For William Broyles Jr., Vietnam veteran, author and former magazine editor, the juxtaposition of an evacuation hospital and an R-and-R center near Da Nang seemed the perfect TV setting to capture not just the war's horror but also its black humor. ``China Beach,'' the show Broyles co-created with writer-producer John Sacret Young, premieres tonight as a two-hour movie on ABC, then will run for six Wednesdays. It tells the story of Vietnam from a different perspective, that of three women in Vietnam in late 1967, a nurse, a Red Cross volunteer and an entertainer. ``China Beach is the name of a real area,'' said Broyles. ``I was there during the war. It's south of Da Nang on the ocean. It's like an in-country rest-and-recreation area. Right next to it was the 95th Evacuation Hospital. Those two worlds are what the show's all about. It had a strange Club Med atmosphere and the very intense reality of the hospital. ``If there's any word I'd use, it's the contrast between the R-and-R area and the hospital. This is not a war story, but the war setting does give us the opportunity for great drama and great comedy because of the intense activity.'' ``The deepest humor is when you laugh in the presence of death. When I was in Vietnam some of my friends were killed, but we still laughed. That's how you survived. We're going for that kind of humor.'' The series stars Dana Delany as nurse Colleen McMurphy, Chloe Webb as singer Laurette Barber and Nan Woods as Red Cross worker Cherry White. Few series have looked at women at war. ``Broadside'' in 1964-65 was more or less the distaff side of ``McHale's Navy.'' ``Operation Petticoat'' was a brief show in 1977-78 about Army nurses aboard a pink submarine in World War II. There was ``M-A-S-H,'' of course, with famous nurse Margaret Houlihan, but the viewpoint on the nurses in Korea was strictly male. ``You meet these women and you get enthusiastic about them,'' said Broyles. ``They went there to serve, not to kill. They went there to help their fellow man. I don't want to sound too pretentious, but that's what these women did. We've got a wealth of stories about them. One of our writers, Susan Rhinehart, was in the Army in Vietnam.'' Broyles and Young worked with women who had served in Vietnam, who helped not only with the scripts but with the sets. The movie was filmed in Hawaii and Indian Dunes, an area north of Los Angeles, where the sets for the R-and-R area and hospital were built. Broyles, 43, was a combat Marine lieutenant in Vietnam in 1969 and returned in 1984 as a writer looking for material for his book ``Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace.'' He was one of the first combat veterans to return. ``I wanted to meet the people I had fought against,'' he said. Broyles founded Texas Monthly magazine in 1972 with Michael Levy. Later, they bought New West magazine and changed the name to California. From there Broyles went to Newsweek as editor-in-chief in 1982. He stayed with the magazine for two years. Broyles had suggested the concept of the television series to Scott Kaufer, vice president of development at Warner Bros. Television. Kaufer had worked with Broyles as an editor on California magazine. ``Then John came in as executive producer,'' said Broyles. ``He has an extensive knowledge of Vietnam _ and he's never been there. We worked together on the pilot and he wrote the script.''
