Lt. Colonel Henry Braymore Blake

Henry Blake commands the 4077th MASH unit with the harried air of a man who'd rather be fishing back in Bloomington, Illinois. Amiable and rumpled, he leaves the paperwork to Radar, tolerates Hawkeye and Trapper's schemes, and runs his hospital more through decency and exhaustion than discipline or rank-pulling.

Stevenson plays command as a kind of benevolent bewilderment, a father figure too tired and too humane to be a real disciplinarian. That softness makes him the show's emotional ballast early on: surrounded by chaos and gallows humor, Henry is the one adult who still seems faintly astonished that any of this is happening at all.