“Men are essential to fighting wars and the Marine Corps has thouhjfully gathered 24,000 of them in a limited area in Korea. Ben Hedges is the head of the Public Information Office, hosting journalists covering the war. They prefer to do it in the company of many, along with many bottles of booze. Meanwhile, one of Hedges's staff, Sgt. Riley, has had inspiration of his own: because there are 24,000 Marines in Korea, whom are always on the move - so what they need most of all is a mobile whorehouse.”
Long before Richard Hooker wrote MASH, his seminal 1968 novel about the Korean War, writer Gene L. Coon gave us Meanwhile, Back at the Front, a sort of semi-autobiographical tale of his time reporting during the Korean War (he would write one more novel set in Korea, The Short End of the Stick, released in 1964. It became one of the earliest publications to discuss the drug problems of the bored occupation troops and how commanders dealt with them).
The book really is well written (a talent Coon would foray into a TV writing career after the war) and sometimes very funny. However, there’s a reason this book has been out of print for decades, as it has no universal appeal. War novels have their fans, but tales set around WWII with some sort of hook that will get a young reader today to sit and read will be out shined by this book. And maybe there are other reasons, as well, why Hollywood has all but ignored this time period, (with the exception of MASH) if only because it was seen less a heroic, end of the world conflict and more an ideological battle led by politicians. As well, there is a lot of misogyny and blatant, in your face racism that the MASH TV series never covered.
By 1956, Coon became involved in scripting teleplays for popular Western and action television shows of the era, including Dragnet (1951), Wagon Train (1957), Maverick (1957), The Wild Wild West (1966) and Bonanza (1959). At Universal in the early 1960s, he turned McHale's Navy (1962) from a one-hour drama into a successful 30-minute sitcom. Together with the writer Les Colodny, Coon floated the idea for The Munsters (1964), as a satirical take on The Donna Reed Show (1958). Coon was also known as one of the fastest writers in Hollywood at the time, often rewriting a script for shooting overnight or over a weekend.
This speed and dry sense of humor may have helped him get his job working on Star Trek. Brought in around the middle of season one, when Gene Roddenberry was facing exhaustion and the NBC censors, Coon became instrumental in bringing humor to the show, as he’s credited for seeing the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate thus creating the “bickersonesque" disagreements between Spock and McCoy than fans grew to love, as well some the most signature aspects of Star Trek: the United Federation of Planets, Starfleet Command, Photon Torpedoes, Khan Noonien Singh, Zefarm Cochrane and the Klingons. Sadly, much of it, if not all of it, is credited to Roddenberry himself. While personal issues with Roddenberry forced him to leave midway through season two, he did contribute four scripts for the third season under the pseudonym of Lee Cronin, as he was by then under contract to Universal Studios (where he mentored the prolific Glen A. Larson).
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