When the last episode of M*A*S*H came on in 1983, my wife Joan made beef stew and let us eat it on TV trays in the living room, which she does not allow. Two and a half hours. When it was over I went out on the lanai and sat by myself for a while, and she let me do that too. She knew I wasn't only saying goodbye to a television show.

I was an Army medic in Korea. I was drafted in 1951, and I watched M*A*S*H from the first season in 1972 to the last night, eleven years, nearly every week. Some weeks I laughed so hard Joan came in from the kitchen to see what was wrong with me. Some weeks I got up and turned it off halfway and went to bed. Most weeks I did both before it was over.

My daughter Sharon put this page together with me on her computer over the summer, and she says people will want to read it. I'm not so sure, but here it is. I'm seventy years old, I worked the window at the main post office in Honolulu for thirty-one years, and I have opinions about M*A*S*H that Joan says she has heard enough of. So now you can hear them.

ON THIS PAGE: WHO I AM / WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT / WHAT THEY GOT WRONG / THE MEMORIAL / TEN I STILL WATCH

I was born in Honolulu in 1929, the youngest of four. My oldest brother Tom went to Italy with the 442nd in the big war and came home with a bad knee and some medals he kept in a cigar box and never talked about. When my own number came up in 1951, my mother cried, and then she went to the store and bought me two pairs of long underwear, which is the smartest thing anybody did for me that whole year.

They sent me to the mainland for basic training and then for medic training, and by the fall I was in Korea. I was an aid man with a rifle company first, and later I worked at the battalion aid station. I'm not going to put my outfit's numbers on here. Joan says if I do I'll get a letter from every man who ever wore that patch, and I'll answer every one and never get anything else done. She is right about that.

For anybody who doesn't know how it worked: when a man got hurt up front, the aid man got to him first. You did what you could, you tied a paper tag on him so the next people would know what you did, and the litter bearers carried him down to the aid station. The doctor there patched him up enough to travel. If it was bad, he went on to a clearing station, or a helicopter took him to a MASH. So I was never in a MASH. I was the step before. I sent them the boys you saw coming in on the helicopters at the start of every show.

I was there about a year. They had a rotation system by then: you went home when you had thirty-six points, and up on the line you earned four a month. I came home in the fall of 1952, married Joan in 1954, and went to work for the post office, and I stayed there until I retired.

The cold. They filmed it in California, so you mostly see everybody sweating, but in the winter shows they had it about right: the little stove in the middle of the tent with everybody crowded around it, the long johns, sleeping in your clothes. A boy from Honolulu had no idea a place could be that cold. Our plasma froze if you weren't careful. I wore both pairs of my mother's long underwear at the same time from December to March and I'm not ashamed to say it.

The helicopters. The little bubble helicopters with a stretcher basket on each side, so the wounded man rode outside in the wind with a blanket over him and the pilot all by himself up front. That's exactly what they were. The first time I saw them come over the hill in the opening of the show, I got up and went into the kitchen for a glass of water I didn't need.

The waiting. People think war is all fighting. In my year the peace talks were already going, and they went on and on, and we sat in the same hills for weeks with nothing happening. Then everything would happen at once, and then nothing again. The show understood that. Half the episodes are people bored out of their minds and getting on each other's nerves, and then Radar hears the helicopters before anybody else and it all changes in a minute.

The jokes. We were not as quick as Hawkeye. Nobody is as quick as Hawkeye, and he had writers. But we joked all the time, about the food, the cold, the Army, each other, and if you weren't there you'd think we were crazy. That's how you stayed sane. Denver Gutshall, a litter bearer from West Virginia, had a running bit about writing his congressman about the powdered eggs, and he added a new paragraph every morning for months. I laughed every single time. I'd laugh now.

Mail call. The show always knew the mail was the most important thing in camp. It was. Maybe that's why I went to work at the post office when I got home. I knew what a letter meant to somebody.

The doctors. Hawkeye wasn't real, but men like him were. Our battalion surgeon, Captain Leroy Eddington, was a quiet man from Nebraska who never raised his voice and never stopped working, and never once made a joke, and he was the best man I ever served with. When people ask me if Hawkeye was true to life, I tell them no, but Doc Eddington was better.

Eleven years. The Korean War lasted three years, from June of 1950 to the armistice in July of 1953. The show lasted eleven seasons. By the end, Hawkeye had been in Korea about four times longer than the war. Every man in that camp would have rotated home three times over. I know, I know, it's television. But it bothered me, because we counted those points like money.

The hills. The hills you see in the opening are California hills, round and gold. Korea's hills are steep, and there is always another one behind the one you're on, and in the winter they are brown and white and nothing else.

Talking back. I never in my life heard an enlisted man or a junior officer talk to a colonel the way they talked to Colonel Potter. Colonel Potter would have had a heart attack in the first season. It is one of the things I liked best about the show, to be honest. It just didn't happen.

The hair. Every season the hair got a little more like 1978 and a little less like 1951. We had Army haircuts. Nobody had a blow dryer on the line.

Some of the faces. A lot of the Korean people on the show were played by Japanese and Chinese American actors. With a name like Kobayashi I'm in no position to complain, and some of them were very good. But a Korean lady at our church noticed every single time, and after a while so did I.

People say the show was really about Vietnam, since it started in 1972 while that war was still going. Maybe so. I don't know about that. The faces in the helicopter baskets looked like our boys to me.

For forty years there was nothing in Washington for Korea. They called it the forgotten war, and the ones who forgot it first were mostly the ones who weren't there. Then in July of 1995, on the anniversary of the armistice, they dedicated the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the Mall, near the Lincoln Memorial. I didn't go to the dedication. Too far and too hot, and Joan's mother was sick that summer. But in the spring of 1996 Sharon took me. Ten hours on the plane, and I'd do it again tomorrow.

There are nineteen soldiers made of steel, a little bigger than real men, walking up a slope through low bushes in their ponchos, like a patrol. They look cold. That was the first thing I noticed, before anything else, that the sculptor made them look cold. Most of them are Army, a few are Marines, there's an Air Force man, and there's one Navy corpsman, a medic, going up with the Marines. I stood by him for a long time. Sharon went and got a cup of coffee and came back and I was still standing there.

Along one side is a long wall of black granite with faces in it, taken from old photographs, of all the people who held the war up from behind: nurses, chaplains, mechanics, cooks, truck drivers. The steel soldiers are reflected in it, so it looks like there are twice as many of them. Carved in the stone is a line that says freedom is not free, and nobody who was there needs that explained.

There are no names on it. Not one, and I thought that was right. There were too many to fit, and anyway the ones I'd look for are in my head, where I don't need to look. Here at home I go up to the Punchbowl, the national cemetery above town, every Memorial Day. There are plenty of Korea boys there.

If you are going to Washington, go. Go at the end of the day when the light is low. And if there's an old man standing in front of one of those steel boys for too long, leave him be. He's all right.

I have most of the episodes taped off the reruns, and some I've watched more times than I'd tell you. My ten favorites, with a line apiece about each, are on their own page:

>> TEN EPISODES I STILL WATCH <<

Fulda Gap: An Old Tanker Reads Tom Clancy. Henry Vergara was a tank sergeant who spent his years in Germany waiting for a war that never came, and he grades Clancy's books the way I grade M*A*S*H. He was kind enough to send people my way, so I'll send them back.

Korea, 1952: A Rifleman's Notebook. Gary Pruett has typed up the little notebook his father carried in Korea. His father got there in January of 1952, a few months after me, and the first thing he wrote about was the cold. Of course it was. Read it.