By Richard Hooker. Find the book.
When Radar O’Reilly, just out of high school, left Ottumwa, Iowa, and enlisted in the United States Army it was with the express purpose of making a career of the Signal Corps. Radar O’Reilly was only five feet three inches tall, but he had a long, thin neck and large ears that left his head at perfect right angles. Furthermore, under certain atmospheric, as well as metabolic, conditions, and by enforcing complete concentration and invoking unique extra-sensory powers, he was able to receive messages and monitor conversations far beyond the usual range of human hearing.
With this to his advantage it seemed to Radar O’Reilly that he was a natural for the communications branch of the service, and so, following graduation, he turned down various highly attractive business opportunities, some of them legitimate, and decided to serve his country.
— p. 9
“My name’s Pierce, and this is Duke Forrest,” Hawkeye said, getting up and offering his hand.
The newcomer didn’t budge.
“See you before, haven’t I?” asked Hawkeye.
“I don’t know. Have you?” answered McIntyre.
“For Chrissake, McIntyre, and you all this friendly all the time?” demanded the Duke.
“Only when I’m happy,” answered McIntyre.
— p. 30
Despite repeated warnings, Shaking Sammy also had the bad habit of writing letters home for wounded soldiers without inquiring into the nature of their wounds. One day, before Duke had a chance to invite him in for a fix, Sammy wrote a letter for a boy who died two hours later. The latter told his mother that all was well and that he’d be home soon. It had been written with no investigation of his surgical situation. The nurse had managed to see the letter, and she told Duke and Hawkeye. They escorted Shaking Sammy out of the hospital and, as he left, they shot all four tires of his jeep with their .45’s. That was the last of Shaking Sammy for a while.
— p. 38.
Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski, of Hamtramck, Michigam, and Dental Officer of the 4077th MASH, was a very good dentist. He took care of the tusks of hundreds of troops, most of whom, before they met him, would have preferred to storm a gook bunker bare-handed rather than go to a dentist. He wired fractured jaws and extracted teeth with a dexterity that few of the medical personnel had ever witnessed at home. That he should be called The Painless Pole was so obvious that no one would own up to being the originator of the nickname.
— p. 44
The Painless Pole, beyond the shadow of a doubt, was the best-equipped dentist in the U.S. Army Dental Corps. He was the owner and operator of the Pride of Hamtramck. Officers and enlisted men from the entire area frequently visited the 4077th MASH, supposedly to take advantage of the shower facilities, but actually they came in hope of catching a glimpse. In fact, Dr. Waldowski’s dental assistant, a Corporal Jones, significantly enhanced his lowly wages by informing certain troops in advance of the Captain’s intention of bathing. In the shower, popeyed officers and enlisted men viewed the Pride wistfully, and one day a corporal from Mississippi spoke for them all.
“Ah’d purely love,” he said, “to see it angry.”
— pp. 45-46
The six o’clock chopper, either morning or evening, was always unwelcome because the very fact that the pilot was risking the trip in half-daylight meant that the soldiers lying in the pods were seriously wounded. So twice a each day, at dawn and at dusk, as six o’clock approached, everyone–surgeons, nurses, lab technicians, corpsmen, cooks and mostly Lt. Col. Henry Blake–would listen, and during the time of the Great Deluge, they would hear, not one six o’clock chopper but three or four.
— p. 109
One of the most consistent customers of the 4077th MASH was the Commonwealth Division, consisting of British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and other assorted British Empire troops a few miles to the west. Captain Black had an intense, burning, complete, unremitting hatred for all the medical officers in the Commonwealth Division. His reason was very simple: they gave half a grain of morphine and a cup of tea to every wounded soldier. If the soldier was incapable of swallowing the tea, he still got the half grain of morphine. As a result of this treatment, it was frequently necessary to wait for the morphine to wear off before a patient’s condition could be assessed. If early surgery seemed reasonable or mandatory, Ugly John, in the process of getting the patient to sleep, often caught the tea in his lap.
— p. 117
Red, that lousy can’t-win-em-all philosophy is no good. In The Swamp the idea is that if they arrive here alive, they can leave alive if everything is done just right. Obviously this can’t always be, but as an idea it’s better than fair, so spare me all the rationalizations.
— pp. 120-121
“Don’t pay any attention to Captain Pierce,” Trapper John said, handing Jeeter a water glass filled with a martini he had mixed for himself. “Sit down and have a drink.”
“What is it?” Jeeter inquired.
“A martini, more or less,” Trapper said.
“It looks like water,” Jeter said.
“That’s right,” Trapper said, “and it’s sort of like water, but you don’t drink it when you’re thirsty.”
— p. 125
“Y’all probably noticed,” he explained to Captain Russell as they were closing, “that when clamping and cutting the mesentery, I wasn’t quite as dainty as y’all were. Y’all will recall that I didn’t do the anastomosis with three layers of interrupted silk, like y’all did. I used an inner layer of continuous catgut and interrupted silk in the serosa. Where y’all put twelve sutures on the anterior side of yours, I put four. Y’all observed that the lumen in my anastomosis is as big as yours, I’ve got mucosa to mucosa, submucosa more or less to submucosa, muscularis pretty much to muscularis and serosa to serosa, and there ain’t any place where it’s gonna leak. It took y’all two hours, and it took me twenty minutes. Your way is fine, but y’all can’t get away with it around here. Y’all will kill people with it, because of lot of these kids who can stand two hours of surgery can’t stand six hours of it.”
“But …” Captain Russell started to say.
“That’s right,” Duke said, “and if I’m really in a hurry I’ll ride with just the continuous catgut through all the layers.”
— p. 194
“Now I’ll offer you some thoughts,” he [Hawkeye] told the much relieved Captain Pinkham. "This is certainly meatball surgery we do around here, but I think you can see now that meatball surgery is a specialty in itself. We are not concerned with the ultimate reconstruction of the patient. We are concerned only with getting the kid out of here alive enough for someone else to reconstruct him. Up to a point we are concerned with fingers, hands, arms and legs, but sometimes we deliberately sacrifice a leg in order to save a life, if the other wounds are more important. In fact, now and then we may lose a leg because, if we spent an extra hour trying to save it, another guy in the preop ward could die from being operated on too late.
“That’s hard to accept at first,” he said, “but tell me something, doctor. Do you play golf?”
“I do,” Captain Pinkham said, “but I haven’t been getting much in lately.”
“Then let me put it this way,” Hawkeye said. “Our general attitude around here is that we want to play par surgery on this course. Par is a live patient. We’re not sweet swingers, and if we’ve gotta kick it in with our knees to get a par that’s how we do it.”
“I can’t argue against that,” Captain Pinkham said.
— p. 195