Neil Fein's Blog

MASH: An Army Surgeon in Korea
by Otto F. Apel, MD and Pat Apel

On June 25, 1950, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- what we know as North Korea -- invaded the Republic of South Korea. Despite demands by the UN, the invasion continued and soon Seoul, the capitol of South Korea was overrun. 5 days after the invasion began, the President Truman pledged US troops to defend South Korea. The war was long and bloody; at one point, ROK and UN troops were pushed back all the way to Pusan, a port city at nearly the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula. Within a year, however, the front lines had stabilized more or less to around the 38th parallel, the original border between the North and South.

Perhaps the most significant advances made in this war were in emergency medical care. The concept of placing a surgical hospital was not completely new, but the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals themselves were a new execution of the concept, over and above the evacuation hospitals and mobile truck hospitals used in the Great War and WWII.

Dr. Apel and his son describe the war vividly and thoroughly, although they can on occasion become repetitive. For a concise and focused book (I read it in a few sittings), the reader can keep everything in mind; no need to repeat.

The standout points of the book are the opening description of the war and the history of combat medicine, putting the rest into perspective; Dr. Apel's first day at the MASH, when he performed 80 continuous hours of surgery before even meeting his fellow officers; and the chapter dealing with arterial transplant surgery, a standout of the techniques developed under fire in the Korean War.

The Apels have adopted a very journalistic tone for most of the book, reporting on events rather than commenting on them. It's only in the end that Dr. Apel allows himself to speculate on what is and what is not a "just war"; his opinion on later conflicts, while reserved, seems clear.

While the reality of combat medicine is nothing at all like the TV show or the movie, Dr. Apel surprisingly (to me, at least) found the TV show more accurate than the movie. As he was a consultant for the TV show, this can be taken with a grain of salt. Some incidents, such as parasitic worms in human intestine, or the true amount of blood in the operating tent, never made thair way to small or silver screens. And neither interpretation ever made clear the sheer difficulty of moving -- and its frequency, particularly in the first year of the way.

The authors do have a distressing tendency of telegraphing the endings of some of their stories, usually by grouping them in chapters of similar stories. Overall, however, this is a very good book. I found it easy to read, challenging and disturbing in its intentional lack of moral outrage. Highly recommended.