‘China Beach’ Gets the War Almost Right

In “China Beach,” American combat soldiers seem to have frightened the scriptwriters more than they did the Viet Cong. But the creators of the ABC series on the Vietnam War have found a way to get around the problem.

They’re bringing us Vietnam from the women’s point of view. And when they stay with that or with even the male “support troops” at the show’s beach base near Da Nang, the show pretty much works. The plots are interesting, the major characters credible.

It’s the minor players, the 19-year-olds with guns, the grunts of this Vietnam saga, who are the problem. They’re all six-foot Claymation characters who sound about as natural as George Bush doing a rap concert.

Hollywood productions, whether from Oliver Stone or Sylvester Stallone, bend the Vietnam War through a political prism. TV seems to want to turn it into soap opera: “The Young and the Restless Cope With Combat.”

The soaps, to be fair, are much better written. The characters don’t walk around sounding like aliens. Not so the grunts of “China Beach.”

Since most writers grow up knowing more about love than war, small blame to them. But if they are going to re-create soldiers on TV every week, they need to bite the bullet and get to know these guys. Those who were in combat in Vietnam were not as weird as legend--or this show--would have it.

It’s not my intent to minimize war or its effect on young men. I just hope they can be presented more accurately. War, once you get past the hurry-up-and-wait, is dramatic enough without the melodrama this show tries to portray as reality.

An unwashed kid with a machine gun and a vacant stare as he goes for donuts at the USO would be sent for a week’s rest. Anyone walking around in a perpetual state of shell-shock, mumbling strange truths about war and death, is a temporary casualty, dangerous to himself and others.

Combat patrols, like the famous prospect of being hanged in the morning, tended to concentrate the mind. Lives were on the line. There was no room for “crazy.”

Another not-so-grim reality was that when not “humpin’ the boonies” (patrolling in the jungle), the boys did an awful lot of smokin’ and jokin’. They told lies about their cars, their girls, the jobs they had waiting for them at home. The music was the same and they wore as many peace symbols per capita as the Berkeley student body.

They were a little more black, brown and blue-collar, and maybe not quite as secure in their dreams as the average college student. But they shared the same Presidents and the same shopping malls, and they grew up watching the same TV shows.

As extreme and horrible as war is, it didn’t turn them into the collection of weirdos that “China Beach” presents. Most of the time, the boys acted and sounded remarkably like the rest of their generation.

In an early episode of the series, several of its women are on a helicopter that crashes in the jungle. They are rescued but have to spend the night with some grunts in the bush--a place one of the women says is “the real Vietnam.”

But this “real” Vietnam didn’t exist.

Unlike what the episode portrayed, no one sat around a fire in the jungle, worshipping a cow’s skull. Nor was it considered acceptable to give a “Donut Dolly” a necklace of severed human fingers. Grunts may have been a fraternity but they were not a cult.

So for anyone who missed that era, be careful. “China Beach” has part of the ‘60s confused, turned upside down. Maj. Houlihan from “MASH” has gotten mixed up in a show with the Charles Manson family, a show that presents grunts as strange.

No . . . grunts were mostly normal. Timothy Leary was strange, and he was an older man from Harvard, not Da Nang.

The writers of “China Beach” would have you believe that grunts had a tentative grip on reality. But in Washington, there was a group of men known as “The Best and the Brightest.” They made foreign policy, supported by the Silent Majority.

History tells us that they had the problem with reality, not the soldiers. If the writers of “China Beach” are trying to be metaphoric, they have made a sad choice.

One last point. The show’s grunts with their skulls and stares are a very scary bunch. But that’s backwards.

Grunts weren’t scary. Believe me, they were the ones who were scared.