MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

By: Mark Kingwell
January 8, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

CHINA BEACH | 1988–91

China Beach is to Vietnam as M*A*S*H (1972–83) was to Korea. Both shows feature rear-theatre medical drama during overseas armed conflict. They spin storylines always implicated by but rarely, if ever, showing front-line combat. Both made stars of their main players, Alan Alda and Dana Delaney.

The contrast is more instructive. China Beach is without humour, though it does not lack irony. It has none of the mawkishness that marked the post-Col. Henry Blake seasons of the TV M*A*S*H, but also none of the sloppy anarchy of the original book and film, both like Animal House in olive-drab fatigues instead of crew-neck sweaters. Vietnam remains the war from which no mass-market humour can be extracted, except maybe at narrative second-order: see Tropic Thunder (2008).

China Beach has many redeeming features, not least Delaney’s winning mixture of bafflement and well-scrubbed authenticity. Her weltschmerz is an emergent property of stress, not a basic character trait. Marg Helgenberger, later to shine as a former Vegas pole dancer turned CSI sleuth, is actually cynical, a prostitute and wartime carpetbagger. Robert Picardo plays the unit’s mordant head surgeon — a fanboy fun-fact hovering over his later holographic life as the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager. There’s also Michael Boatman (awesome), Jeff Kober (scruffy), and Brian Wimmer — these days an expert fly fishing guide (!) — as the wounded bartender at the base canteen. Asked how he got hit while on jungle patrol, he says, “I zigged when I should have zagged. A lot.”

That line stays with me, as does the moody face of Delaney’s love interest, a morally tortured fighter pilot with eyes like smoking bullet holes. Both the actors and their characters were about my own age at the time. In fact, the show’s run coincided almost exactly with the four years of my PhD, when I owned a tiny 12-inch portable TV that wrangled just one station out of the ether, the New Haven ABC affiliate. So I got this show, Keith Jackson calling college football games on Saturday afternoons, and Ed McMahon’s full-on cringey Star Search program, with its prescient “television spokesmodel” talent category. I watched them all with a mixture of avidity and apathy that I now find hard to imagine.

Maybe because I was reading a lot of Husserl and Heidegger at the time, another thing about China Beach stays with me. The characters on this fictional medical base, the 510th Evac Hospital at My Khe — based on the real-life experiences of former army nurse Lynda Van Devanter — always referred to the normal post-war life in distinctive way. They did not long to go “back home” or “to the States,” but instead talked dreamily of “the world.” As in: What will you do when you get back to the world?

The world is a construct, Husserl tells us, a phenomenological beckoning and projection. The world worlds, Heidegger insists neologistically. But on the gritty beach near Dan Nang, not some plage of Debordian leisure but instead the blood-soaked desert of all foreign war, from Homer to Hormuz, the homely world is always far away. In war, the world unworlds. A lot.

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MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

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