“Everybody Here Is Crazy”

In December 1973, television’s M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–1983) aired the first of 40 episodes that tackled the disabling effects of war, the prime-time program capping a year of increased disability awareness and activism in the United States. By then, the Vietnam War had entered its final years of cease-fires and troop withdrawals, and the national media had started to focus on what Newsweek termed the “permanent prisoners of war”—the hundreds of thousands of physically and psychologically wounded veterans created in Vietnam. ¹