The moment that defines what MASH is really all about does not take place in the operating room, nor does it occur on the football field. Nor does it explode as the result of a confrontation between doctors who have been drafted and career military men standing for everything that the antiheroes are rebelling against. Often overlooked as a vital moment in the film due to its contextual surroundings of sacrilegious sexuality is a quiet conversation between Dr. “Hawkeye” Pierce and Lt. “Dish.” The occasion: the “death and resurrection” of “Painless” Waldowski.*
The discussion centers around the fact that the lovely lieutenant is married and therefore going through the necessary requirements for “resurrecting” the suicidal dentist would require sacrificing her virtue. Hawkeye presents this moral quandary in the form of a dualistic argument: what is really more important, saving the actual life of a human being or conforming to a man-made sense of ethics? The answer becomes simple when couched in those terms and Dish sacrifices a certain amount of her virtue for the sake of slicing through Waldowski’s desire to end his own life.
That moral argument is at the center of every other scene presented in MASH. The question always comes down to what is really being forwarded as important: genuine concern for humanity or mankind’s self-appointed mandates for living a virtuous. The epicenter of the film’s irony takes place in the surgical operating rooms where concern for human life is enacted through the processes of putting back together again the bodies of soldiers torn apart by weaponry…for the purpose of sending them right back out onto the battlefield to face death again in the name of protecting America’s democratic virtue from the sinister immorality of communism.
What MASH ultimately suggests is that the world would be far better off if all those soldiers put down their rifles and grenades and instead moved to actually engage with the enemy in order to arrive at a universal understanding of the preciousness of each and every life rather than submitting to the will of those thought to be "on their own side" whose personal interests are formed by and in turn reformulate the moral code which is instrumental in sending them out onto the battefield to kill strangers in morally ambiguous conflict for which they are willing to sacrifice that precious ownership.
*The use of colloquial nicknames for just about every single important character in the movie ("Trapper" John, "Radar" O'Reilly, "Hot Lips" Houlihan) becomes shorthand for the undermining of official military apparatus. Or, in other words, the use of nicknames serves to separate them from the military machine which is sending them out to die for the most spurious of reasons.
