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Both shows reflect the way dissent has become domesticated in America; what were radical antiwar views in the '60s are now mainstream TV attitudes. High- ranking officers and other authority figures are mostly buffoons, insensitive martinets or corrupt sleaze balls. Heroism, at least as the military tries to market it, is usually a sham; public relations is the name of the game. A lieutenant in Tour of Duty gets drunk in a bar and empties the place by wildly firing his gun. A few seconds later, a bomb explodes inside, and he is hailed as a hero. Notes a smarmy major: "You're the first good publicity the command has had since Tet."
Most of all, there is disillusion and frustration. Sergeant Zeke Anderson (Terence Knox), the sympathetic Everysoldier in Tour of Duty, confides to his ex-wife his feelings about the war: "It's just like everything you hear. It's death and destruction, it's hell on earth, it's twisted limbs. I just want it to be over." An injured grunt in China Beach expresses his despair even more starkly: "Nobody here gets out alive. Breathing maybe. Eating. Sleeping. You ride the bus to work, cash a paycheck, wait. But your life is out there . . . always."
These sentiments, however, are largely denuded of their political context. Rarely are they linked to any specific complaint about the conduct of the war -- a policy mistake or a battlefield blunder. It's just the eternal tragedy of war. At the same time, the angry pacifism once expounded by M*A*S*H (a TV series about Viet Nam that was set in Korea) has been tempered by sympathy for the average grunt. There is still a place, in TV's current view of Viet Nam, for courage in battle, duty and loyalty to buddies. At a champagne dinner for officers in China Beach, a Red Cross worker blurts out a drunken toast to the men in the field: "Out there, it's not your war. It's not our war. It's their war." And it's their war that TV is finally trying to tell.