Greg Horton is a widely published freelance writer and an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City Community College. With a new generation of veterans struggling to deal with emotional and physical wounds from their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to find meaningful work in a challenging economy, this story of a father’s 30-year nursing career after his return from the Vietnam War is particularly relevant today.

My father started us on M*A*S*H soon after his return from Korea in 1973. The Vietnam War was nearing its end, although we did not know it at the time. A combat medic during his tour of duty in Vietnam early in the war, on this most recent tour my father had been stationed in Korea for a year at a hospital that received the grievously injured. “Spaghetti and meatball surgery,” he called it.

Our family had moved to Maud, Oklahoma, in 1972 to be near my mother’s family while my dad was in Korea. The endless countryside around our small town, combined with the local dump, gave us more than enough adventures to keep our minds off the war in a country of which we knew little.

M*A*S*H, the legendary television show featuring Alan Alda as the sarcastic antihero, started the year my father left for Korea. We were not a television-watching family, as such. My mother’s Pentecostal background instilled a deep-rooted distrust for the medium, unless Oral Roberts or Rex Humbard was preaching.

However, on my […]