Citizen Jane

Citizen Jane: China Beach, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, and U.S. Popular Memory

Kim Heikkila, Program in American Studies, University of Minnesota
Popular Culture Association Conference
13 April 2001

On March 15, 1989, ABC television aired a special episode of its Vietnam War drama series China Beach. Entitled “Vets,” the program interspersed documentary-style interviews with actual veterans of the Vietnam War with previously broadcast clips from the tv world of China Beach.[i] Sitting against the standard black backdrop of a televised interview setting, former military nurses, Red Cross workers, USO entertainers, and journalists told their stories of the Vietnam War. The interviews were edited so that the bits and pieces of the stories that made their way into the episode bore an amazing resemblance to the plot lines that had already been developed on China Beach and were repackaged for “Vets.”

One of the veterans interviewed for this special episode was Diane Carlson Evans, former Army nurse and founder of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project. Midway through the episode the viewing audience sees Diane talking to the camera, describing a particular encounter she had had with a wounded GI in Vietnam. “Well, there were a lot of times you didn’t know what to say,” Diane tells the audience. “And so you didn’t say anything. But just being there…transcended words. And there was one night…” Diane says, signaling a visual move from the sterile interview setting to a previously televised scene in the ward of China Beach’s 510^th Evacuation Hospital.[ii] Lying on a hospital bed in the foreground is a young male GI – Dodger (Jeff Kober), a regular character on the show – whose head and face are covered in bandages. The voice-over narration of the real Army nurse, Diane Evans, continues as the audience sees the fictional Army nurse character, Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany), enter the ward to check on her patient. Diane explains that she was called to intensive care one night, and that “there was a kid who was wrapped, his whole head was wrapped because he had a head injury and he had lost his face. I read his operative report;” – McMurphy checks Dodger’s chart – “everything was gone and they didn’t expect him to live. And there…couldn’t be this non-verbal communication because I couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see me.” Viewers see McMurphy pull up a chair next to the bandaged Dodger’s bedside, telling him, “Here I am. Here we are. Just the two of us. Don’t bother to talk.” Diane’s off-camera voice resumes, in an apparent direct narration of the events taking place on China Beach: “The unit was quiet that night, which I’m thankful for, because I was able to be with him most of the night, and I sat with him and just held his hand,” she says as McMurphy takes Dodger’s hand in hers. The scene ends with a complete transferal to the fictional world of television as McMurphy tells Dodger, “Good night. Sweet dreams.” As the background music swells, McMurphy asks, “Dodger? Can you hear me? Did you just squeeze my hand? Do it again. Please.” The China Beach theme music enters, McMurphy smiles and holds Dodger’s hand to her cheek. “You squeezed my hand.” Regular viewers of China Beach know that Dodger survived his life-threatening combat wounds; we never hear the ultimate fate of Diane Evans’ patient.

This creative blending of interview clips and scenes from previous episodes of China Beach runs throughout the entire “Vets” episode, and as such plays with the tension between fact and fiction, truth and lies, memory and history that permeates narratives of the Vietnam War.[iii] Partly because of its novel claim to tell the story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of women, the series provided a great deal of interpretive fodder – for popular, historical, theoretical, feminist, semiotic, psychoanalytic, psycho-socio-historical analyses.[iv] This particular episode generated its own fair share of attention, as critics and scholars alike debated its role in establishing China Beach as a more or less “real” representation of the Vietnam War as experienced by its U.S. women participants.[v]

While I would argue that the episode “Vets” works to authenticate the story China Beach had been telling about the Vietnam War and its women participants up to that point[vi], my intent here is not to rehash that particular angle of the debate. Instead, I would like to focus on the backstory of the episode and its link to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project. By the time “Vets” aired in 1989, Diane and her fellow Project members had been working for five years to establish a Women’s Memorial on the grounds of the Mall in Washington, D.C., near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The January 1989 meeting between Diane and her fellow veterans and the producers, writers, and creators of China Beach that resulted in this episode is a telling moment in women veterans’ efforts to establish themselves as honorable and respected veteran-citizens. This meeting was a response to the continuing trend that Susan Jeffords has described as the “remasculinization of America,”[vii] wherein the once despised Vietnam veteran was rewoven into the national fabric through a popular culture – and, I would add, memorialization -- industry that portrayed him as a true and mightily masculine American hero-victim fighting against the forces of feminizing oppression at home and abroad. If, as Peter Ehrenhaus suggests, “remembrances …reconfirm…the relationship of each individual to the larger political community,” and if, as Lisa Lowe demonstrates, “it is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American,’” then this meeting is a crucial (though not final) moment in helping us to understand women veterans’ attempts to assert their right to tell their own war stories and to demand a place for themselves as veteran citizens in the postwar U.S. landscape.

It was early in 1989 when Diane Evans received a phone call from a China Beach writer asking for her help in responding to the complaints they had been receiving from women veterans unhappy with the show’s female characters. Her initial response to their plea for help was a polite “no, thanks.” “’I consciously did not want to watch China Beach,’” she told a staff writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch in March 1989. “’I have such an overdose of Vietnam in my life.’” After talking to other women veterans, many of whom were helping her to gain support and funding for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, however, she decided she would lend her insights, experience, and name to the China Beach effort. “’If you don’t like something,’” she explained to the reporter, “’you try to change it.’”[viii] And there was plenty about China Beach that women veterans wanted to change.

From its inception in 1987, China Beach was billed as “the” woman’s take on the Vietnam War experience. The brainchild of experienced war writers William Broyles, Jr. – himself a Vietnam veteran – and John Sacret Young – author of the screenplay for Phillip Caputo’s memoir-turned-miniseries A Rumor of War -- China Beach was supposed to show viewers what it was like “to be in a women’s steambath in the middle of a men’s locker room.”[ix] Telling women’s stories not only granted their show a compelling novelty, but it also allowed Broyles and Young to focus on the other, more dramatically human (or humanely dramatic) side of war. It meant they could, in Broyles’ words, “’show the same kind of tension, the same sort of pressure, and the same kind of extremes you have in war’”[x] while also considering, in Young’s view, the “’seminal’” and “’primal’” “women’s issues” such as “’”What is it to have children? Can you juggle a job and being a mother and a relationship?”’”[xi]

That these same concerns do not define men’s, even fathers’, “seminal” experiences in Broyles’ and Young’s minds is evident, both from their statements about war and their work on the show. Both of them clearly saw “real” war in terms of the combat experiences of men. In a 1998 interview about his work on the Showtime production Thanks of a Grateful Nation (about Gulf War Syndrome), Young characterized war as “’something that we seem to do through history [where] young men go off to war’” and experience “’an adrenaline flow that gets very close to ecstasy.’”[xii] This view of war as male ecstasy made Young a perfect partner for Broyles, author of the much-ballyhooed 1984 essay, “Why Men Love War.” Here, the former Marine lieutenant and editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly, California, and Newsweek claimed that “most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since.”[xiii] Men love war in part, he says, because “the love of war stems from the union, deep in the core of our being, between sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death…[War] is, for men, at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death.”[xiv]

Broyles’ and Young’s view of war as male fantasy erotica made its way each week into millions of post-Vietnam War American homes by way of China Beach. In its early episodes, the show certainly could be likened to a women’s steambath in the middle of a men’s locker room; it was as if towel-clad men gathered around to clear a hole in the steamy window so they could peep at the women inside. Surrounded by men secure in their control of the space, the women on display thus became male fantasy incarnate: Nurse Colleen McMurphy, the long-suffering but fiercely loyal mater dolorosa (mother of sorrows); Red Cross worker Cherry White, the wide-eyed, beautiful innocent; entertainer Laurette Barber, the worldly girl-about-town who had no compunction about enjoying her time in Vietnam as a “men-o-rahma”; and, finally, KC, the business-savvy prostitute who satisfied GIs’ carnal needs as much as Cherry and McMurphy tended to their emotional and physical health needs.

Women veterans, television critics, and scholars agreed: the women of China Beach were nothing more than cardboard cut-outs. That women were in the warzone at all was a step in the right direction, but, as Joan Furey, an Army nurse Vietnam veteran and current director of the Center for Women Veterans at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C., said in 1989, “’You have standard images. Characters end up being either superhuman people or rip-roaring flakes.’”[xv] As scholar Cynthia Hanson explained in a 1990 article in The Journal of Popular Film & Television, the women of China Beach fell into one of four character types: harpy, victim, imp, and courtesan. More importantly, they also fell into the virgin-whore dichotomy that has characterized the depiction of women for centuries.[xvi] Whatever stock characters the women represented, it was clear that their roles were defined primarily through their relationship to men. Their duties, their laughter, their sorrow, their decisions to come, go, or stay all revolved around the men they served.[xvii]

It was against these controlling images that Diane Evans and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project were so assiduously working. And though China Beach wasn’t the only source of such images, its claim to be “the” women’s story of the Vietnam War made its sins an even greater affront, to paraphrase a critical review of the show offered by Gloria Emerson in May 1988.[xviii] Aside from incidental plot developments they found un-believable, women veterans “disliked the series’ steamy depictions of rampant love, lust and sexual harassment on the military compounds,” according to a May 1988 article in the San Diego Union-Tribune.[xix] Many women veterans felt China Beach contributed to the longstanding and highly misguided belief that women who went to Vietnam, like their military foremothers, did so in order to “sexually service men.”[xx] As such criticisms by the show’s most careful viewers made their way into the press, the staff of China Beach decided to draw the complainants into the production process even more visibly than they had in the past.[xxi] So it was that one of the program’s writers[xxii] called Diane Evans at home on a Friday morning in early 1989 to ask for her help.

“I was the…89^th woman they had called,” Diane recently told me. “And of course they had gotten a lot of ‘no’s.’” Diane herself was not a fan of the show, having been appalled at its exaggerated portrayal of, as she called it, “the sex, the booze, the drama.” She admits that she had only watched one episode (she didn’t own a television at the time), but based on what she saw, she had no desire to see another, nor to participate in the program in any way. “I was so disturbed by it,” she recalled, “I just could not even think of watching it again…I felt like they were exploiting our service” and perpetuating the “stereotype that women who go off to war are there to please the men.”[xxiii] She had no intention of becoming part of a program that so badly misrepresented the truth about the women who served in Vietnam.

Two things made Diane change her mind. The first was a pithy question posed by the writer. “’How can we tell the truth [about women’s service in Vietnam]…’” Diane recalls the young woman asking, “’if we don’t talk to the real veterans…?’” Intrigued but still reluctant, Diane said she would think about it over the weekend. Over the next couple of days, Diane discussed the China Beach proposition with a number of people – friends, family, fellow veterans. She was especially careful to solicit the opinions of the members of the Board of the Project. Although her participation in the program would be based on her individual experiences – would not, therefore, represent official endorsement of the show by the Project[xxiv] -- she was concerned that her high visibility and association with the Memorial Project would imply such support. She asked the Board members if they would be comfortable with her decision to take part in the special episode that China Beach had proposed. “And every single one of them was,” she told me. “Because they believed that we needed to do our parts to help bring the truth to this program…There was only one program out there, and it was China Beach, that was doing anything about highlighting women’s service in Vietnam. So I made my decision and called [the writer] on Monday and said I would come out there.”

Diane’s consent to be interviewed for the “Vets” episode thus established a clear link between her work on the Memorial Project and China Beach. The goal of the Memorial Project was to “get the truth out there to the American public”[xxv] about women who served in Vietnam, and China Beach was a key culprit in disseminating hurtful un-truths about the women. To be sure, China Beach was not the only guilty party: the films and television shows of the 1970s and 1980s either ignored in-country women altogether or portrayed them as objects of sexual conquest for male GIs.[xxvi] This scripting of public memory of the Vietnam War occurred in the same context that witnessed the construction of a particular image of Vietnam veterans in public memorials. Indeed, the Memorial Project’s work up to that point had taken aim at a more obvious target in its struggle to overcome the male biases in memories of the Vietnam War and its veterans: the Vietnam memorials located on the National Mall.

Actually, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project was conceived against the backdrop not of Maya Lin’s abstract Vietnam Veterans Memorial (the Wall), but of Frederick Hart’s realistic rendition of “Three Fightingmen,” as the statue has come to be known.[xxvii] When Diane heard, in 1983, that Frederick Hart’s statue was to be added to the grounds of the existing Memorial in order to appease political and aesthetic critics of the Wall,[xxviii] she took on the mission of completing what she considered to be a now-incomplete memorial. “The Wall was complete,” she told me when we first spoke in May 2000, “because the men and women who died in Vietnam were together on the Wall.”[xxix] But once memorializing the War’s veterans took a turn away from the abstract Wall and toward the realistic, representational statue, a problem arose. “If we are now going to see men in the flesh and blood, portrayed visibly as men,” she explained, “then that [perpetuates] the cultural stereotype that only men go off to war.” To counteract this stereotype, Diane lobbied for a similarly realistic, representational statue honoring the War’s women veterans.[xxx]

By the time Diane met with the people at China Beach and shared her story with its audience in “Vets,” the Project was only halfway through its 10-year struggle to build a memorial for women.[xxxi] Although they had secured approval for the concept of the Memorial, Diane and the Project were still uncertain as to where it would be located. While opponents argued that women’s service in Vietnam could be recognized sufficiently as part of the then-pending Women in Military Service to America Memorial (now located at the entrance to Arlington Cemetery), Diane insisted that the only appropriate site to commemorate women’s service in this particular war was on the grounds of the existing Vietnam Veterans Memorials. “We were with our brothers in Vietnam,” she explained to me, “…we want to be with our brothers at the Vietnam Memorial.” Besides, she argued, women deserved to be commemorated on the Mall, “a spot…that is considered perhaps the most prestigious ground in [the] nation.”[xxxii] Finally, on November 28, 1989 -- one year after President Reagan had approved the idea of the Memorial, eight months after “Vets” aired on ABC -- President Bush signed the hard-won legislation securing a site for the Memorial on the grounds of the national Mall.[xxxiii]

The struggle was not over. It would take another four years to obtain the remaining approvals for both the site and the specific design of the Memorial[xxxiv] before, in November of 1993, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial was unveiled in its current location. Diane’s 10-year old vision of honoring women veterans of the Vietnam War with a statue of their own in a nationally significant location had come to fruition. And while the theme of the dedication ceremonies -- “Celebration of Patriotism and Courage” – attests to the vision of women veterans that Diane and her fellow Memorial supporters constructed, Diane explained the significance of her work on the Memorial eloquently when I spoke to her nearly one year ago. “Who gets to decide?” she asked. “Who remembers? … Who ultimately shapes the public memory of war and our veterans?”[xxxv]

These questions -- and concern about how they were being answered -- were precisely what led Diane to the production offices of China Beach, despite her original misgivings. For her and her fellow women veterans, the answer to “Who gets to decide?” is not artists, or politicians, or television writers. It is not William Broyles, Jr., and John Sacret Young. Instead, she says, “it should be the men and women who serve in war and the families who lose their loved ones that…shape the memory of war.”[xxxvi] By 1989, male veterans had had their say about their wartime experiences – in film, literature, memorials, and television. It was time for women, so long excluded from the (hi)story of war, to have theirs. “China Beach,” Diane says, “…made me feel all the more that it [was] about time this country recognized who we really are, [that we’re] not some figment of people’s imaginations.” And ultimately, for her, going to China Beach was worth it: the “Vets” episode provided her with “affirmation” and validation for her service.[xxxvii] Her work on behalf of the Memorial and China Beach was an assertion of the right of women veterans to narrate their own war stories and to be part of the move toward reconciliation between the nation and its Vietnam veterans.

[i] “Vets,” China Beach, Dir. John Sacret Young, Written by John Wells and John Sacret Young, ABC, 15 March 1989.

[ii] This scene is from the episode “Limbo,” Dir. Dan Lerner, Written by Carol Flint, ABC, originally aired 14 December 1988.

[iii] Vietnam veteran and author Tim O’Brien repeatedly addresses this issue in his work on the Vietnam War. See esp. The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990), and Going After Cacciato (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975). William Broyles, Jr., likewise a Vietnam veteran and writer, and co-creator of China Beach, also noted that “every good war story is, in at least some of its crucial elements, false.” Broyles, “Why Men Love War,” The Vietnam Reader, ed. Walter Capps (New York: Routledge, 1991), 75; Orig. published Esquire (November 1984), 55-65.

[iv] Many other scholars have already risen to the challenge, offering critical reviews of the series’ portrayal of (U.S.) women in Vietnam, assessments of the show’s use of narrative and televisual genres, and understandings of how China Beach links the medium of television to the history and memory of the Vietnam War in U.S. culture. See, for example, Cynthia Hanson, “The Women of China Beach,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 17.4 (1990): 154-163; Carolyn Reed Vartanian, “Women Next Door to War: China Beach,” Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, ed. Michael Anderegg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991) 190-203; Sasha Torres, “War and Remembrance: Televisual Narrative, National Memory, and China Beach,” Camera Obscura 33-34 (1995): 146+, available online at GenderWatch (1 March 2001) <http://www.softlineweb.com>; Amanda Howell, “Reproducing the Past: Popular History and Family Melodrama on China Beach,” Camera Obscura 35 (1995): 158+, available online at GenderWatch (1 March 2001) <http://www.softlineweb.com>; Deborah Ballard-Reisch, “China Beach and Tour of Duty: American Television and Revisionist History of the Vietnam War,” Journal of Popular Culture 25.3 (1991): 135-149.

[v] Most of the reviews of this episode, scholarly and popular alike, asserted that it verified (or attempted to verify) the show as true (or at least true-er)-to-life. See, for example, Howard Rosenberg, “Viet vets add drama to China Beach, Nightline,” Los Angeles Times 15 March 1989: 1, available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe>; Matt Roush, “On China Beach, a platoon of real stories,” USA Today 8 February 1989: 3D, available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe>; Matt Roush, “Shows give vets a chance to share pain,” USA Today 14 March 1989: 3D, available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe>. Scholars were less ready to simply assert the episode’s status as an authenticating device, though noted that that was its intent, regardless of the success thereof. Howell, for example, argues that the episode “confirms the adequacy of China Beach’s fiction as a reenactment of a real past” (par 27). Vartanian likewise suggests that the episode “attempts to validate the series’ own fictional representation as somehow being ‘truthful,’ a historically accurate representation” (195). Ultimately, she feels the episode does a disservice to the women veterans who were interviewed by justifying the series’ exaggerated emphasis on women’s roles as defined in relationship to men.

There was also an interesting exchange of barbs between China Beach co-creator William Broyles, Jr., and Tour of Duty (another television drama set in Vietnam during U.S. intervention there) executive producer Zev Braun over which series’ women were more realistic. Tour added more female characters to its weekly line-up after the success of China Beach, despite the fact that Braun claimed that that had been his intent all along. Moreover, he argued that Tour’s women would be more complex characters than those on China Beach, “’not just devices to get our guys into bed.’” Broyles responded by saying that China Beach’s women were “’more real’” than Tour’s men. See Diane Haithman, “TV's 60s: War and remembrance; Tour boosts role of women after success of Beach,” Los Angeles Times 30 November 1988: 1, available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/.>

[vi] Torres points out the limitations of analyses of the show that focus only on the pilot and/or the early episodes, arguing that substantive changes were made as the series progressed, lending more complexity to the characters and the narratives in which they were involved. She also argues, in contrast to Vartanian, that China Beach is “actually quite distrustful of ‘authority’ or ‘historical accuracy’” (par 6).

[vii] Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989).

[viii] Diane Evans as quoted by Bill Gardner, “Ex-Nurse Shares Her Vietnam Experience,” St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch 12 March 1989: 1B, available on-line through Pioneer Press Archives (27 March 2001), <http://www.newslibrary.com>, par 2, 7.

[ix] Young as quoted in Lisa Chambers, “John Sacret Young: Word Warrior,” Written By (June 1998), available on-line at From the Pages of Written By (27 March 2001), <http://www.wga.org/WrittenBy/1998/0698/young.html > par 21.

[x] Broyles in Reischel, par 36.

[xi] Young in Chambers, par 13.

[xii] Young in Chambers, par 44. Emphasis added. His emphasis on the rush of war for men is interesting, given his earlier insistence in the same interview on the primacy of women’s issues and experiences in his work (including on China Beach) and given the fact that the Gulf War was so widely hailed for the increasingly visible roles of military women.

[xiii] Broyles, 68.

[xiv] Broyles, 74-75. He goes on to say that “love is finally our only weapon against death. Sex is the weapon of life, the shooting sperm sent like an army of guerrillas to penetrate the egg’s defenses – the only victory that really matters. War thrusts you into the well of loneliness, death breathing in your ear. Sex is a grappling hook that pulls you out, ends your isolation, makes you one with life again” (79).

[xv] Furey as quoted by Elizabeth Norman, “Nurses in Vietnam: Beyond TV's Stereotypes,” New York Times 28 May 1989: Section 2, Page 23; available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe>, par 1. See Hanson for a feminist analysis of the specific gender stereotypes perpetuated in China Beach.

[xvi] Hanson, 157. Such gender analyses of the show’s portrayal of women are based on sound readings of what was presented to the audience by the time each episode was broadcast. But a quick behind-the-scenes look at some of the show’s scripts lends even more credence to such interpretations.

The background material in the script for the pilot episode lays out the ways in which the female characters were conceived in the mind of writer John Sacret Young. Dana Delany’s character, nurse Colleen McMurphy, is a no-nonsense, all-American girl: “one part flax, one part autumn leaf. She wears no makeup, has done nothing special with her hair…Her body doesn’t get special attention either and doesn’t need it – it’s American, athletic, resourceful, resilient.” [John Sacret Young (writer), China Beach (pilot episode), first draft script (3 September 1987), 1. This pilot episode aired on ABC on 26 April 1988.] By the time we meet her in the first episode, her first tour in Vietnam is almost over, and she’s “gone robot.” The only thing that restores her humanity is the restoration of her sexuality, a feat accomplished by a guest appearance as a backup singer for Laurette’s girl group. (See Hanson, 158, for a useful, more detailed analysis of this metamorphosis of the McMurhpy character.) McMurphy’s brooding character is somewhat more complex than the other three women who form the focal point of the early show. Cherry White (Nan Woods), “catnip to many men,” is described as a “sensual and chaste Little Bo Peep” who cannot understand the intense attention she draws from the battle-weary LRRP Dodger; Laurette “Barbarian is her real name” Barber (Chloe Webb) has a “mouth, [a] figure, [a] zest [that] are larger than life. She’s a force of nature without portfolio”; KC (Marg Helgenberger) sports an animalistic sexuality as she “prowls like a panther” around her room in a bombed out church, and is “a two-career girl, volunteer and businesswoman, the tough article” (Young, 6, 31, 9, 87, 17). And these are just the white women characters. When Young describes the women of color who make ever-so-brief appearances in the first six episodes of the series, race and gender combine to create an even more static and conventional view of the women: Y Sacheem, a member of Laurette’s 3- woman group who appears in the pilot episode only, is written as “a big, silent Indian who sees everything and says nothing, except on stage,” and Kim, the bartender at the Jet Set Club, is hailed as “a Vietnamese girl, sensual, cynical, enigmatic” (Young, 9, 22).

[xvii] As Vartanian notes, “The program implies that women’s accounts can only be told in relation to the men who served in Vietnam…it is the actions of men and their visions that are reflected upon the women of China Beach” (192). Though there are scenes in the show in which the women characters bond in their frustration at being surrounded and courted by -- and serving men -- all the time, Vartanian points out that “their solidarity is tenuous; they cannot achieve a permanent bond of trust as long as they are heterosexually competitive” (201). This tenuous bond is exemplified in the obvious competition between Laurette and KC for Boonie’s affections, but also in a more subtle way in the on-going relationship between McMurphy and KC, which alternates between a tense camaraderie and outright hostility. Although they are not explicitly competing for the affections of any particular man, there is an underlying sexual tension in their relationship vis a vis the roles they play for the men of China Beach.

[xviii] Gloria Emerson, “Remembering the Real China Beach; 'A Series So Moving That Its Sins Are an Affront',” Los Angeles Times 18 May 1988: part 6, page 1; available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe.>

[xix] Zenia Cleigh, “China Beach -- Image vs. Memory; Intensity rings true, sexy focus does not, say women who served,” San Diego Union-Tribune 4 May 1988: Lifestyle E-1; Available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe,> par 14.

[xx] Cleigh, par 18. Diane Evans also mentioned this as a prevailing stereotype she was trying to counteract in her work on the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. Diane Carlson Evans, personal interview, 3 April 2001. All comments attributed to Diane that stem from this interview will be noted with a “#2”; this was the second of two interviews I conducted with Diane..

[xxi] To their credit, Broyles and Young had attempted to include actual women veterans in the show’s production from the outset. Nurse veteran Jan Wyatt, for example, served as the series’ technical adviser for the hospital scenes (Norman, par 8). As Broyles explained in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, published on 21 May 1988, he, Young, and writer Carol Flint also talked to “about two dozen” women veterans in preparing the show. (William Broyles, Jr., “Defending China Beach (letter to editor of Entertainment Desk),” Los Angeles Times 21 May 1988: Calendar, Part 6, Page 2; available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe,> par 4. The show’s creators also held a “Vets Day” workshop in October 1988, which brought the cast and crew together with 8 veteran guests who explained their work in Vietnam. See Stacy Jenel Smith, “A Time of Blood and Reality for the China Beach Troupe: Vietnam Veterans Share Their Wartime Experiences with TV Series' Company,” Los Angeles Times 9 October 1988 1988: Calendar, Page 7; available on-line at Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (19 March 2001) <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe.>

[xxii] Diane was unable to recall the name of the writer; she remembered only that she was a young (25 years old) woman. John Wells and John Sacret Young are credited as the writers for this episode on the episode trailer itself, but China Beach employed a number of women at this time, among them writers Carol Flint and Lydia Woodward, and researcher Kate Lutz (who worked on the “Vets” episode).

[xxiii] Her sentiments were shared by the “many, many women veterans” who had contacted her “in dismay over the portrayal of their service.” “’That’s what your program is doing,’” she told the young writer, “’and I don’t care to come in and have my service in Vietnam exploited by you’” (#2).

[xxiv] Diane says that the Project never made an official statement of support for or endorsement of China Beach.

[xxv] All of Diane’s comments to this point (unless otherwise noted) were from interview #2.

[xxvi] Diane recalls being appalled by the one reference to military women serving in Vietnam that appeared in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, wherein one soldier comforted another, wounded soldier by telling him that he was headed back to a hospital where a nurse would give him a “blow job.” Evans, #2.

[xxvii] This is the popular title of the work, but National Park Service Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection curator Duery Felton, Jr., told me that the statue is officially untitled. Duery Felton, Jr., personal conversation, 21 February 2001.

[xxviii] Hart’s statue was erected in 1984. Much has been written about the controversy over Maya Lin’s design and the ensuing Hart compromise. See, for example, Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Karal Ann Marling and Robert Silberman, “The Statue Near the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Art of Remembering,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1.1 (1987): 5-29; Franklin Ng, “Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” Chinese America: History and PerspectiveS (1994): 201-221; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996); Catherine M. Howett, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Public Art and Politics,” Landscape 28.2 (1985): 1-9; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

[xxix] Diane Carlson Evans, Personal Interview, 15 May 2000. Comments taken from this interview will be designated with a “#1.” This interview spanned the course of two days (10 and 15 May 2000), but since both conversations were part of the same interview, comments from either day, while noted, will still be considered part of interview #1.

[xxx] When opponents of the Women’s Memorial argued that Hart’s statue was “universal in its message and universally intended to include the women” – as Diane remembered it – she asked them “’Well, which one of those men is a woman?’” Evans #1.

[xxxi] The Project had secured approval from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Inc., and the Secretary of the Interior to place a women’s memorial on the grounds of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (in May 1986 and September 1987, respectively). The 1986 Commemorative Works Act stipulated that the Memorial needed to secure site approval before issues of specific design could be addressed. Following the October 1987 rejection of the proposed memorial by the Commission of Fine Arts, the issue made its way to Congress. (In addition to the Commission of Fine Arts, the Memorial Project also had to secure approval from the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Capital Memorial Commission for both the location and the design of the Memorial. I discuss the roles these Commissions played in more detail in the chapter from which this paper is excerpted.) From November 1987 through November 1988, the House and Senate bandied about bills in support of the Memorial. The most controversial issue was its location. On November 15, 1988, President Reagan signed Public Law 100-660, authorizing the construction, if not the site, of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.

[xxxii] Evans #1. As philosopher Charles Griswold argues, “…the Mall says a great deal, in what it portrays and in what it omits to portray, about how Americans wish to think of themselves.” [Charles L. Griswold, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 691.] Although I find his assessment of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (the Wall) a bit too cheery in its outlook on the link between the Memorial and “real” American values, I think Griswold is correct in stating that “veterans can reaffirm their pride in having served their country and so their pride in being Americans” (712), courtesy of the Wall. For all its intent to avoid making a political statement about the War itself, and for all its deviation from the traditional dictates of memorializing war in the U.S., the very fact of its location on the Mall (and its enumeration of the name of each individual killed during the War) makes the Wall a statement about the citizenship of its veterans. For the Mall to so clearly portray male Vietnam veterans “in the flesh and blood,” and to omit a similar portrayal of female Vietnam veterans was tantamount to writing women out of the (hi)story of the Vietnam War and denying them their standing as veteran-citizens. [See Bodnar for a discussion (one of many) of the ways in which the Wall broke the traditions of remembering war in the U.S., especially the Prologue.]

[xxxiii] It would take further wrangling before, in May of 1990, the final approval for locating the Vietnam Women’s Memorial on the specific 2.2 acre site of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was secured.

[xxxiv] The original design for the Memorial was a sculpture of a solitary female figure, entitled “The Nurse,” by Minnesota artist Roger Brodin. Once the Commission of Fine Arts rejected the initial proposal for the Memorial, however, and subject to the regulations of the Commemorative Works Act and the eventual legislation that was passed in favor of the Memorial, an open design competition was mandated for the shape the Memorial would eventually take. The sculpture that now stands at the site was designed by Glenna Goodacre.

While some of this recounting of the chronology came from interview #1 with Diane Evans, much is taken from the commemorative booklet that was issued for and distributed during the dedication of the Memorial in November 1993. See Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project, “Celebration of Patriotism and Courage: Dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, November 10-12, 1993,” (Washington, D.C., 1993): 12-13. For another accounting of the process, through 1989, see Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, “The Sexual Politics of Memory: The Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project and ‘The Wall,’” Prospects 14 (1989): 341-372.

[xxxv] Evans, #1. Peter Ehrenhaus notes that “The obligation of commemorative discourse bestows upon those who speak on our behalf the right to shape our understanding of the past and its meaning for us in the present” (97-98). The struggle Diane and other women Vietnam veterans waged on behalf of the Memorial, and against (and ultimately on behalf of) China Beach provides an answer to the question that follows from Ehrenhaus’s claim: what if those who speak for us get it wrong?

[xxxvi] Evans, #1.

[xxxvii] Evans, #2, and Evans as quoted in Roush, “Shows,” par 2. Diane also told me that the public loved the episode and that the show’s ratings rose after “Vets” aired (#2). John Sacret Young was awarded a Peabody for the episode, as well. The creative license of Hollywood notwithstanding, Diane thinks the show improved after the meeting between its producers and actual women veterans, noting that “there was more substance to the program” and that the characters were “better developed” (#2). Sasha Torres also argues that the show became more complex in later episodes.

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