Hawkeye falls in love with a Korean woman caring for orphans and refugees at her farm. A newly-arrived nurse calls Margaret's marriage to Donald into question.
Attention, all personnel! Captain Pierce and Kyung Soon are noted to have exchanged the following tropes:
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Margaret finds out from a newly-arrived nurse that Donald has been unfaithful.
- Ask a Stupid Question...: Hawkeye asks how Kyung Soon could get water from a mile away. She tells him that's where the water is.
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Hawkeye claims he is "pull-ay towards poetry", or pulled towards it - not realizing "poulet" is French for chicken.
- Boring, but Practical: Kyung Soon sells the car she'd been driving to get a pair of oxen because the car requires gas while the oxen can eat grass.
- Camp Follower: Kyung Soon has to take the orphans in her home farther south partly to keep the girls from becoming this (or worse).
- Complete-the-Quote Title: From the common adage "All's fair in love and war."
- Contrived Coincidence: Lieutenant Gleason just happens to go to the one MASH unit where the wife of the lieutenant-colonel she was partying with is assigned.
- Downer Ending: Of the "two people fall in love but are torn apart because of the war" variety.
- Idiot Ball:
- Potter orders Hawkeye to go to Kyung Soon's estate, despite knowing Hawkeye's attitude towards army discipline, instead of explaining why it's important that he go. He justifies it by essentially saying that he didn't have to explain to Hawkeye.
- He follows this up by asking I-Corps to transfer Lieutenant Gleason as far away from the camp (and Margaret) as possible, not realizing they might assign her to Tokyo - right near Donald.
- Impoverished Patrician: Kyung Soon and her mother are this, living on what was once a well-kept estate. She was educated in Paris in her youth and would discuss literature and music in French with a local doctor. What the war hasn't destroyed, she sells after her mother dies.
- Innocuously Important Episode: Probably the episode with the most foreshadowing for the finale. Hawkeye accidentally calls himself a chicken in French, the tearful goodbye about the futility of writing is echoed with B.J., and Margaret drunkenly says he's one of the things that stinks about the war. He knows.
- Iron Woobie: Kyung Soon proves to be one of these, taking in orphans in her bombed-out house and getting water from a mile away.
- Irony: The one time Hawkeye tries to look like a good little soldier boy, he really shouldn't have, as he doesn't understand yet he's part of the imperialist war machine that's making Kyung Soon's life miserable.
- Jerkass: Winchester offers Hawkeye a can of food for his romantic meal with Kyung Soon - a can of wild boar goulash that's swelling from whatever toxin is growing inside it.
- Oh, Crap!: Margaret, when she realizes that Potter may have transferred the woman her husband was trying to romance back to Tokyo, where he's stationed.
- The One That Got Away: Kyung Soon and Hawkeye for each other. Also the Korean doctor she used to have conversations with in French.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Hawkeye resents being ordered to treat Kyung Soon's mother while in the middle of triage, seeing it as an example of this.
- Something Only They Would Say: Margaret knows for sure that Donald was having a fling with Lieutenant Gleason when she reports that he tried to lick her fingernails.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: Hawkeye and Kyung Soon both know the risks of pursuing each other. They do it anyway. They would only write to each other a couple of times out of sheer futility before never seeing each other again.
- Take a Third Option: Invoked by Margaret when Potter tells her about a time that he had to choose between his car and his horse (the horse kept trying to jump over the car because it was attracted to the color). She mentions that he could have repainted the car, an option he clearly hadn't thought of.
