The podcast studio is quiet, the low hum of the air conditioning the only sound until the host leans forward into the microphone.
He’s a younger man, someone who clearly grew up watching the reruns in the late nineties, and he looks at Gary with a mix of reverence and excitement.
He clears his throat and says the three words that defined a decade of television history: “I hear choppers.”
Gary Burghoff smiles. It is that familiar, slightly weary but warm Radar O’Reilly smile that hasn’t seemed to age a day, even if the man himself has.
He leans back in his chair, his eyes sparking with the memory of a production set that was both a creative sanctuary and a high-pressure cooker.
“You know,” Gary starts, his voice dropping into that comfortable, storyteller’s register, “whenever I hear someone say that to me, I don’t immediately think about the helicopters.”
“I don’t think about the dust of the Malibu ranch or those brown mountains in the distance.”
“I think about the smell of the Operating Room set at two o’clock in the morning.”
He describes the OR as a place of absolute, mandatory focus.
When the cameras were rolling in that specific set, the humor that the show was famous for usually took a back seat to the grit and the grime of the surgery.
They had actual doctors on set to make sure their hands were moving correctly, and the actors took the responsibility seriously.
They were often exhausted, filming late into the night, covered in synthetic blood that was essentially a sticky mixture of corn syrup and red dye.
“It was a very heavy atmosphere,” Gary recalls.
“We were filming a scene for one of those particularly dark episodes where the casualties just wouldn’t stop coming.”
“The mood on the floor was somber. Alan Alda was tired. Mike Farrell was tired. I was standing there in the corner with my clipboard, ready to give the status report on the next wave of wounded coming in from the front.”
The director was pushing the cast for one last perfect take before they lost their momentum or their energy.
The tension in the room was so thick you could have cut it with a surgical scalpel.
Gary looked at the actors gathered around the table, their faces obscured by surgical masks, with only their eyes visible under the harsh studio lights.
“I remember looking over at Alan’s eyes,” Gary says, leaning closer to the podcast mic.
“There was a glint there that absolutely should not have been there in a scene about a life-threatening thoracic injury.”
“I saw him glance at Mike, and then he looked down at the prosthetic torso on the table.”
And that’s when it happened.
Alan Alda, playing the incomparable Hawkeye Pierce, reached deep into the ‘patient’ on the table—a prosthetic torso they used for the close-up shots of internal surgical work.
He was supposed to be searching for a piece of jagged metal or a stray bullet, something life-threatening and dramatic for the scene’s climax.
The script called for a moment of high-stakes tension where the entire room goes silent as he retrieves the deadly object.
Instead, with a perfectly straight face and the professional precision of a world-class surgeon, Alan reached into the chest cavity and pulled out a massive, slightly greasy, bright yellow rubber chicken.
There was a heartbeat of absolute, dead silence on the set.
You have to understand the environment we were in.
We had been trapped in that small, hot room for twelve hours.
We were breathing in the scent of stale tea and latex.
We were all mentally mourning the fictional soldiers on the table because we put so much of our hearts into the roles.
And then, suddenly, there is this squeaking, floppy toy being held up in the air by the lead actor of the most popular show on television.
I looked at the chicken.
Then I looked down at my clipboard.
Then I looked at Mike Farrell, who was standing directly across from Alan.
Mike didn’t even blink.
He didn’t break character for a second.
He just reached for his surgical clamps, nudged the rubber chicken, and said, ‘Careful, Hawkeye, I think it’s still laying eggs.’
That was the end of the take.
Actually, that was the end of the entire hour.
I think I was the first one to truly go.
I tried to deliver my line about the incoming ambulance count, but it came out as a sort of high-pitched, strangled wheeze.
I dropped the clipboard on the floor.
The rule on MAS*H was always that once Radar breaks, the whole camp falls apart.
It was like the very foundation of the 4077th had just crumbled into the dirt.
The director, who had been yelling about the shooting schedule and the budget five minutes earlier, just slumped over his monitor in the shadows.
For a second, I thought he was having a physical collapse, but then I saw his shoulders shaking.
He wasn’t just laughing; he was weeping with it.
He had completely given up on the night.
The camera crew was the worst, though.
The guy operating the main dolly was laughing so hard he actually accidentally kicked the tripod.
The camera tilted violently up toward the rafters, filming the studio lights and the dust motes in the air while the rest of us descended into total madness.
Alan just stood there, still holding the rubber chicken with his blood-stained surgical gloves.
He was looking around with this faux-innocent expression, calmly asking the crew if we were going to continue the operation or if the patient was ‘too foul’ to save.
That is the thing about the MAS*H cast that people don’t always realize.
We worked in this incredibly heavy, emotional atmosphere.
We were portraying a war that felt very real to us because of the mountains of letters we received from actual veterans.
The only way to survive that kind of emotional weight, day after day, was to have these moments of absolute, transcendent stupidity.
The rubber chicken wasn’t just a prank.
It was a pressure valve.
We spent the next twenty minutes trying to clean up the set because Mike Farrell had eventually taken the chicken and tried to ‘resuscitate’ it using a pair of surgical bellows.
There was yellow latex and prop blood everywhere.
The script supervisor was trying to maintain some semblance of order, but she was literally holding her sides, unable to speak.
Every time we tried to reset the scene and get back into our positions, someone would make a faint ‘cluck’ sound from the back of the room.
We would get back into position.
The masks would go back on.
The lights would dim.
The director would finally catch his breath and call ‘Action.’
And Alan would look at me, and I would see those eyes crinkling behind the mask, and I’d know he was still thinking about that chicken.
I’d start shaking.
Then Mike would start shaking.
Then the ‘patient’—who was actually a very patient extra—would start vibrating because he was trying so hard not to laugh while playing a dead weight.
We never did get that take that night.
We had to come back the next morning after a few hours of sleep to actually finish the scene with the proper gravity it required.
But the energy on the set was different when we returned.
That heavy, oppressive gloom that usually settled over the OR had lifted.
We were a team again.
People always ask me if it was hard to play a character as naive and earnest as Radar in such a cynical setting.
I always tell them it was the easiest thing in the world because I had guys like Alan and Mike looking out for me.
They knew when the pressure was getting to be too much.
They knew exactly when we needed a rubber chicken in the middle of a war zone to keep our sanity intact.
It’s funny how a moment of total unprofessionalism can actually make you better at your job.
We were closer after that night.
We were a family that had shared a very ridiculous secret in the middle of a very serious fake war.
Even now, forty years later, if I happen to see a rubber chicken in a toy store, I feel my heart rate go up just a little bit.
I instinctively look around for a clipboard and wait for someone to tell me the choppers are coming in.
It’s those little cracks in the mask that let the light in, you know?
Do you think you could keep a straight face if your boss pulled a rubber chicken out of a ‘patient’ at two in the morning?
