Explorations Read-Aloud: “M*A*S*H” by Richard Hooker

Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.

For July 11, Coté will read aloud from Richard Hooker’s novel M*A*S*H: A Novel about Three Army Doctors.

Summary:  Before the movie, this is the novel that gave life to Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Hot Lips Houlihan, Frank Burns, Radar O’Reilly, and the rest of the gang that made the 4077 th MASH like no other place in Korea or on earth.

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.”

M.A.S.H. units, according to one doctor assigned to the unit, “weren’t on the front lines, but they were close. They lived and worked in tents. It was hot in the summer and colder than cold in the winter.” The operating room consisted of stretchers balanced on carpenters’ sawhorses.

Many of the M.A.S.H. doctors were in their 20s, many with little advanced surgical training. During battle campaigns, units could see “as many as 1,000 casualties a day.”

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.

Richard Hooker is the pen name of former military surgeon H. Richard Hornberger. Born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, he attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

A typescript copy of MASH, with copyedit corrections and editor’s annotations, is held in the Special Collections and Archives holdings of Bowdoin College, Hooker’s alma mater. 

This is referred to in a tongue-in-cheek manner in Hooker’s later work M*A*S*H Mania (1977) when it is stated that, “In addition to the original manuscript of MASH by Richard Hooker, the works of Mr. Longfellow, a nineteenth-century poet and writer, are on display in the fictitious Androscoggin College Library”. (Androscoggin is the alma mater of fictional main character, Hawkeye Pierce.)

Click the links to find the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.

Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net