Viet Vets Add Drama to ‘China Beach,’ ‘Nightline’

How slowly television once moved when it came to the reality of Vietnam. And now, how surely.

More evidence arrives tonight as ABC uncorks an unusual, unlikely--and stunning--Vietnam double feature with “China Beach” and “Nightline” on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42.

It’s a chance pairing of totally dissimilar series that this one time, by coincidence, are spiritual cousins.

Expanded to an hour, the “Nightline” (at 11:30 p.m.) is a pre-taped program on post-traumatic stress disorder featuring a group of Vietnam veterans who in January revisited their old foes and battlefields with an ABC news crew. Originally scheduled for last week but bumped because of another story, the program is an emotional knockout.

Vietnam is always the setting for that superior dramatic series “China Beach” (at 10 p.m.), which is named for the eclectic area that adjoined the U.S. base at Da Nang. Each week “China Beach” movingly relives the routine minidramas that defined living--and dying--in this sector dominated by a hospital, entertainment center and living quarters.

Tonight, in an episode co-conceived by executive producer John Sacret Young and producer John Wells and directed by Young, there’s a poignant twist, however.

Portions of past episodes and a few previously unaired scenes are intercut with the reminiscences of real people who served in Vietnam, mostly as nurses, Red Cross workers and USO entertainers. The women (plus a male doctor) appear on screen almost as witnesses (a la the movie “Reds”), descriptively, emotionally and humorously recalling their experiences, becoming human footnotes to the war that marked them forever.

Their living transcript also affirms the basic truth that “China Beach” has presented during its 10-month run, for it’s amazing the way these actual war memories and scenes from the series track and fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

A surgeon recalls removing an unexploded grenade from a soldier’s chest. Then we dissolve to a scene from a past “China Beach” episode that is almost identical to the surgeon’s story, a scene that otherwise might have been dismissed as bizarre fantasy.

A USO entertainer rues the way she was expected to socialize with senior officers by night after spending her days with the troops. “The implication was fairly clear what your role was.” Again, her words are echoed by the series.

Vietnam is the war that television introduced to America during dinner-hour newscasts, then later overlooked in prime time when the subject became too stressful and controversial for the timid networks. Only after the war’s healing process set in did the networks become bolder and clear the way for Vietnam to become safe--even chic--for TV in the late 1980s.

HBO, with such glittering productions as “Vietnam War Stories” and “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam,” has been the mightiest contributor to TV’s Vietnam archive. But now ABC has “China Beach,” CBS has “Tour of Duty,” and those notable theatrical films “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket” are making the rounds on cable.

Meanwhile, the war’s psychological scars have become fodder for national news programs ranging from “Nightline” to “60 Minutes,” whose lead piece Sunday is about the war’s impact on individual North Vietnamese.

Some of the nurses featured tonight on “China Beach” also appeared in a devastating “60 Minutes” piece March 5 about the campaign by Vietnam nurses for their own statue at the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C.

The “60 Minutes” story hit a soaring emotional peak when a nurse was reunited with a soldier she had gently tended in Vietnam, a man she had known only as an armless, legless casualty.

Subjects for the “China Beach” hour were interviewed on camera in Los Angeles in the presence of some of the cast regulars. Although non-actors, the veterans have surprising camera presence.

“They all came here loaded for bear and ready to talk,” producer-director Young said. “They wanted to do it, and they wanted to do it right. It’s amazing. You always think you’ve heard it all, and then you hear a new story that rips you apart.”

For stories that rip you apart--and confirm that the “Nam of yesterday” still lingers--try tonight’s “Nightline.”

It integrates Ted Koppel’s usual interview segment with a striking videotape package from reporter Ken Kashiwahara and producer David Doss, who accompanied the eight veterans (including one female nurse) and two therapists to Vietnam on this attempted exorcism of old demons.

Demons and dreams.

“I dream of the enemy that I buried and what it was like,” Ed Marcin tells Koppel. “And I see their faces, and I see their clothes, and I see their bodies, and I can still see them. They’ve never gone away.”

This is an hour of guilt, of rearranging time and place, of anguished memories, of reconciliation, of tears, of awakening.

Former combat medic Bill Koutrouba guiltily recalls the time his unit celebrated New Year’s Eve by firing at a Vietnamese village, “just for fun,” killing seven children in the process.

The same Koutrouba--who says he was beaten with beer bottles by his fellow Americans when he returned from Vietnam--tries to sort his emotions upon being enthusiastically welcomed in Hanoi by the very people who were his enemy only two decades ago.

He says: “Our own country don’t forgive us, and these people forgive us.” Then he breaks down.

Seeking a bottom line, Koppel later polls some of the men about their overall feelings. They give essentially the same answer: There is no glory in war. There is no glory in death.

They say the trip helped them. Hearing their words and seeing their faces, however, you wonder if, for these veterans, it will ever be quiet on the Vietnam front.