April, 1975. During the chaotic final days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, as the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon, South Vietnamese resistance crumbled.

Set in the Korean War of the early 1950s, “M*A*S*H,” the CBS dramedy about wisecracking U.S. Army doctors, was among the most popular shows in the country during the Vietnam War’s final years.

It was heavy with anti-military, anti-war sentiment, evoking the zeitgeist of a Vietnam-exhausted populace. “War isn’t Hell,” Hawkeye Pierce, played by Alan Alda, says in a typical line.