Remembering the Real China Beach : ‘A Series So Moving That Its Sins Are an Affront’

I have been watching the Americans wounded in Vietnam for a month now, sitting quite close to the television screen, and I know that the badly burned GI in the new ABC series “China Beach” (ABC, 10 p.m. Wednesdays) would have been in too much pain to ask the weeping USO woman to sing “I Believe.” No one gave him morphine, so he would have been screaming or unconscious.

The burned in Vietnam did not ask for a song. Sometimes they wanted to be allowed to die.

In the real war, the wounded often ask questions that you were never going to hear again. A nice pediatrician from San Francisco, drafted, was one of the doctors working in a B-Med combat medical station for American casualties during the disastrous South Vietnamese drive into Laos, 1971. He told me of a 20-year-old who was mutilated by a mine as his engineer battalion cleared the border. First the boy wanted the doctor to pray.

“Then he asked me, ‘Will my parents treat me the same?’ ” the doctor told me. I did not want his answer. This B-Med was only a sunken fortified room made of packed earth whose walls were planks of rough wood and strips of metal.

“We had to use more morphine than in civilian practice, sometimes 2 1/2 times . . . they come in very afraid of what will happen,” the pediatrician said. He wore two flak jackets because the shelling was often intense. Choppers took the wounded or the dead to an Army hospital in Quang Tri where there were nurses. I often saw them at work in different places and thought then that they were the best of all of us: the nurses and the medics in the field with each platoon.

The old war, and its unmanageable memories, sometimes comes back when I’m watching the face of an actress in “China Beach” who is a nurse from Kansas named Lt. Colleen McMurphy, with five brothers. She is played by Dana Delany, who understands how to use silence, an astonishing gift.

In a recent episode when the nurse believes that two other young Americans, women who are her friends, have gone down in a chopper, she does not cry or make the usual motions of despair. It is that face that tells us how she has taught herself to bear grief because more is always on the way. This was the struggle for those who survived the killing or saw the end results of it: how to keep moving and not let the heart turn to stone.

“You cut off their hand but you don’t have to hold it,” she tells a doctor. “You’re not the last person they see before they die.”

China Beach was really an R & R center, outside Da Nang, for our troops. For a little while they could cavort like children in the ocean and not hate the sun. In the ABC series it is also the 510 Evacuation Center with a Graves Registration Collection Unit for the corpses on their way home. The Red Cross Recreational Center has a club and puts on shows.

The story rests, often shakily, on how some American women endured the war, although not all are as heroic as Lt. McMurphy. The others are a USO entertainer, a Red Cross Doughnut Dolly perfectly played by Nan Woods, an American prostitute called K.C. who has the run of the place to my amazement and knows that everything is for sale, and a goofy, middle-aged Special Services director who is obliged to be a dimwit but is never truly funny.

Sometimes even Delany is eclipsed by the actress Chloe Webb, who plays Laurette, a poor girl from Pennsylvania, hardly a beauty. An average singer with a sweet, croaky, speaking voice dying to be loved and admired, she can be most captivating. Asked to sing something from the repertoire of the Andrews Sisters because some brass, World War II vintage, are coming to the club, Laurette says: “You want me to sing the wrong war?” Later she complains that she wants to perform for some “grown-up men who will not cheer my underpants.”

Conceived and written by John Sacret Young and William Broyles Jr., a writer and Vietnam veteran, “China Beach” is often so audacious and moving that its sins are an affront. It is often made soggy by overwriting and elaborate plots more suitable to the soaps.

The men are rarely as compelling or haunting as they should be, in fact a deeply damaged soldier, called Boonie, seems almost a parody to me of the men who had seen too much combat. One black actor, Michael Boatman, is Pvt. Sam Beckett, the mortician who receives, logs and prepares the bodies. “Sweet Dreams,” he says, leaving the room where the bodies lie on slabs. Beckett is going under inch by inch and does not need to have to speak such lines as: “All the flesh goes to bone, all the dreams go to bone.”

The others at the 510 try to help him, for “China Beach” is often about love, too. What people try to find is a family to sustain them.

Black soldiers sending heroin back home in the body bags have some truthful, rough, things to say about the war and who it used up like Kleenex. The doughnut dolly who must play idiot games with the troops is really in Vietnam looking for her missing Marine brother--and finds him, thanks to K.C., who knows how to get anything. The brother is a deserter and an addict. “What I do, and what I am, is as clean as the war,” he tells her.

“China Beach” may never go beyond this line and reveals some of the lies and corruption and dishonor in the U.S. military or what the Vietnamese had to pay for our presence. But it does take huge risks and perhaps we have Broyles to thank for that.

In one of the early episodes, a Vietnamese woman in Da Nang wounds and kills some of McMurphy’s pals from the 510 and is admitted to the hospital herself, pregnant. An American infantryman lies in the next bed. The nurse hates the woman and cannot pretend otherwise. When the soldier begins to go into convulsions, McMurphy is in the hall holding the “enemy” baby and it is the Viet Cong who tries to save him. A strange and separate peace now exists between the two women and in the final scene the American, knowing that on her release the other woman will be interrogated and tortured by “our” Vietnamese, pretends not to see her walk out of the hospital with her infant. Nothing is said.

We may never see anything of that caliber in a television series about the war which has become so fashionable. The American need not to know is unchanged. The people who defied and fought us do not count; it is our suffering that matters, not theirs. “China Beach,” in that episode, revealed much more.

There is nothing to recommend about “Tour of Duty” (Saturdays at 9 p.m. on CBS) unless you are still 12. I have tried to be attentive; I have even noticed that the grenades don’t look like the ones used in Vietnam. No cliche is scorned in this series. “Tour of Duty” achieves one unimaginable effect. It makes the war, which took so much away, now boring, and I would not have thought that possible just yet.