This episode features anecdotes of actual Vietnam Veterans telling their wartime experiences mixed with scenes from previous China Beach episodes.
Dateline: November 1967. Within klicks of Danang, Vietnam, sits a U.S. Army base, bar and hospital on China Beach filled with wounded soldiers and one very lovely but damaged Army Nurse Colleen McMurphy. Many heroes, dead and alive, try to make sense of life and death in between bourbon, bullets and battles.
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This episode features anecdotes of actual Vietnam Veterans telling their wartime experiences mixed with scenes from previous China Beach episodes.
A flashback to 1966 shows McMurphy as a hospital ward nurse who joins the army and after months in basic training, arriving for the first time at China Beach where she meets Dr. Richard for the first time and she loses her innocence fast after facing the horrors of real war in dealing with the endless soldiers coming in for medical treatment and getting help from the head nurse, Jan Wyatt, and the head doctor, Dr. Singer, over handling the situations. Meanwhile, K.C. under the name of 'Charlene' and working as a secretary/call girl for the sleazy then-China Beach commander, Lt. Col. 'Mac' Miller, meets Boonie Lanier for the first time and they get close when the wounded Boonie is reluctant to go back into the bush when he recovers. K.C., using her influences, gets Mac to hire Boonie as the lifeguard at China Beach.
While the rest of the China Beach staff attends a rock concert at Firebase Geronimo, McMurphy and K.C. stay behind, get drunk, and enter a shared surrealistic dreamland of a destroyed fire base where they must deal with unresolved issues from their pasts under the guidance of a Native American solider, named Dream Walker, and K.C.'s former boyfriend Jones, both recently killed in action.
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