JERUSALEM — My father was a Vietnam War veteran.
I do not have anything exactly relevant to the headlines today to discuss this topic, but I have been watching syndicated reruns of the early-1990s American television-show “China Beach” on Israeli television, and it produced some pseudo-vicarious memories. Let me explain.
I never knew much about my father except that he was shot through the wrist during the war and received a Purple Heart medal. Likely as a result of his experiences in Southeast Asia, he developed alcoholism and various other mental issues. But I never really understood because he and my mother divorced when I was three, and I had rarely seen him until I had received a phone call from a relative nearly twenty years later to inform me that he was dying from pancreatic cancer. I flew from Boston to St. Louis to say my final goodbyes and attend the funeral a few days later, and his other son from another mother gave me a bullet from the twenty-one gun salute at his burial.
China Beach TV Show
Since I have never known what my father experienced, I have been drawn to watching the four seasons of “China Beach.” I had never seen the show before since I was ten or so at the time. Still, the program has stood the test of television time to communicate effectively the drama facing those involved in the war and the aftermath of the trauma.
The plot: “China Beach” is not yet another movie or television show that showcases the grim horror of soldiers in the Vietnam jungle. By the early 1990s, it would have been a cliche. Rather, the show takes a different approach by focusing more on the lives of other people including the doctors, nurses, U.N. personnel, French officials, Red Cross volunteers, and an on-base American prostitute-and-businesswoman looking to strike it rich. Needless to say, they suffered — mentally, if not physically — a great deal as well. Here are the introductory credits to the show, starring Dana Delany (pictured, in her breakout role):
Where the show truly excelled was in its creative approach. Rather than just show the day-to-day lives of the characters through the war — like in M*A*S*H, which was a thinly-veiled critique of the Vietnam War even though the show officially occurred during the Korean War — the present-day “China Beach” episodes were interspersed with those occurring in the future showing the main characters in the years following the war. Even more creatively, individual shows often cut into sequences with interviews with actual veterans telling stories that paralleled the dramatic arcs within the specific episode.
The Vietnam War
The producers and directors took a cliched topic and presented it in a novel way that had never been done before. As my Communications 201 professor once told my class at Boston University: from the Bible to Shakespeare to Ernest Hemingway, there are no new stories under the sun; the goal is to tell them in a new way. And just as importantly, the acting in the series is superb. An episode I watched recently showed the nurse portrayed by Delany encountering a wheelchair-bound veteran in a flash-forward episode years after the war. Her quivering chin — sadness just on the verge of breaking out into tears without doing so — is extremely hard to replicate convincingly.
For these reasons, among others, I have always agreed with critics who maintain that television today has generally been a higher form of art than film. First, the Golden Era of film — movies like “Casablanca” and “Citizen Kane” — has long passed since trite films geared to teenagers like “Twilight” earn more revenue at the box office. Second, movies have only two hours to establish plots and characters that connect with an audience, so the result is always superficial. Dramatic television-shows give creators and directors twenty hours — one hour multiplied by twenty episodes over a season — to develop deep characters, nuanced dialogue, and complicated plots (like “China Beach” and one of my other favorites, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). The nature of the medium now communicates the result more effectively. (See my recommended television shows.)
But that is a point for another time. I doubt that anyone involved in the production of “China Beach” will ever see this random article, but I just wanted to thank them. As a result of the program, I finally have a realistic glimpse into the chaotic life that my father faced in Vietnam. But sometimes I just wish he would have told me himself. This is the closest he ever got.