China Beach - Season 1

1988 | Drama | History | War

Sand dunes and scalpels, surfboards and shrapnel, blue sea and red blood, R&R and CPR.

Welcome to China Beach. Part EVAC hospital, part USO entertainment center - this outpost of craziness and compassion introduces us to the Vietnam War through the eyes of the women who served them.

Created by William Broyles, Jr., and Executive Producer John Sacret Young, the series captures an extraordinary group of characters in this unique, exotic where so many things came together - horror and laughter, heroism and sacrifice, and unforgettable and iconic music.

Season 1 opens with a beautiful woman on a beach. But before long, courageous nurse Lieutenant Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) is hurled back into a world of helicopters loaded with wounded soldiers, the impossible dilemma of delivering the baby of a hated enemy, an unlikely kinship with USO singer Laurette Barber (Chloe Webb), and a fitful romance with zoomie pilot Captain Natch Austen (Tim Ryan).

Season 1 also brings together the whole unlikely "family" of China Beach - "entrepreneur" K.C. Kolowski (Marg Helgenberger; by-the-book Major Lila Garreau (Concetta Tomei); young Donut Dolly Cherry White (Nan Woods); fanny-pinching surgeon Dr. Dick Richard (Robert Picardo); recovering wounded soldier Boonie Lanier (Brian Wimmer); the grunt who carries "the thousand-yard stare," Dodger (Jeff Kober); and Private Samuel Beckett (Michael Boatman), the man in charge of the GRU, the Graves Registration Unit.