“The surgeons in the MASH hospitals,” Cpt. Hiester Richard Hornberger recalled of his days in Korea, “were exposed to extremes of hard work, leisure, tension, boredom, heat, cold, satisfaction and frustration that most of them had never faced before…. A few flipped their lids, but most just raised hell.” A chest surgeon from Maine, Dr. Hornberger served for a year and a half in Korea in the 8055th MASH unit. Sparing his parents the gory details of body counts and casualties in his letters home, Hornberger chronicled instead baseball games in ankle-deep mud, late-night poker marathons, and other diversions the doctors turned to when things were slow. From time to time Hornberger also offered wry commentary on the war. “Off and on we get some interesting work to do,” he wrote in January 1952, “some of it caused by the Chinamen, much of it caused by our own soldiers being hit by our own mortars, or trying to cross our own minefields. If we stay here long enough, the American Army may annihilate itself.” After recovering from a bout of chicken pox, Hornberger sent the following on February 17, 1952. (A. D. Hall, mentioned in the letter, was his lifelong friend Arthur Dudley “Dud” Hall, who was serving in the Merchant Marines; “Horny” was Hornberger’s college nickname.)
Dear Mother and Dad,
Well, except for my complexion & skin, I’m a well man. Tomorrow I’m going to shave for the first time in 10 days & go over to the 22nd Evac for a couple days before returning north.
Having nothing else to write about I will tell you more that I have learned about the adventures of A.D. Hall in the Orient. He apparently made a big hit at the 22nd Evac Hospital. The most disturbing thing is that everyone who’s visited me says that the consensus of opinion is that “He sounded just like Horny”—to which I have taken violent exception at every opportunity. This was due, mostly, to one or two down east profanities we have in common.
His first night there he helped my friends Jeet & John Glynn drink up a bottle of John’s scotch. At his time he met my old roommate, Jenner P. Coil (the 46 yr old Oklahoman lush of whom I once told you). Finding that Jenner was classified by the army as a CNT man, and being an excellent judge of character, Dudley decided that Jenner was just the man to take care of the nasal polyps which were afflicting the captain of his ship. So the next PM. up came Captain & First Mate. The Captain submitted to the tender ministrations of Jenner P. Coil (a braver man than I) while the first mate proceeded to get around a bottle generously provided by my friends.
Well, the Captain survived, and that night Jenner, Jeeter, Big John Glynn, & Cy Schwolben, my other old roommate, were guests at dinner aboard ship. Jenner, having saved the Captain’s nose, was the guest of honor and occupied the seat of honor, in which he immediately passed out as a result of before dinner refreshment. The meal proceeded uneventfully and was followed by conversation and alcohol, probably in ever increasing quantities. Finally one of the more alert noticed that Jenner P Coil was no longer with them. A search was forthwith instituted and sometime later Jenner was found down in the hold, draped over a pipe, sobbing, and mumbling over & over again “I am lost in the bowels of the ship.”
Without knowing Jenner, you cannot fully appreciate the humor of this, altho I must admit there’s a little pathos mixed in with it.
I have to laugh at the whole thing. Dud invariably makes a good first impression, particularly if he can impress a bunch like that by taking them aboard his ship. Just wait till he comes to Pusan and brings his whole crew up to have their appendices out; the boys may feel a little different about him then.
Well, that’s the tall tale for today.
So long
Dick
After leaving Korea, Captain Hornberger, using the alias “Richard Hooker,” wrote a fictionalized account of his wartime experiences in a book titled M⋆A⋆S⋆H, which became a movie and then an enormously popular television show that ran for eleven years.