Alan Alda’s Hawkeye Rewrote A Dark Childhood Memory On ‘M*A*S*H’ That Most Fans Have Forgotten

For 11 seasons, Hawkeye Pierce joked his way through the Korean War, and Alan Alda made it look easy. Every so often, though, the writers of M*A*S*H let viewers peek into the boyhood of the surgeon from Crabapple Cove, Maine, and one of those peeks turned up a memory so painful that Hawkeye had quietly rewritten it in his own head.

Parade recently revisited that story as the dark detail fans may have forgotten. Watch the episodes again and it reaches further than one night of television, because two of the men who wrote it also helped write the 1983 finale. Alda, who turned 90 on January 28, is still here to talk about what it meant to play a man who hid his pain behind a punchline.

Why Wouldn’t Hawkeye Go Into The Cave?

The first clue came in “C*A*V*E,” which aired on CBS on February 5, 1979, in the show’s seventh season. Written by Larry Balmagia and Ronny Graham, it sends the 4077th into a nearby cave when shelling pins the camp down. Everyone files inside except Hawkeye. The surgeon who could talk his way out of anything stalls at the entrance, and Colonel Potter slowly works out what is wrong. Hawkeye is claustrophobic, and he had never told anyone.

Margaret Houlihan, fighting her own hidden terror of loud noises, ends up being the one who helps him through it. Not every viewer bought the twist. The fan site MASH4077TV.com has pointed out that Hawkeye hid in a trunk in the pilot and squeezed into a crowded jeep in another episode without a flinch. The episode never explained where the fear came from. Two seasons later, a psychiatrist went digging.

What Did Sidney Freedman Find In Hawkeye’s Past?

“Bless You, Hawkeye” aired on March 16, 1981, in season 9. It was written by Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford and directed by Nell Cox, and it opens with Hawkeye sneezing and unable to stop. He sweats and scratches, the doctors find no medical cause, and Potter calls in Sidney Freedman, the Army psychiatrist played by Allan Arbus. By then Hawkeye is sure something is killing him. “Sidney, I’m scared,” he admits. “I’m gonna die.”

Sidney follows the clues Hawkeye keeps dropping without noticing, from the way he reaches for water images to a smell that seems to set him off. The talk turns to childhood summers in Maine and to Billy, an older cousin Hawkeye idolized like the brother he never had. When Hawkeye was 7, he remembers, he tumbled out of a fishing boat and Billy pulled him from the water and saved his life. It is a sweet memory, the kind a man carries with him to a war. Sidney suspected there was something wrong with it.

What Did Alan Alda Say About Hawkeye’s Hardest Scenes?

Episodes like this asked Alda to drop the wisecracks and let the fear show, and by season 9 he had been doing it since the first year. Talking about “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” the 1972 episode in which a friend of Hawkeye’s dies on the operating table, Alda told Jeff Greenfield at a 2013 Museum of the Moving Image event, as reported by The Comic’s Comic, “I think you welcomed the difficult stuff because you knew that was how life really is.” He was harder on his own work in a 2000 Television Academy Foundation interview. “There’s a shot of me crying over the guy who’s dead, which I really don’t like,” he said. “I don’t like my performance in it.”

By the late seventies he was writing and directing the show as well as starring in it, and he won an Emmy for writing the 1979 episode “Inga.” After M*A*S*H he earned an Oscar nomination for The Aviator and an Emmy for playing presidential candidate Arnold Vinick on The West Wing. Fans have spent years piecing together Hawkeye’s family, right down to whether he had a sister, and Alda has kept talking about his own life too. He went public with his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2018, and this fall he told CBS, “I don’t let Parkinson’s define me. It’s not who I am.” Hawkeye, it turned out, had let one memory define him for decades without knowing it.

What Really Happened With Cousin Billy?

Billy never saved him, at least not the way he remembered it. As Sidney pressed, the real memory broke through, and Hawkeye shouted it out. His cousin had been horsing around in the boat and pushed the 7-year-old into the water, and Hawkeye nearly drowned before Billy pulled him back out. The boy could not bear the idea that his hero had almost killed him, so his mind flipped the story into a rescue. Even the smell made sense now. Hawkeye had come out of that water smelling like a wet burlap sack, and once the truth was out, the sneezing stopped. Wikipedia’s M*A*S*H character guide goes a step further and links the near-drowning to his lifelong claustrophobia. The show never says that in so many words, so it is best read as the fans’ interpretation, but it fits that cave entrance in 1979 uncomfortably well.

Wilcox and Mumford were two of the eight writers credited on “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the finale Alda directed, which drew nearly 106 million viewers on February 28, 1983. It finds Hawkeye in a psychiatric hospital with Sidney once again. He remembers a refugee woman on a bus smothering a chicken to keep it quiet as an enemy patrol passed. The truth, which Sidney draws out, is that it was her baby, silenced after Hawkeye hissed at her to keep it quiet. In our reading, it is the cousin Billy trick all over again, a mind swapping an unbearable memory for one it can live with, only this time there was no rescue to rewrite it into.

That scene was nearly kept off the air. Producer Burt Metcalfe, who died in 2022 at 87, said it came from a real wartime account. “A mother’s baby in the group started to cry, and she smothered it to avoid the group’s detection,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, as SlashFilm recounted. Former M*A*S*H writer Ken Levine later wrote that Alda had wanted to tell that story years earlier and the writers refused because it was “too powerful.” “It’s the only time we ever said, ‘No. Not on our watch,'” Levine wrote. Alda waited. When the story finally aired, it went to the same character whose mind had once turned a near-drowning into a rescue, and this time Hawkeye had to face the truth in front of the biggest audience American television had ever seen.