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             The sitcom M*A*S*H debuted on CBS in the fall of 1972, when I was nine, in the days when TV provided the background noise of my life. On the first floor of our house, if I wasn’t sitting in front of the set, I could hear it as I played on the floor, drew, or did my homework. So when my father began following the antics of M*A*S*H’s Korean War surgeons, who spent their off-hours acting crazy to avoid going insane, I watched and listened, too, even though I didn’t understand everything I was seeing and hearing. For example, when an aging general made a stealth visit to the tent of Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan - the last visit he was ever to make anywhere - my father had to explain to me why a nice romantic evening had killed the man.

            My father himself passed on a couple of years later, and as if I were taking over one of his duties, I began watching M*A*S*H on my own. It soon shot past the likes of The Brady Bunch to become my favorite show. M*A*S*H was first a novel by Richard Hooker and then a film by Robert Altman, but it was with the TV show that the characters got fleshed out best. I loved those characters, and I loved the writing, and if I still didn’t get every rapid-fire line out of Hawkeye Pierce’s mouth, that just made me appreciate the show more: I felt like a junior member of a club for the sophisticated.

Ah, Hawkeye. As played masterfully by Alan Alda, Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce was the center of the action - a brilliant surgeon, a womanizer, a drinker who lived near the border of alcoholism, a man whose practical jokes, wisecracks, and general irreverence could not hide his moral core. Hawkeye was my favorite character on M*A*S*H because, well, he was everybody’s favorite character. The more pressure he was under, the funnier he got; he did the right thing even when it meant defying the “regular army clowns,” as he called the top military brass, and somehow he got away with it. How could you not like him?

            Of course, like many brilliant, morally driven, and very funny people, Hawkeye could sometimes be insensitive, if not downright mean. As I got older, I became more appreciative of how realistically Hawkeye was portrayed - and less fond of Hawkeye himself - when I met some of his real-life counterparts: guys (they were mostly guys) who reacted passionately to injustice elsewhere but didn’t give a hoot about the people in the room with them. Then there were the people who emulated Hawkeye’s irreverence but somehow fell short of his competence and dedication. Surely this is a mark of middle age, but as I’ve developed into the person I will probably more or less remain, I’ve come to have a greater appreciation for another figure on M*A*S*H, the character played by McLean Stevenson - the commanding officer of the 4077^th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake.

            Unlike Hawkeye’s nemesis, the cowardly, self-righteous, idiotic and incompetent Major Frank Burns, Henry was one of the show’s good guys; but like Frank, he was a figure of fun. Henry, in retrospect, was the classic middle manager, which I define (because I’m one, too) as someone with a lot of responsibility but not much power. Henry barely even had power over the people he was nominally in charge of, as Hawkeye and his cohorts - who liked Henry - walked all over him, when they weren’t plotting behind his back. And sometimes Henry was just plain silly, owing largely to his drinking; if Hawkeye lived near alcoholism’s border, Henry had a couple of toes over it.

            But while Henry may not have known half the things his subordinates were up to, he probably wouldn’t have cared if he had. A decent surgeon himself, he was concerned mainly about the smooth functioning of his hospital, where seriously wounded soldiers arrived in droves and gut-wrenching decisions had to be made on a routine basis. (”If I save this leg I’ll lose that life,” is one line I remember from Hawkeye.) Despite his (partly deserved) reputation for indecisiveness, when something had to be done where the hospital was concerned, Henry stepped up to the plate. For example: in one episode, when Hawkeye and Frank - a superior officer - butted heads in the operating room, Henry saw the need to appoint a chief surgeon. Not even the most mature of people like to be passed over for promotion in favor of someone with less seniority, and when you pass over an immature person, you’ve got some unpleasantness on your hands. (I know what I’m talking about.) But sometimes it has to be done, and Henry picked Hawkeye. The actor Larry Linville did a fine job of capturing Frank’s very realistic reaction to the news: a look of pure, childlike hurt followed by outrage. Hawkeye, for his part, responded to Henry’s show of confidence in him by rolling his eyes and saying sarcastically, “Terrific.” Typical thanks for a middle manager.

            A good boss knows when to bend a rule in one area for the benefit of the overall workplace. Once on M*A*S*H, a medic from the front line was caught stealing from the hospital’s supply room and brought before Colonel Blake. Henry could’ve had him put in the stockade - technically, in fact, he was probably obligated to; but he knew that would mean depriving wounded soldiers of immediate attention. “Next time, just ask,” Henry told the grateful medic. “If we’ve got extra, it’s yours.” Like any competent manager, Henry knew when someone on his staff needed a talking-to. In one episode, when Hawkeye was brooding because he hadn’t been able to save a patient, Henry advised him to save that attitude for when he had a medical practice back home and could “pick the kind of patients who won’t go sour on you.”

            Hawkeye was the person many people want to be. Henry was closer to the way many of us are in reality. (One measure of how real he was: at the end of M*A*S*H’s third season, he got his discharge. On the way home to his wife and children, he got killed.) Like me, maybe like you, Henry was not always as sharp, brave, or eloquent as he wanted to be. But he had his moments, times when, away from the limelight, he quietly rose to the occasion.