A Look Back At Richard Hornberger, The Author Of MASH

I watched an episode of MASH on METV last night. 

The show was funny, and I laughed a couple of times, but the TV series was nowhere near as funny and clever as the Richard Hornberger (seen in the below photo) MASH novel or the 1970 Robert Altman film.

I first saw the film MASH in 1971 when I was an 18-year-old sailor serving on the USS Kitty Hawk as the aircraft carrier performed combat operations on “Yankee Station,” in the South China Sea, off the coast of North Vietnam. 

A lot of the older officers and senior enlisted hated the film, as they saw it as an anti-Vietnam War message, even if the film portrayed the Korean War.  

Although I was a fervent anti-communist and supported the Vietnam War – I thought we should have gone all out to win the war – I loved the film. 

I thought it was funny and irreverent, like other service comedies that preceded it.   

I bought the book, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, soon after we returned home from Southeast Asia. I liked Richard Hornberger’s classic satirical novel even better than the film. 

Richard Hornberger (seen in the above photo in South Korea in front of the tent famously known as the "Swamp"), wrote the slim novel under the pen name Richard Hooker in 1968. 

Hornberger served as an Army doctor in a MASH unit during the Korean War, and according to those who knew him, he based the wise-cracking and irreverent character Hawkeye Pierce on himself.  

Richard Hornberger, who died in 1997 when he was 73, liked the film, and he liked actor Donald Sutherland’s portrayal of Hawkeye Pierce (seen in the above photo), although he hated the actor’s long hair, which a soldier in the Army would not have.  

He disliked the TV series, as actor Alan Alda and the producers used the comedy show as an antiwar allegory against the Vietnam War - even more than the film. 

The author, a political conservative, said he was not against the Korean War (or the Vietnam War), but as a doctor and draftee, he laughed at the nonsense he encountered in the Army. 

I watched the TV show, as it was often funny (I loved Harry Morgan's Colonel Potter character), but I too disliked the cheap shots at the U.S. military, while they never once condemned the brutal and dictatorial North Koreans, who invaded South Korea and started the war. 

You can watch three clips from the Robert Altman film with Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye, Elliot Gould as Trapper John, Tom Skerrett as Duke, Robert Duval as Frank Burns, and Sally Kellerman as "Hot Lips" via the blow clips:

Donald Sutherland,Elliott Gould,Tom Skerritt in M*A*S*H - martini (youtube.com)

MASH (2/5) Movie CLIP - Sayonara to Frank Burns (1970) HD - YouTube

MASH (4/5) Movie CLIP - A Shower With Hot Lips (1970) HD (youtube.com)

Mash 1970, Football - YouTube

Catch-22: No 80 On The Guardian's 100 Best Novels List

I've read Joseph Heller's comic classic Catch-22 three times in my life. I was a teenager in high school the first time I read Catch-22 and I thought the WWII novel was funny.

The second time I read the novel was a few years later when I was an 18-year-old sailor serving aboard an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. Unlike Heller at the time, I was a military hawk and I supported the U.S. efforts in Vietnam. Yet I enjoyed the anti-war novel even more the second time I read it, as I recognized more clearly and intimately some of the absurdities of military life and war.

The third and last time I read Catch-22 I was in my 40s and I was serving as the civilian administrative officer of  a Defense Department Command in Philadelphia. I was working closely with high-ranking military officers, so from this additional perspective, I got a kick out of Heller's satiric look at command leadership.

Today I remain a military hawk and I still don't subscribe to Heller's world-view. But now that I've left the Defense Department and I cover the military as a writer, perhaps it is time to once again read Catch-22. 

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian takes a look back at the novel, as he ranks Catch-22 at number 80 in the newspaper's list of 100 Best Novels.

In 1962, writing in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan saluted Catch-22 as “the most striking debut in American fiction since Catcher in the Rye.” Within a year, he had been joined, in a chorus of praise, by writers as various as Harper Lee, Norman Mailer and Graham Greene. More than 50 years later, this brilliant novel still holds an unforgettable comic grip on the reader.

“It was love at first sight,” Heller begins, setting the tone for everything that follows. “The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

Bombardier Yossarian is in a military hospital with a pain in his liver that’s not quite jaundice. Hinting at the famous “catch” of the title, Yossarian can be treated if he’s got jaundice, but discharged if he hasn’t. If neither, then he’s in a Kafkaesque limbo, where he’s at the mercy of fate.

This anticipates the notorious conditions under which a combat airman can be grounded: you have to be insane before you’re excused flying combat missions, but if you don’t want to fly any more missions that proves you are not insane. The OED defines this “Catch-22” as “a difficult situation from which there is no escape, because it involves mutually conflicting or dependent conditions”, which is a very dull way to describe the absurd crux whose mad logic exhilarates every page of one of the greatest war novels of all time.

Bombardier Yossarian, who is at odds with his own side as much as with the enemy, is an unforgettable second world war Everyman, whose cat-and-mouse relationship with a cast of deranged oddballs – Milo Minderbinder, Major Major and Doc Daneeka – is played out, amid mounting absurdity, on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean. It’s 1944, and Yossarian has figured out that “the enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on”.

Inevitably, the high comedy with which the novel opens eventually modulates into a darker, bleaker humour, and movingly, it’s the tragic death of rear-gunner Snowden which reminds us that Heller’s merriment is the kind of gallows laughter that’s inspired by the horror of war.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/30/robert-mccrum-100-best-novels-catch-22-joseph-heller

Note: I was disappointed in Mike Nichol's 1970 film adaptation of Catch-22, despite the film's fine cast. In contrast, I thought Robert Altman's 1970 film M*A*S*H was a fine adaptation of Richard Hooker's comic novel.

You can read Roger Ebert's review of the film Catch-22 via the below link:

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/catch-22-1970