Season 1, Episode 5
Date of airing: May 18, 1988 (ABC)
Nielsen ratings information: 13.2 million viewers, 11.9 rating/21 share in Households
Written by: Terry McDonnell
Directed by: Kevin Hooks
”I'm just ... sort of leaving here.”
“This is Vietnam, people don't sort of leave.”
A show about the Vietnam War, which was one of the deadliest in American history, didn't take that long to also deal with the topic of deserters – with the Army seeing them as dangerous people, and others seeing them as people who are so traumatized by what they have witnessed in the jungles that the only way for them to survive is to run. The guy hunting for deserters was treating them like scum, like the most criminal people on the planet, like people who deserve to rot in hell for simply running away and hiding to survive –similar to how the second Trump administration described immigrants. Nobody dared to think about why deserters exist in the first place. Boonie was right when he said that the Sergeant might have been the bad one because one of his soldiers decided to run away from him.
Cherry came a bit out of her shell in this episode. The girl with the least experience in life is in a war zone and now has to assist a traumatized guy to escape the country... Of course, that wouldn't go so well for any of the involved. Now the question is, what has Cherry learned after being betrayed like this? She is still a teenager (although Nan Woods was 21 years old during filming of this season), but an experience like that must have aged her quite a bit.
Meanwhile, I can only hope that Beckett is about to crack and falter – a story that would make sense in the greater narrative. He is already very confused and scared, and no one on base is listening to him, even after some of them started to worry about him. It makes for an interesting character arc, and it's a different way to show post-traumatic stress and traumatization for any soldier deployed in Vietnam. Some run and hide. Others play poker with deceased soldiers.
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| In Vietnam, you must take all the free and peaceful times you can get to lean how to surf. |
