Classic Episode - Goodbye, Farewell and Amen

The final episode of M*A*S*H had one of the biggest ever television audiences it is also one of the most popular with fans. The problem is it is one of the least shown episodes, so for those who haven't seen it here's what you are missing...

Dear Dad,
For the first time, I understand what a nervous disorder is because it seems I've got one. I guess I'll be seeing you soon since I doubt they'll let a surgeon operate whose cheese has slipped off his cracker. Sorry I haven't written you for a while, but I've been on R&R at this wonderful resort - The Seoul Old Soldiers Never Die They Just Giggle Academy. We're planning on having a bridge tournament here as soon as we can find someone with a full deck.

On the 4th of July, Colonel Potter decided to let several members of the 4077 take the day off for an old fashioned celebration. They went to the beach at Inchon. Inchon was west of Ouijongbu, and most of the fighting was in Kum Song, to the northeast. It was a nice summer day and the beach trip seemed just the thing to break the tension. On the way back to the MASH unit, the bus stopped to pick up some refugees. About a half a mile later; it stopped again, this time to pick up some wounded GIs. "We gotta get this bus into the bushes," one of the GIs said. "There's an enemy patrol coming down the road. Everyone get quiet. Nobody make a sound until they've passed us." The bus was hidden. Inside, everyone grew nervous. Each person sat on the edge of his seat, quietly breathing the tense air; terrified that each breath might be his last. Suddenly, a refugee baby began to wail. "Shhhh," Hawkeye hissed. The child's mother was in despair. She could not quiet the baby. If its sounds attracted the North Koreans, everyone could be killed. Soundlessly, the woman smothered her child.

Dear Dad,
I am doing better now. You remember Sidney Freedman? He's been here all week pulling shrapnel from my memory. I think the worst is over now. Remember when I was a kid, you told me that if my head wasn't attached to my shoulders, I'd lose it? That's what happened when I saw that woman kill her baby. A baby, Dad. A baby. But Sidney says that confronting the memory is half the battle. So I'm going back to the 4077. Sort of like the criminal returning to the scene of the crime. I asked them to send me to a foxhole in Crabapple Cove, but there aren't many foxes there - only lobster. So write me care of the war, Dad. Any place I hang my scalpel is home.

Pierce's hysterical breakdown was conquered once Sidney forced him to admit that he had actually seen the woman smother her child and not a chicken as Hawkeye's tormented memory had "chosen" to remember it. Repressing the real memory had triggered his collapse. Tentatively, he returned to the 4077. He felt unsure of himself when he got there, worse when he discovered that B.J. had gone home without even saying goodbye. "Is it the war that stinks or just me?" Hawkeye asked Margaret. "My best friend went home without so much as a damn note. Trapper did the same thing."
But B.J. never quite made it home. When heavy fighting made it impossible for his replacement to get to the 4077, Potter put in an urgent call to I-Crops for any surgeon they could lay hands on. BJ was brought back. "I got as far as Guam," he explained. "I'm sitting in this crummy Officers Club and a guy says, `Are you Hunnicutt, the surgeon?' and I said, `No, I'm Hunnicutt, the chaplain,' so he said, `Well, chaplain, you better start praying for a miracle because you're going back to Korea to do surgery.... Sorry I didn't leave you a note, Hawk, but I didn't have time." "That's okay," Hawkeye replied tartly. "I didn't even know you were gone. I thought you were in the bathroom." Just as the end of the war was announced on the PA system, more wounded were brought in. "Does this look like peace to you?" Margaret asked bitterly as she surveyed the scene. In the OR, the doctors began to talk about what they would eat when they got home. It seems that all short timers begin to think of food. B.J. wanted a big glass of ice cold milk; Hawkeye wanted a piece of chocolate cake; Potter wanted fresh corn on the cob.

While Hawkeye had been away at the psychiatric hospital the 4077 itself had come under enemy fire. A tank had blundered into the compound like a wounded water buffalo and began drawing shells; Father Mulcahy ran out to release the POWs so they could escape the explosions and was knocked flat himself. It turned out to be only a mild concussion but Mulcahy found that he'd lost some of his hearing. He swore B.J. to secrecy so that he wouldn't be sent home, leaving his orphans. Charles spent much of his time worrying whether he'd get the appointment he wanted as Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Mercy Hospital in Boston. To take his mind off things he taught Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings to a group of Chinese soldier-musicians who had surrendered to him one day when he was on his way to the latrine. In their fashion, they learned to play it quite well but when they were shipped out Charles returned to the surgery as his only diversion.

Surgery was interrupted by an announcement on the PA system requesting a surgeon for triage. Charles took off his rubber gloves and went outside. Wounded were being tagged in the traditional manner. "What else do we have?" he asked the corpsman. "This POW, sir. Part of his chest is blown off. He was in the back of the truck when it got hit." Charles moved to the patient's litter. He checked the man's carotid artery first then saw his face. It was one of his Chinese musicians his eyes glassy and unfocused. Charles recoiled with horror.
"What happened to the others?" he asked numbly. "He's the only one who made it this far;" the corpsman reported. It was, indeed, the end of the war for Charles Emerson Winchester III. "I've just discovered I'll be head of Thoracic Surgery at Boston Mercy Hospital. My life will go on as expected. For me, music had always been a refuge from this miserable experience. Now it will always be a reminder."

Yet there was a happy moment in the final melancholy. Klinger announced that he and Soon-Lee would marry. Soon-Lee was a Korean girl who had been brought to the 4077 a few months earlier when she was found holding a carbine and was accused of murder. She had been proved innocent and stayed on at the 4077 working as a translator. Now that they were getting married, Soon-Lee refused to go to Toledo until she found her family dead or alive. So Max Klinger; the most unlikely man in the world to stay in Korea, chose of his own free will to stay. Father Mulcahy married them; Soon-Lee wore Klinger's old wedding dress; Klinger wore the tuxedo that Hawkeye's father had sent over at the beginning of the war. "Gee, two weddings," commented BJ "One here and one in Toledo; one where you eat rice and one where you throw it."
"John Francis Patrick Mulcahy," the padre said. "Remember that name if you name any children after me."
Klinger and Soon-Lee left their "family" wedding in what Sergeant Rizzo described as a limousine. It was the best he could do under the circumstances - an ox cart with a "Just Married" sign trailing a string of Klinger's old high heals. The next day, corpsman began to pack up the canvas for the last time, and the members of the 4077th began to ship out. The remaining wounded were trucked to the 8063 MASH. Father Mulcahy rode up front.

Margaret and Charles were going to share a jeep to the 8063, but Margaret loaded it down with so much baggage that Charles didn't have any room. "You stay with your belongings, Margaret," he suggested. "Sergeant Rizzo will find me another mode. I wonder, though, if you have room in all those things for one more item ?" Then he gave her his treasured copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and kissed her hand before he boarded his own ride out - a garbage truck.

Potter decided to take Sophie for one last trot and arranged for his jeep to pick him up at the orphanage, where he was leaving his horse. "Well, boys," he said to Pierce and Hunnicutt, "it would be hard to call what we've been through fun, but I'm sure glad we went through it together. You always managed to give me a good laugh right when I needed it. I will never forget the time you dumped Winchester's drawers in OR. 'Course, I had to pretend I was mad at you, but inside, I was laughing to beat all hell."
"We've been thinking about a little something to give you before you left," B.J. said. "It's not much," Hawkeye said, "but it comes from the heart." And the two men stood to attention and saluted their departing CO.
Then Hawkeye's chopper arrived. It was his turn to say goodbye. "Look, Beej, I know it's tough for you to say good-bye, so I'll say it. Maybe we will see each other again. In any case, I want you to know how much you meant to me." The men hugged. B.J. drove off on his motorcycle. Hawkeye's 'Huey' lifted off the chopper pad for its ascent over the Korean hills. As he looked down at the deserted 4077, Hawkeye smiled. B.J had left him a final message spelled out in stones;