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There were eleven seasons and I couldn't tell you how many episodes, and I have seen most of them more than once. These are the ten I'd keep if the VCR ate the rest. They are in the order they first came on, not the order I like them, because I can't decide that and Joan says to stop trying. I don't tell the stories here. If you haven't seen them, you should see them, not read about them from me. |
| NO. | EPISODE / WHY |
| 1 | Tuttle (season 1) The officer Hawkeye invents out of thin air, who ends up more real than half the officers I knew. The Army runs on paper, and so did we. |
| 2 | Sometimes You Hear the Bullet (season 1) The first time I saw the show stop being funny on purpose. There's a boy in it who lied about his age to get in, and I knew boys like that. |
| 3 | Abyssinia, Henry (season 3) Colonel Blake gets to go home. I won't say any more than that, except that I sat in my chair a long time after it was over. |
| 4 | Hawkeye (season 4) Hawkeye, with a knock on the head, talking for half an hour to a Korean family who can't understand a word he says. I don't know how Alan Alda did it. |
| 5 | The Interview (season 4) In black and white, like the newsreels, with a reporter asking everybody questions. It's the closest the show ever came to the way we really talked about it, which was not much and sideways. |
| 6 | Bug Out (season 5) The whole camp packs up and moves. We moved our aid station three times in my year, and they got the mess of it exactly right: what gets lost, who gets left holding what. |
| 7 | Point of View (season 7) Seen all the way through the eyes of one wounded soldier, from the helicopter on. I was always on the other side of that stretcher. This is the only time I ever saw it from his side. |
| 8 | Life Time (season 8) Told against a clock in the corner of the screen. Twenty minutes is a long time when you're watching it run out. I sat forward the whole way, and I knew how it would end the second time. |
| 9 | Death Takes a Holiday (season 9) Christmas in the camp. Winchester does a kindness and doesn't want anybody to know. That's the best kind, and the show knew it. |
| 10 | Goodbye, Farewell and Amen (season 11) The last one, February 28, 1983. More people watched it than had ever watched anything on television before, and nothing has beaten it since. It isn't the funniest, but they let everybody go home, which is more than the Army ever did all at once. |
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Honorable mention: any episode with mail call in it. Thirty-one years at the post office and I still sit up when somebody hands out the letters. I watch Radar's face. Radar's face is right. The ones I skip: I'm not going to name them. Somebody worked hard on every one. But there are a few in the later years where everybody makes a speech, and I go get a sandwich. |