A Time of Blood and Reality for the ‘China Beach’ Troupe : Vietnam Veterans Share Their Wartime Experiences With TV Series’ Company

Before ABC’s “China Beach” series rolled into second-season production last week, co-creators William Broyles Jr. and John Sacret Young gave the show’s actors and writers a potent taste of Vietnam-as-it-really-was.

“The people in the slides you’re about to see are real,” Broyles announced coolly at the Burbank Studios gathering. “Real people, real blood. . . . They don’t get up when the director says ‘cut.’ ”

A series of graphic medical pictures of battlefield casualties flicked on and off, while Jan Wyatt, a technical adviser and a former Army nurse, explained the wounds and treatment being shown. The people and guests of “China Beach”--a series inspired by a Medevac-recreation center that operated during the U.S. wartime involvement in South Vietnam--watched grimly. There was a quiet cough or two. And, eventually, some tears.

“Vets Day,” a workshop that brought the actors together with nurses and others who really lived the kinds of lives the actors recreate on TV each week, was a journey back in time; it was a trip to the Vietnam of 20 years ago--in pictures, music, and, more than anything else, in the personal recollections of the guests.

“There were a lot of nurses who did very brave things,” recalled Lily Adams, an Army nurse of the 12th EVAC Hospital, Cu Chi, 1969-70 and now a psychotherapist. “Like the one who went in to pull a patient out of a helicopter that was about to blow up. She got him out and it blew up after. And she was not given any medal--nothing. It was not recognized by the military powers. . . . She was just a woman. . . .”

Sharon McGlothlin, a Vietnam Red Cross “doughnut dolly” in 1966-67, told the group: “We knew we’d been accepted when we went up to the fire base and found they’d built an outhouse for us . . . with a sign that said ‘Ladies’ on the door.”

Bearded, bespectacled Bill Seigesmund, bar manager of the real China Beach recreation station in 1970, and now a postal worker, had written the “China Beach” series producers to commend them on the series pilot last February. A month ago he was invited to fly out from his Wisconsin home to tell the show’s stars what his former stomping grounds were actually like. The assembled group listened, fascinated, as Seigesmund described the regularity with which the military left shipments of beer out on hot asphalt lots--for months--and how he took pains to keep tabs on the cases that were fresh.

But what Seigesmund remembered most about China Beach was “the night the orphanage next to the R&R; center got bombed. You could hear the kids crying. I still think of that when I hear kids cry. And I remember seeing this nurse pick up a baby and hold a compress on its head. I remember wishing I was that baby.

“There were plenty of opportunities to have sex, but what I wanted was that compassion.”

“This is to inform you in some ways,” Broyles told the actors, writers and production personnel arrayed around him as the Saturday session got under way. “But it’s also to give you the emotional weight of what the people you actors are portraying had to deal with.”

As he spoke, the tall, boyish Broyles stood behind the desk in the office of executive producer John Sacret Young. Pins, plaques, patches, fatigues and other Vietnam War memorabilia brought in by some of the gathered vets was spread out in front of him.

“There is no way we can make everyone who was in Vietnam happy with the show,” acknowledged Broyles, a former Marine lieutenant in ‘Nam who is also a graduate of Rice and Oxford universities, former editor-in-chief of Newsweek and founder of Texas Monthly. “The experience was so intense for everyone who was there, if we show something that didn’t happen to someone personally, there is a sort of dissonance: ‘This isn’t right. It didn’t happen to me.’ . . . You finally reach the point where you realize, ‘This isn’t my story.’ . . . But is it a good story, with the essence of truth?”

By mid-morning, the eight guests and 20-plus members of the “China Beach” company dropped the last bits of formality and began acting like friends. Their bull session covered topics ranging from survivor’s guilt to Dear John letters, sexual harassment at generals’ parties to alcoholism in the military.

Robert Picardo, who plays Dr. Dick Richards on the show, wondered whether the three nurses present ever saw open signs of anger in the medical men who were drafted and sent to Vietnam.

“One doctor I knew showed his anger by performing a tubal ligation on every Vietnamese woman brought in,” Wyatt replied, causing a chorus of gasps and moans led by cast addition Megan Gallagher (“Slap Maxwell”), who will play a weather girl on Armed Forces TV.

When conversation moved on to post-traumatic stress syndrome, former Army nurse Lily Adams related the story of her own breakdown: At the sound of a Medevac helicopter, she rushed outdoors and began to curse the pilot for taking too long to land--until she realized she was standing on a suburban street, with the war actually years behind her. Her young daughter was nearby shouting, “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

Several seconds of silence passed before anyone in the group of 30 responded. On the opposite side of the room, actress Concetta Tomei, who plays Lila Garreau on the series, wiped away free-flowing tears.

For Dana Delany, nurse Colleen McMurphy in “China Beach,” the “Vets Day” experience this year was entirely different from the first, smaller, “family only” session in 1987. For one thing, said Delany, “It’s more spontaneous.” For another, “Last year, I didn’t know the right questions to ask. Now I feel like I’ve been there.”

Actually, she has been there. Delany’s and co-star Jeff Kober’s personal quests for verisimilitude took them to Vietnam for two weeks in September. Included were stops in Hanoi, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh City and, of course, China Beach (where, they report, a Russian hotel is now being completed).

The nine-hour “Vets Day” program--which stretched to two days for some who went into personal, one-on-one encounters--wasn’t all drama and trauma.

In the afternoon, two former Red Cross “doughnut dollys” supervised a party of games with string and colored cards, laughing, singing--”My Favorite Things”--with everyone generally behaving like kids--”very typical of the kinds of things we used to do in Vietnam,” according to Sharon McGlothlin, who served in Vietnam in 1966-67.

Would viewers of “China Beach” be seeing any of the dramatic moments described at “Vets Day”?

“This specific day is mainly for the cast,” said Young. “If the writers come up with something along the way, so much the better. There’ll probably be something, maybe just a line, maybe more.”

By the end of the day, everyone looked wrung out, numb. Voices were low, comments generally running toward a “this is going to take a long time to sink in” theme.

Actors Michael Boatman and Tim Ryan exchanged shrugs, saying nothing.

A weary Megan Gallagher shook her head when asked whether her first “Vets Day” had been what she’d expected.

“It was much more intense,” she said, seeming relieved that it was over. “I learned a lot.”