Q18: The emotions in the O.R. scene of "Abyssinia, Henry" right after Henry's
        death looked so real!  Why was that?

A18: On June 29th 1999, Larry Gelbart posted the following to alt.tv.mash:

For those of you who have inquired recently about this subject, here is an
excerpt from my book, "Laughing Matters."

Naturally, CBS did not want us to "kill" the Henry Blake character.  And so
was sentimental, dear old 20th Century Fox.  Killing a character in a half-hour
show had never been done before.  That was all the reason Gene and I needed to
know we would have to do it.

M*A*S*H was a fast track for actors, but the late McLean Stevenson, who played
Henry, was not an actor in the classical sense.  He was a personality, a
terrific one.  He had done a lot of television, and appeared in a good many
commercials, but I don't think he ever felt completely comfortable working with
experienced actors.  Which is not to say that he didn't do a marvelous job.  I
think that after three years of co-starring in it, he felt the series had done
a marvelous job for him, too - that it had served as a showcase for his talents
and he would move on, get his own writers, producers, and directors, and do for
himself what we had all done for each other.  M*A*S*H, however, was a
once-in-a-career confluence of collaborators, an experience not likely to be
repeated simply because you hoped it would.  Though Mac was under contract to
the series for an additional two years, Gene and I felt that it was everyone's
best interest to let him leave.  An unhappy actor in a group effort becomes a
tremendous emotional burden for all concerned. We resolved that, instead of
doing an episode in which yet another actor leaves yet another series, we would
try to have Mac/Henry's departure make a point, one that was consistent with
the series' attitude regarding the wastefulness of war; we would have that
character die as a result of the conflict.  After three years of showing
faceless bit players portraying dying or dead servicemen, here was an
opportunity to have a character that our audience knew and loved, one whose
death would mean something to them.

Gene and I worked out a story entitled, "Abyssinia, Henry" - Abyssinia being a
20's expression meaning "I'll be seeing you." The phrase struck us as very
breezy, very Henry Blake-ish.  We asked two writers, a pair of M*A*S*H
stalwarts, Everett Greenbaum and the late Jim Fritzell, to write the episode.
We distributed the finished script to the cast and various production
departments, but removed the last page, which called for Radar to enter the
O.R. with the communiqué that informs everyone that Henry Blake, who had been
discharged, and was on his way back to his family in the States.  Colonel
Blake's plane went down in the Sea of Japan, he informs us ... and "there
weren't no survivors."

We kept that one, last page under wraps, locking it in my desk drawer.  The
only cast member we let in on the secret was Alan.  We planned the schedule for
this episode so that the O.R. scene would be the last one we shot.  There were,
in fact, two O.R. sequences in that show: one in which Henry is informed by
Radar that he, Henry, is going home, that he has received his discharge orders,
and everyone in the room breaks into raucous song; the second, the one in which
Radar reads the communique  announcing Henry's death.  After we shot the first
scene, the one in which Henry gets the good news, the cast and crew,
understandably, began to wrap, pulling the plug on the episode, and for that
matter, the whole season.

There were a great many visitors on the set: spectators, press, family,
friends, easily a couple of hundred people.  We asked everyone to wait a few
minutes, that we had one more piece of business to finish.  I had a couple of
words privately with Billy Jurgensen, our cinematographer.  I told him what was
up, and asked him to position his camera for the one additional scene.  I did
not want to rehearse it; we would shoot it only once.  Then, taking the cast
aside, I opened a manila envelope that contained the one-page last scene,
telling them I had something I wanted to show them.  "I don't want to see it!"
Gary Burghoff exploded.  "I know you!  You've got pictures of dead babies in
there!"

Assuring him I didn't, I gave each a copy of the one page scene to read to
themselves.  Each had a different reaction.
"F--king brilliant," said Larry Linville.
"You son of a b--ch," Gary said to McLean.  "You'll probably get an Emmy out of
this!"

Mac, who had stayed to watch the filming of what he knew was his last M*A*S*H, was
speechless.  But that doesn't begin to say it.

We returned to the set and shot the scene.  Gary was unbelievably touching as
he read the message on-camera.  The others reacted with a kind of heartfelt
sincerity that was stunning - their performance based on their real surprise
and lingering shock, their awareness of how much Mac meant to them.  The
performances of the extras and crew, hearing of Henry's death for the first
time, as the cameras were rolling were all one could ask of them.  Unhappily,
there was some sort of technical glitch.  Either the boom mike or a light or
whatever could go wrong did and we had to shoot it again.  I was heartsick.  I
thought Gary would never be able to do a second take as beautifully as he did
the first.  He was better.  And on that second go, a totally unexpected thing
happened.  After Gary finished reading his message, there was a hushed silence
in the O.R. set, as B.J.'s camera panned the stricken faces of the actors, and
then someone off-camera accidentally let a surgical instrument drop to the
floor.  It was perfect, that clattering, hollow sound, filling a palpable void
in a way that no words could.  I could not have planned it better; I wish I had
planned it - whenever I happen to hear it again, I marvel at how perfectly it
worked out.  Mac left the stage without a word to anyone; he couldn't stay for
the wrap party.  The scene destroyed him.  I learned later he sat crying in his
dressing room for hours.

We received a tremendous amount of mail from people saying say that it wasn't
true, that Henry wasn't really dead.  They felt that we had jerked their
emotions around, that M*A*S*H was a comedy show and it wasn't fair to do what
we did to them.  I think it's fair to say that over the years we had given them
fair warning that we might make them care from time to time.