That's Major to you

        

 

Rank & Name: Major Margaret Houlihan
Canon point: Season 10 - Post Birthday Girls
Application
History - the wiki is terrible, sorry.

Margaret Houlihan is a complicated woman with complicated issues. She is a fundamentally flawed human being who both says she worked her way to her rank as Major through her own merit and yet seems to know an awful lot of generals in the biblical sense. She's had her share of affairs and we catch her in the beginning of the series with the awful Frank Burns who seems to have a particular knack in bringing about her worst nature. She continually attempts to get surgeons Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John in trouble through various means (though sometimes, they need no help from the terrible two).

She can be horribly spiteful, even mean. Case in point? Her treatment of Frank Burns, though he's pretty much a lousy human being, when she gets engaged to Lt. Col. Donald Penobscott. Over the course of seasons, she had continually professed her love for Frank despite the fact that he was apparently happily married back in the United States, wanted him to divorce his wife, etc., etc. and yet when Penobscott put a (tiny) ring on her finger she dropped Frank like a pinless grenade and let him completely crack up. It was not at all her finest hour.

Despite these qualities, she has wonderful moments where she is all too human. Margaret is the kind of person who stuffs most of her feelings away into some black box deep in the back of her head and insists that she's "by the book" - really, Korea and every loud noise out there scares the holy shit out of her. She manages to pull herself together and keep moving though. She stays with Hawkeye on several occasions when the camp is threatened and they have to bug out, helping him operate on a patient who couldn't be moved due to a spinal injury and sits with him when his claustrophobia gets the better of him.  She even admits to him that when the bombs drop or there's loud noises, all she wants to do is run away.  But she doesn't, she makes herself stay and soldiers on. When lost in the wilderness trying to get home from an Aid Station, she and Pierce are nearly blown up by North Korean artillery, she admits to him that she's actually scared and cracks enough to let him in. She has a few moments like this, even admitting to her nurses that she's terribly lonely.

It takes her a divorce from her cheating, rather terrible husband, dumping her front line chauvinistic love, Jack Sully, and a visit from an old friend, to really start to change. Eventually she starts to show a kinder, softer side. Much to the relief of some. There's a great deal of Margaret to dislike, a whole lot to like.

She takes zero shit from anyone and frequently (drunk or not) will slap or punch out someone being a complete ass. Margaret's intense, highly focused, a fabulous nurse, and a woman who will tell someone off if there's enough disrespect going on. In fact, she told Hawkeye off spectacularly for objectifying the nurses and being more than a little chauvinist about a visiting female doctor who'd taken over a surgery for him.  Despite her gruffness and her series long love/hate relationship with Chief Surgeon Hawkeye Pierce and the others in her unit, she has this enormous amount of respect for each and every one of them.  You just...need to catch her at one of those human moments to scrape it out of her. 

Despite all of her faults, and her journey to overcome them, she really is one hell of a woman.