officer of the 4077th MASH, just forty-five yards to Radar O'Reilly's east.
"Listen," Radar O'Reilly said, his head turning slowly back and forth in the familiar scanning action.
"Listen to what?" Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski, the Dental Officer and Painless Pole, asked.
"Henry," Radar O'Reilly said, "is trying for two new cutters."
"I gotta have two more men," Colonel Blake was shouting into the phone, and Radar could hear it.
"What do you think you're running up there?" General Hammond was shouting back, and Radar could hear that, too. "Walter Reed Hospital?"
"Now you listen to me . . ." Colonel Blake was saying.
"Just take it easy, Henry," General Hammond was saying.
"I won't take it easy," Colonel Blake shouted. "If I don't get two . . ."
"All right! All right!" General Hammond shouted. "So I'll send you the two best men I have."
