M*A*S*H’s Hiester Richard Hornberger, Jr.

by James Nalley

In June 1950, military forces of communist North Korea immediately (and surprisingly) headed south across the 38th parallel in their attempt to conquer non-communist South Korea. By the time the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in July 1953, approximately 40,000 Americans had died in action, with more than 100,000 wounded. Among those drafted to (or near) the front lines were newly graduated medical doctors, including one Bowdoin College graduate who eventually practiced in Waterville. Based on his dramatic and sometimes comedic experiences as a wartime army surgeon, he would eventually write “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doc- tors” (1968), which was adapted into “M*A*S*H” (1970), the award-winning and commercially successful film starring Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye Pierce and Elliott Gould as Trapper John McIntyre, and the long-running television series under the same name (1972-1983).

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, on February 1, 1924, Hiester Richard Hornberger, Jr. (better known under the pseudonym Richard Hooker) attended The Peddie School (a college preparatory school) in Hightstown and went on to graduate from Bowdoin College in 1945. According to a 1973 “TV Guide” interview with Hornberger, he (cont. on page 54)

(cont. from page 53) stated that “Bowdoin was not exactly motivational…I had the lowest marks of any pre-med student in the class.” Despite his academic performance, he was an active member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and the editor of the Bowdoin Orient, the college’s newspaper. He eventually managed to get into Cornell University Medical School, after a “chemistry teacher stated in his application that Hornberger was ‘peculiar, but worth taking a chance on.’” By the time of his internship as a new doctor, the Korean War had broken out and Hornberger was drafted under the Doctors Draft Act of 1950. He was then sent to Korea and assigned to the 8055th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H.) unit, which, as one doctor in the unit stated, “was not on the front lines, but pretty close.”

According to the article “Korea’s Real M*A*S*H Doctors” by Sarah Buckley, “Many of the doctors were

Phil Carter’s Garage

in their twenties, many with little advanced surgical training.” There were also “long periods when not much of anything happened, which created an atmosphere of apparent safety, with plenty of time to play. When things were quiet, they would sit around and read. Sometimes the nurses would have a little dance.” However, during the battle campaigns, the various units saw as many as 1,000 casualties a day, which overwhelmed the doctors. Meanwhile, in many instances, “the operating rooms consisted of stretchers balanced on carpenter’s sawhorses with substandard lighting.”

As for Captain Hornberger, a colleague interviewed by the Hartford Courant in November 2010 described him as a “very good surgeon with a tremendous sense of humor.” In a related book titled, “MASH FAQ” by Dale Sherman, “Hornberger shared with the other doctors a tent that was referred to as ‘The Swamp,’ which would be found in both the film and television series.” Hornberger would eventually spend a total of 18 months overseas, the majority of which was in the 8055th At that time, Hornberger stated that his philosophy was, “Do the job well, and after that, do as you please. We were out there in the middle of nowhere. What could they do, fire us?” According to Sherman, this attitude was also seen in Andrew Carroll’s book titled, War Letters: Extraordinary Correspon- dences from American Wars, in which “one of Hornberger’s letters explained more about the drinking and partying he and others in the unit did than about any of the more depressing elements of his work. However, Hornberger did discuss the irony of seeing more men come in with wounds due to friendly fire and accidents than from enemy fire, which fed the ‘war is crazy’ attitude found in the subsequent versions of “M.A.S.H.”

After the war, Hornberger worked for the U.S. Veterans Administration and qualified for his surgical boards. As stated by Sherman, “He settled in Broad Cove (erroneously called ‘Crabapple Cove,’ the home of Captain Hawkeye Pierce in the film and books) and built a home for his wife and family just a short distance from his mother’s house. He then began working six to seven days a week as a thoracic surgeon for Thayer Hospital in Waterville, where he specialized in gallbladder, hernia, and lung operations until his retirement in 1988.”

As mentioned earlier, his experiences as a captain in the 8055th inspired him to write his first novel, which took approximately 12 years to complete. After being rejected by many publishers, William Morrow and Company accepted the book in 1968. The book would go on to inspire the 1970 film directed by Robert Altman, which was the third-highest grossing film that year, and the CBS television series, one of the most popular shows in television history. Moreover, the film was nominated for five Academy Awards and won Best Adapted Screenplay. As for the television series, it was nominated for more than 100 Emmy Awards and won 14, along with the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series in 1981 and six Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor in a Television Series for

Alan Alda.

On November 4, 1997, after a battle with leukemia, Hornberger died at a hospital in Portland. He was 73 years of age. He was subsequently buried at Hillside Cemetery in Bremen.

Interestingly, according to his son in The New York Times (dated November 7, 1997), “He modeled the character of Captain Benjamin Pierce after himself. Partly for that reason, he disliked the television series and almost never watched it.” However, “He liked the film because he thought it followed his original intent very closely. But my father was a political conservative, and he did not like the liberal tendencies that Alan Alda portrayed Hawkeye Pierce as having.” He added, “My father did not write an anti-war book, it was a humorous account of his work, with serious parts thrown in about the awful kind of work it was, and how difficult and challenging it was.”