ABC’s “Combat Hospital” raises moral issues

ABC is airing promos for a new summer fictional drama entitled Combat Hospital. This is a Canadian-conceived show set in 2006 in a military hospital at the Kandahar Airbase in Afghanistan, and purports to depict “the frantic lives of the hospital’s resident doctors and nurses from Canada, America, the UK and other allied countries.”

Wartime hospital dramas on TV are nothing new. M.A.S.H. was set during the Korean War, and China Beach depicted an evacuation hospital during the Viet Nam War. But both of these shows were created years after the conflicts they dramatized. Combat Hospital will be a fictionalized account of an ongoing war, and that raises some moral and ethical issues in my mind. There’s much that doesn’t feel right about having a fictional account of a war simultaneous with the actual death and suffering that’s taking place on a daily basis in Afghanistan.

• The show will undoubtedly depict casualties in graphic fashion. What will be the effect of such scenes on viewers with family members or friends who are in actual harm’s way?
• The doctors will surely be able to save some lives in the show. How does that play with viewers whose loved ones weren’t saved? And when the inevitable medical failures occur, is there a “multiplier effect” for the grief and trauma of those who suffered loss in real life?
• Are there ethical implications of having actors portraying soldiers and being paid many times more than the salaries of those men and women in the military who are not acting but serving in the same roles?
• If the story lines play out true to “Hollywood” form, there will be subplots involving “foxhole romances,” and dark humor. Will those things trivialize the real life-and-death drama of the ongoing war? And while there’s no doubt that humor is a healing and strengthening technique even in times of intense stress, does it matter that such humor is originating from a writer’s imagination? (I don’t know if any of the show’s writers have served in the military, and specifically in Afghanistan. That could make a difference in the answer to some of these questions.)
• Will the show’s writers be able to keep their personal opinions about the war out of the story lines, or will Combat Hospital be a vehicle for propagandizing a specific political viewpoint? And if the program promotes an agenda or perspective that’s the slightest bit at odds with American military goals and strategies, how might that feed the enemy’s own propaganda machine and morale?

We live in an age of compressed news cycles and real-time reporting. That’s not a bad thing, unless you subscribe to an “ignorance is bliss” philosophy. But when that leads to an overlap or blurring of lines between actual and dramatized events, troubling questions arise.

One might argue that such TV shows serve a useful purpose in helping us to remember the truth in the saying “war is hell,” and the reality of the sacrifices being made each day by those serving in the military (and their civilian support infrastructure). The counterargument is that if the actual news reports aren’t sufficient for such purposes, then a fictionalized television show won’t make any difference.

For me, and I suspect for many other Americans, Combat Hospital is too much, too soon.