Mail Tribune

Mike Farrell may be best known for his years on "M*A*S*H" and "Providence," but his new book is no mere collection of show business anecdotes. It is the story of the merging of the personal and the political realms in one man's journey through life.

Among the celebrity blurbs for "Just Call Me Mike: a Journey to Actor and Activist" (Akashic Books, $21.95), the funniest is from old pal Alan Alda, who wrote, "I learned things about him in this book I never knew before. So now I have to call him humble, too. He's really kind of irritating."

Farrell says in an interview from a San Francisco hotel that the book tour, which will bring him to Ashland for a Sunday talk, has been more strenuous than writing the book. When his publisher talked him into writing it, he told him to write about his activism.

"You can't just write a book about that," Farrell says. "But what I could write about is who this person is."

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He wrote about growing up and raising a family and making a career and being deeply involved in the long-haul fights for human rights and against war and the death penalty.

Still, he always gets asked about his years on "M*A*S*H."

"I can't imagine a better job," he says. "It seems funny to call it a job, it became a kind of calling. What we heard again and again was, 'I never watch television, and I never miss 'M*A*S*H.' "

He got the role of B.J. Hunnicutt after losing the role of an android's buddy in the short-lived Gene Roddenberry project "The Questor Tapes." The door opened when Wayne Rogers left "M*A*S*H" three years into the show. It was the first of several canny replacements that maintained the show's chemistry and kept it maybe the most beloved TV show ever.

It took a lot of hits for being anti-military, "which," writes Farrell, a former Marine, "we were not. ... What the show spoke out against most clearly was the hypocrisy that sends young people (mostly men) to fight and die to meet old men's ego-driven, dishonest, jingoistic or megalomaniacal needs."

After "M*A*S*H," the Reagan Administration was pouring cash and military "advisers" into El Salvador to stop an insurgency there, and Farrell began going to Central America to help refugees from El Salvador pouring into camps in Honduras.

"It was a potential Vietnam," he says.

One incident blurred the line between acting and activism. In 1985 a guerrilla commander named Nidia Diaz was wounded and taken prisoner and was about to lose use of a hand unless she had surgery. No Salvadoran doctor dared help, so Amnesty International recruited an American husband/wife doctor/nurse team, and Farrell went as an observer.

"It was hideous," he says. "People were being taken off the streets and being killed by death squads."

The Americans were taken to the prisoner after midnight, and the doctor said to Farrell, "Put on the gown and gloves."

"Whoa, Doc," Farrell said. "I'm here to watch."

The doctor said Farrell had some experience.

"That was fake blood," he protested. "We could do another take."

The doctor said Farrell had to help or the surgery could not happen. He agreed on condition that the patient agree. She did. Then she laughed and said in Spanish, "In the mountains, those who can, do."

Farrell assisted, and the operation was a success. Nidia Diaz later used the hand to sign a peace agreement and became a member of the El Salvador's Constituent Assembly, or congress.

Farrell, who has been an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq, once organized a Hollywood event in support of Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers. The documents detailed in thousands of pages the secret machinations behind the U.S. government's involvement in Vietnam. The publication outraged President Nixon and was considered to have spurred a "credibility gap" in which people realized that what the government said didn't always square with what it did.

Farrell says he thinks the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby for lying in the case of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame has comparable implications today — but the times are so different he's not counting on it.

"Odd to say, that was a more innocent time," he says. "There is more cynicism today, more fear.

"The lies, Libby, WMDs, all these things have been adding up to what one would expect to be a huge explosion. But I'm not sure the collective consciousness is ready to make that leap."

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.