Hawkeye Pierce

He is a drafted Army surgeon called to serve at the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean Conflict. Between long, intense sessions of treating critically wounded patients, he makes the best of his life in an isolated Army camp with heavy drinking, carousing, and pulling pranks on the people he despises, unpleasantly stiff and callous Major Frank Burns and Major Margaret Houlihan.

The TV version proved to be a somewhat different character: While his professional and social life was much the same, he also gradually evolved into a man of conscience trying to maintain some humanity and decency in the insane world he has been thrust into.

At the end of the TV series with the truce, he was the last to leave the dismantled camp with the announced goal of returning to his hometown of Crabapple Cove, Maine, to be a local doctor who has the time to get to know his patients instead of the endless flow of casualties he faced in his term of service.