Guest Post from Elizabeth: Watching M*A*S*H

I just had an epiphany about the nurses: they didn't have to come. They were all volunteers.


My latest pop-culture homework is watching the TV show M*A*S*H all the way through. I know we all know it as a show that our parents watched, or our grandparents even; a show that is always on some channel, somewhere; that perhaps we stumbled upon while staying home sick, and when we told our mother about it later she said thoughtfully, "Hmm. You know, I remember seeing a great episode about malaria when I was in college."


And it's probably popped up in lists of greatest shows, greatest episodes, most popular shows, most experimental episodes for their time, etc. But here's the thing: it's better than you think. It has that extra bit.


All great works of art have that extra bit. You've heard about how great that piece of art is, and you think you understand it, but until you see it you don't know about that extra thing and it hits you, hard. Seen pictures of the Colosseum? It's taller than you thought. Heard Atonement was a tragic love story? You forgot about the war. Think you don't need to see Casablanca? You didn't know about the refugees. The Stand is about the flu, right? Oh, how wrong you are, my friend. So you know what "Rosebud" means? No, you don't.


The extra bit in M*A*S*H is...well, everything. About the war, about medicine, about the people. You go into it thinking that you get it, and then a dozen episodes in someone drops this bomb: "You're three miles behind the line. Would you like to get transferred to an ambulance on the front?" and you realize, Holy shit, the patients we see every week are the survivors. Casualties from the "other side" come in and American doctors fight each other over whether they should or should not treat "the enemy." Then of course there are the locals--South Koreans who use their daughters to check for landmines in a field they don't want to trust their ox to until it's safe, because they can make or buy more daughters more cheaply than they can replace a plow-ox. South Koreans who take up the sex trade because it's steady money. South Koreans whose children may be shot by snipers, who can't even be sure that if they take their wounded to a U.S. Army hospital that they will be understood, much less cared for, much less respected.


As much as we root for the doctors, doing their best under outrageous conditions--and we do want them to win, we do, we do!--there's another group of medics whose voices are rarely heard and whose concerns extend far beyond the O.R., and in a different direction than the concerns of the doctors. Those would be the nurses. These are women who put up with all the normal indignities of military service plus all the indignities and hassles of womanhood: being constantly degraded by the doctors, all the while knowing that it's more difficult for women to get medical degrees; the decreased pay and the longer hours; the relentless sexual harassment and the double-standard that labels them either sluts or prudes with no option in-between. If they do their jobs well, they will be invisible. After that, they had better be a good fuck.


It's funny, isn't it, how we heard for so many decades that women simply couldn't be in the armed services, because they couldn't handle combat situations and might get infections from bleeding all over the place? And yet, we don't have to go as far back as the Revolution to find women who failed to die of menstruation-induced gangrene or the vapors while serving--we could go back as far as the Revolution, and farther, but we don't need to. From the Red Cross volunteer ambulance drivers of World War I through the field nurses of World War II, Korea, Vietnam (the only ones I know of who have a memorial in D.C.), Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom and wherever else the U.S. has been in living memory, we owe a great debt to the American women who put their own lives on hold and in danger to give life to others. And they aren't invisible: we only need turn on our television sets and flip for a while. I guarantee you'll find them there, on some channel, somewhere.


None of them were drafted.