Monster Mash
In New Zealand, M*A*S*H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) has been aired most every weekday at 4:30 p.m. and has now run for over a decade longer than the actual Korean War. “The back story is that in June 1950, Kim Il-Sung’s North Korean People’s Army invaded South Korea.
To Stalin’s great surprise, the United Nations Security Council backed the defense of South Korea, though the Soviets were then boycotting meetings to protest that Taiwan and not Communist China held a permanent seat on the Council. A UN force of personnel from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Canada, Australia, France, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand and other countries joined to stop the invasion. Countries like New Zealand, were considered belligerents or armed parties in the war.
The story of M*A*S*H was based on the 1970 Korean War movie satire directed by Robert Altman and adapted from the novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, by Richard Hooker. The series debuted in 1972 when America was embroiled in the Vietnam war. It centered around the antics (or should that read politics) of the character Hawkeye Pearce and his fellow medical personnel of the fictional 4077th M*A*S*H unit. It’s a medical drama/black comedy that follows a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu, South Korea, during the Korean War.
My father, now in his mid 70’s loves this show. From time to time I sit with him and watch it. He gets the humour but also the irony of it all, me too. When you watch it for long enough, I think no matter who you are, you get it eventually. And you get that, at the time, it was a fairly ballsy show to make in the then political climate.
One of my Dad’s favourites is the Jamie Farr character, Corporal (later Sergeant) Maxwell Klinger whose original defining characteristic is his persistent attempts to gain a Section 8 Psychiatric Discharge from the army, by habitually wearing women’s clothing and engaging in other “crazy” stunts. The Mike Farrell character B.J. Hunnicutt once remarked that Klinger was actually the sane one for always trying to get out. The rest of them he felt were crazy for accepting their situation.
Perhaps war is like that, sucks us in to feeling that gunfire is ‘normal’, natural even. I don’t know, I’ve never been. I’m grateful for our troops and their peace-keeping efforts, those stories from the war you never hear unless you talk to someone who has been. I think of meeting up again with my old friend Susan a few short months ago. Susan who is and has been a Peace-keeper. She shared some of the stories of building schools and infrastructure in war torn places and I felt so terribly terribly proud to be her friend.
But I do wonder sometimes how long a belief or even an ideal can sustain a person until eventually the sound of gunfire is as natural as birdsong. It’s obviously possible since people can be and are sustained by those things. M*A*S*H’s title sequence featured an instrumental version of the Mike Altman lyrics “Suicide Is Painless”, which also appears in the original film. Mike Altman is the son of the original film’s director, Robert Altman and was 14 years old when he composed the song’s lyrics.
The song is played during the film’s opening credits, sung by uncredited session singers John Bahler, Tom Bahler, Ron Hicklin and Ian Freebairn-Smith (the vocals are sometimes misattributed to Johnny Mandel since his is the only name officially credited for the song). Additionally, the movie also featured a scene that began when Walter Koskiusko Waldowski, a dentist nicknamed “Painless Pole”, who declared his intention to commit suicide, and the song is then sung by Ken Prymus (playing Private Seidman) during the suicide scene.
By the end of the Korean War, Klinger has fallen in love with and married a native Korean woman, Soon Lee (Rosalind Chao). In the final M*A*S*H episode, Klinger reverses his long time goal to leave Korea, and decides to stay to help search for her relatives (inspired by real US troops choosing to stay in Korea after the war).
In the short-lived spin-off, AfterMASH, we learn that soon after the end of the war, Klinger and his wife, having found her family, return to the United States. He’s disowned and ostracised by his own family for marrying a Korean and finds his hometown unwelcoming to a mixed-race couple. In desperation, he resorts to petty crime to make ends meet, is caught and put on trial.
He contacts Colonel Potter seeking help, and a deal is struck, whereby, in exchange for the charges being dropped, Klinger and his wife move to St. Louis, Missouri and work at the hospital that Colonel Potter now administers. He studies for a Civil Service Exam, while he and Soon Lee await their first child.”
Looking out my window, and as I write this, the blue skies here in Central Hawke’s Bay hurt my eyes. It’s the only thing that hurts this morning, and I never tire from looking at them. I feel so incredibly grateful for my life, do you? And perhaps the lesson we might learn from one monster mashed up Maxwell? The circle of life, starts and ends where it begins, there’s something ironic about that isn’t there. There is, trust me. There is.
