Say what you want about the accuracy of MASH’s portrayal of the military and the Korean War, but several principal actors had real military experience, including in Korea. One of them actually wore his true U.S. Army dog tags in the show. Which MASH actors were really in the military? Alan Alda, Jamie Farr, Wayne Rogers, Mike Farrell, and McLean Stevenson.
Alan Alda’s (Hawkeye) Military Experience
Alan Alda actually served in Korea, but after the war had ended. Alda attended ROTC while attending college at Fordham University. After graduating in 1956, Alda received an officer’s commission to become a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve. He was initially stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, and then sent to South Korea, where he served six months as an artillery gunnery officer. His job was to train soldiers how to use mortars, a far cry from Hawkeye Pierce of MASH, who would never touch a gun, let alone a mortar! 1https://www.npr.org/2019/01/25/688685987/alan-alda-on-m-a-s-h-and-his-tremendous-education-growing-up-in-a-burlesque-club,2https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/article/2866032/mashs-alan-alda-was-an-army-officer-in-korea-and-played-one-on-tv/#:~:text=Alan%20Alda%20is%20the%20jeep%20driver.&text=Coincidentally%2C%20Alda%20was%20actually%20an,commissioned%20in%20the%20Army%20Reserve.
Alan had this to say about his military experience to NPR in 2019:
I was in the Reserves. I don’t know if you call that being in the military. They put me in charge of a mess hall at one point, and we had to feed 200 people three meals a day. And I had six guys who sort of stared blankly at the wall and played with the liver. They were — I don’t know how we fed those people. But I wouldn’t call that being in the military.
That was one of my jobs, to teach people how to kill the greatest number of people with a mortar shell. And I would keep them interested, and you know, I wanted to be a good teacher. But the interesting thing about it is, I understood just from doing that that when you’re in a war, it’s real. It’s the real thing. People are going to get killed or lose their arms and legs. And when we did ‘MASH,’ I wanted to make sure that at least that understanding that I had came out — that that’s what we dealt with, and that we didn’t gloss over that.
Jamie Farr’s (Klinger) Military Experience
Jamie Farr, who played Maxwell Klinger on MASH, served two years in the United States Army and then six years in the Army Reserve. Unlike Klinger, Farr served with pride and always wore his regulation uniform. While in the Army, Jamie Far even spent time in Korea.
Jamie Farr received his military draft letter just as his acting career seemed to be launching in 1957. He had been attending the Pasadena Playhouse of Theater Arts after graduating from high school. A talent scout saw him there and asked him to audition for a role in a movie called Blackboard Jungle. Farr got the part in the movie and then was drafted.
After basic training, instead of being shipped off to war, Farr was assigned to make training films at the U.S. Army Pictorial Center. Of all possible places, the film center was located at the old Paramount Studios in Astoria, New York.
Farr had been studying script writing and soon landed a position as script supervisor and was placed on temporary duty making training films on tank operations at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Huachuca, Arizona. After a few months of this, Farr was shipped to Japan to work for Armed Forces Radio Far East Network. He was kept extremely busy and did every job there was, including reporter, writer, actor, and producer, gaining a wealth of experience.
Then his friend Red Skelton, whom Farr had worked with before, asked the army for Farr to tour with him throughout Korea to entertain the troops. They toured military bases all over Korea, including a few MASH units.
When I (your friendly MASH FAQ writer) was in the Air Force, I had a few somewhat frightening experiences flying in military aircraft like C-140s. Once, a bird hit the cockpit windshield and forced an emergency landing. At another time, the landing gear wouldn’t go down and the crew had to frantically wind it down by hand, which took way too long. But this was nothing compared to the harrowing experience Jame Farr had, flying over the sea in South Korea:
On the MASH Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen Special Edition DVD, Farr told a story about flying in an Army DC-3 in South Korea over the sea. The engines started freezing up from the cold. The crew had the passengers put on parachutes, everything!
According to Jamie, the pilots fed the engines extra alcohol and then descended, hoping the air temperature at a lower altitude would thaw the engines enough to enable flight. He recalled thinking of how ice-cold the sea must be. You are lucky enough to have a parachute, but then you freeze to death in the water. “Obviously, you know the end of the story and what happened,” said Farr. “Our plane crashed and we all died.”
Jamie Farr’s military tour ended in 1959. He returned home to find that his father had died and his mother was left with nothing. One of Klinger’s gags to get out of the Army, for Farr, was all too real. He was prepared to leave acting behind and go to be with his mother in Phoenix, Arizona, where she had moved from the family home in Toledo, Ohio (Klinger was also from Toledo).
Red Skelton once again stepped in. He sent money to Farr’s mother and gave him a contract. After a year of working with Skelton in his night-club appearances and TV show, Jamie Farr was offered his guest appearance on MASH, and one of the most beloved characters in television history was born. The dog tags Jamie Farr wore on the show were his own. 3https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2009/september/answering-call-i-wore-my-real-dog-tags-mash
Wayne Rogers’ Military Experience (Trapper John McIntyre)
Wayne Rogers graduated from Princeton in 1954 with a degree in history and then joined the Navy as a commissioned officer. He worked as a navigator aboard the U.S.S. Denebola, a ship that carried supplies to ports all over the world.
While attending Princeton, Rogers had been a member of the Triangle Club, a theater club first founded in 1891. While he clearly had an interest in acting, it is not clear, at this point, whether he had any intention of pursuing it as a career, since he planned to enter Harvard Law School after his Navy stint was done.
In 1955, the Denebola was put in drydock at the naval port in Red Hook, Brooklyn, so that it could be repainted. While there, Rogers visited a friend of his who was a director rehearsing a play. The director invited Rogers to attend a rehearsal of the play on Broadway. According to the actor, this was a turning point. He resigned his commission in 1957 and, instead of attending law school, worked to build a career as an actor.
Rogers took acting lessons at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater under renowned acting coach Sanford Meisner and choreographer Martha Graham. He began landing parts in off-Broadway plays, including one with Gene Hackman in his first performance, Chaparral. He soon began working on television, including soap operas, while rooming with none other than Peter Falk of Columbo fame.
In 1961, he began working as an actor on Stagecoach West, which lasted for one season, filming in California. After the show ended, he remained in California and served as a guest star on many popular television shows, including The F.B.I., Cannon, Gunsmoke, The Fugitive, and more.
He also acted in several films, including a small part in the iconic Cool Hand Luke (1967), starring Paul Newman, as well as in The Big Valley in 1968. In 1971, he was approached to test for a role in the upcoming TV series production of MASH. He initially auditioned for the role of Hawkeye, but felt that the character was too cynical and that the role of Trapper fit him better. 4https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/wayne-rogers/
McClean Stevenson (Colonel Henry Blake) Military Experience
Unlike the other actors in this list, McLean Stevenson, who played Col. Henry Blake, not only served in the military but did so in a medical capacity. After graduating from Lake Forest Academy, a private prep school in Illinois, Stevenson joined the Navy, where he was a hospital corpsman or “pharmacist’s mate.”
According to McClean, he found serving in a medical setting challenging, as he had a very low gag threshold and an aversion to the smell of hospitals. He finished up his tour of duty the Naval Hospital in Great Lakes, IL. as a Seaman Second Class. Since he technically served during the official WWI years, from 1946 to mid-1948, he was awarded the WWI Victory Medal.
After his military service, Stevenson attended Northwestern University, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Theater. His first “acting” gig was playing a clown on local television in Dallas. In 1962, McLean starred in a production of The Music Man and began regularly performing in summer stock productions in Indiana.
He soon moved to New York and began working on Broadway before finding acting roles on television and commercials. He also began writing for television, working on the Doris Day Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and That Was The Week That Was, which included the acting talents of none other than Alan Alda. Stevenson also found jobs in commercials, including Kellogg’s, Libby’s Fruit, and Winston Cigarettes.
After building up his resume, he found roles on television, including in the Doris Day Show and That Girl. He was cast in his signature role, as Colonel Henry Blake on MASH, in 1972, initially auditioning for the role of Hawkeye. 5https://sixfeetunderhollywood.blogspot.com/2020/10/mclean-stevenson.html,6https://findingaids.library.northwestern.edu/agents/people/1669
Military Experience of Mike Farrell, aka Captain B.J. Hunnicutt
Mike Farrell was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1939, but his family moved to Hollywood, California, when he was two, where his father worked as a carpenter on movie sets. Farrell enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, entering basic in 1957 in San Diego, where he was the Honor Man of his platoon. He served as a Rifleman and was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, with the 3rd Marine Division. He served until 1959, reaching the rank of Private First Class. Farrell credited this military experience for helping to shape his acting, especially his portrayal of B.J. Hunnicutt, saying the military instilled values like discipline, camaraderie, and quiet resilience.
After working a few different jobs, Farrell began acting in various television shows during the 1960s. By the time MASH came knocking, he had already racked up quite a resume, including parts on Lassie, The Monkees, I Dream of Jeanie, The Bill Cosby Show, and a returning role on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. He even played a doctor in a few of his roles, including an Army doctor in the show Combat! and a civilian doctor in the CBS series The Interns. Other roles include The Man in the City, The Questor Tapes, Marcus Welby, M.D., The Six Million Dollar Man, Bonanza, and more. He was recruited for his new, original role on MASH in 1975, when Wayne Rogers left the show. 7https://www.marine250.com/marines-across-america-minnesota#:~:text=Paul%2C%20Minnesota,lived%20out%20every%20day%20since.
