‘Combat Hospital’ presents image of war

In one episode of “M*A*S*H,” CBS’s classic sitcom set in the Korean conflict, surgeons Pierce and Hunnicutt debate the ethics of committing surgery on a colonel bent on an aggressive strategy that will send soldiers into a high-risk situation.

Pierce induces, then diagnoses, the colonel’s symptoms as appendicitis, and then removes his appendix. “It was pink and perfect and I threw it in the scrap bucket,” he said.

As choppers come in bearing wounded, Hunnicutt says, “You treated a symptom. The disease goes merrily on.”

ABC’s “Combat Hospital” may only be similar in topic. It’s not exactly “Grey’s Anatomy: Kandahar” but it’s ...

Well, let’s be fair. By the time this exchange took place, Pierce had served all of seven years in this three-year conflict. I have no idea how old Pierce was, but Alan Alda, the actor playing him, was 43 years old – already an elder statesman to most of the people on “Combat Hospital.”

I had a chance this week to watch a couple of episodes and I was impressed with parts of it and thrown by others.

Setting

First, I think this show, set at the Role 3 NATO Medical Unit on the Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan is envisioned as a sanctuary, a space to retreat from the conflict. Medical personnel from all over the world work together – and sometimes butt heads – to provide needed medical care in an environment of relative calm.

The previews indicate this is going to change pretty dramatically in next week’s episode, but that was the atmosphere that seemed to have been established.

Last week’s episode opened with a kabob-eating contest that resulted in food poisoning. Col. Xavier Marks of the Canadian forces – this show has American and Canadian producers, which probably accounts for the reserved approach to sex and violence in the presentation – notes they can have a burst of shrapnel and everyone’s fine, but one cook with gastroenteritis can level the compound.

That episode explored the romantic history of a woman who left her husband after falling in love with another woman. It’s impossible to completely ignore the parallels to the Ross character on “Friends,” but the backstory gets more complicated when, while the ex-husband – still in love with her – is nursing her back to health, she tells him she’s broken up with her girlfriend. They begin to reconnect a bit, then she leaves him a goodbye note on her way to Kabul. C’est la vie.

This week’s episode revolved around a wounded civilian rescued from an accident with burns over a good portion of her body. Trauma team leader Bobby Trang is at the center of what becomes an entrenched division among the hospital staff over whether to continue treating her or to let her die and end her suffering.

The way they stepped up the conflict in this already dark case was to reveal that one of the other patients in the accident was her daughter. But that didn’t really change the medical facts in the mother’s case.

Also, repeated reference was made to “the rule of nines,” an evocative phrase not explained especially well in the show that seemed to be a shorthand method of determining treatment options based on burns over a percentage of total body surface area.

Trang estimated her burns at 45 percent, which is less than half, but in any event the burns were extensive and her recovery was far from guaranteed.

Ethics

Certainly the treatment of a civilian following an accident is a weighty ethical issue, and not just because it involved a military vehicle. If they could keep her alive and aid her recovery to where she could be transferred to a civilian hospital, that was one thing. But she would require nearly constant attention. Doctors and nurses were attending her night and day. They got in each other’s way, and they got upset with each other. Some thought she was a lost cause from the beginning, and that Trang was simply trying to maintain an ego-driven 100 percent cure rate – which denial would’ve been more convincing if he weren’t preening over it so publicly at the top of the episode.

Even more to the point ethics-wise was an investigation into whether a Canadian doctor should have prescribed stimulants to a flirty airman who later died in a plane crash. His team said the equipment malfunctioned. The investigator was bent on blaming pilot error and by extension the doctor who refused to prescribe the stimulants.

She said she couldn’t prescribe powerful stimulants based on his complete lack of symptoms and advised him to approach his flight physician. The investigator pressed her, but this whole situation seemed too “constructed” to really invest in, given how informal the pilot’s request was in the first place and the fact that the pilot who died was on screen for maybe a minute.

It certainly didn’t rise to the level of the scene I described at the top of the review.

As in life, there are subplots that don’t really seem to go anywhere, and randomness that means little but provides some distraction. A sort of arrogant British doctor who seems to be the Winchester-slash-Dr. House of the operation manages to get entangled in a property dispute when he rents some land out to two Afghan farmers (I’m going to just ignore how he came to own property in Afghanistan in that I don’t know and realize in exactly the same moment that I don’t really care.) He calls on a young translator to settle the dispute since he doesn’t speak the language, and the translator works out a deal and for his services charges the doctor a pair of Italian leather boots and a pair of high-end sunglasses.

This entire storyline was actively uninteresting to me except for the translator’s reaction when Dr. Arrogant authorized him to be his agent, like on Jerry Maguire: “I have seen ‘Jerry Maguire’ on DVD three times! But for being an agent, he gets so much money they have to show it to him.” Fun line.

Reaction

So, do the occasional fun lines and mildly comic, occasionally tense situa-tions make up for relatively underdeveloped characters and their random situations?

Possibly.

I guess as a fictionalized window on conditions in a forward situation in an ongoing conflict, a sense that this is a sanitized representation of what quite a lot of people are going through in Asia’s basement circa 2006, “Combat Hospital” does keep the fact that we are at war overseas in front of us in a way that even 24-hour cable news occasionally forgets.

And as such, my strongest hope is that it reflect the struggle and sacrifice of our servicemen and women with the respect, dignity, valor and humanity they embody.

So ... the multinational production team has competing priorities: To keep its characters human, to keep its show entertaining, and to be respectful of the servicemen they portray.

So far, they mostly seem to be doing this.

New episodes of “Combat Hospital” air Tuesdays at 10/9c on ABC.