Marland Monday: It’s Black, And There’s Room For You Too
It’s Memorial Day, it’s Monday, so it’s
Marland Monday!
Yes, I don’t take holidays off. Every Monday I celebrate the career of Douglas Marland, the GOAT of writing soap operas.
Memorial Day usually is a melancholy day. We remember the people who fought for our country. The year I was born, President Nixon reduced the number of troops sent to Vietnam. In my hometown, seven boys flew from SFO to Tân Sơn Nhứt Airfield and never returned. My uncle served in Vietnam. Because he knew how to type, he worked as a clerk typist. Operation Baby Lift landed in SFO in 1975 with Vietnamese orphans.
The odd thing was it was never declared a war. Neither was Korea, the war my father fought in. Yet it was Vietnam that I remember being debated and debated, years after the war ended. Mr. Marland wrote about Vietnam-Tony Reardon on Guiding Light was a Vietnam veteran. Yet Vietnam was featured in three storylines on various shows. One I never saw, one I wrote about already, and one that started off well but didn’t end great.
I’ve written about Loving and why it wasn’t a hit show. In 1984, it won praise for the actors (James Kiberd, Callan White, and Hubert Kelly) when they filmed an episode on location at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. Mike Donovan (James Kiberd) was the Donovan that had a chip on his shoulder. He didn’t get to go to fancy college like brother Doug (Bryan Cranston) No, he went to Vietnam. The Soap Opera Encyclopedia wrote that during a town picnic, Mike got drunk and talked about Vietnam, then about his life afterward. Finally, in May 1984, he went to Washington D.C. The Wall had been erected a year and a half earlier. It had been controversial (below I posted an excerpt of a documentary about Maya Lin, who designed the memorial)
Mike Donovan knew he had to see The Wall. He also kept on seeing his best friend Gage (Hubert Kelly) but Gage had died in the war. Still, Gage popped up. In D.C., he went with Ann Forbes (Callan White) Ann’s husband Roger had died recently. He was a former senator, so she was there as a tribute to him. And yet, he knew he wasn’t ready to see it yet. He couldn’t do it. According to Soap Opera Digest, “The End” by the Doors played as Mike tried but failed to put the past in the past. It showed friends and families going to the wall, then finally saying goodbye. I wish I could find that episode but no luck.
The second time was when Lien (Ming Na) came to Tom Hughes’ doorstep and announced she was his child. He had an affair with a Vietnamese nurse while he was in the war. Lien was welcomed into the Hughes family. She went to Oakdale high where she encountered a history teacher who kept on giving her extra assignments. Tom confronted the teacher about this. Lien hadn’t complained; she just assumed the teacher was giving her extra work so she could be caught up with the other students. (Below Tom confronts the teacher. TW: the teacher says some awful coded racist stuff)
A couple of months later, he called Lien awful racist names. Finally, during a class trip to-you guessed it-Washington D.C., they were visiting the Wall, when the teacher snapped. He was assulting Lien. Andy (Scott DeFreitas) saw what was going on and stopped him. The teacher says racist homophobic things to Lien and Andy (in another storyline, there was a rumor going around that Andy was gay) Thankfully this was during one of Andy’s sober periods, so he rounded up Lien and the rest of their classmates and headed to the hotel. (below is the video; be aware of racist/homophobic language and the sound isn’t great)
The teacher finally realized how wrong he was. He went to Andy’s room and made amends to Lien, then said he was quitting. Andy and Lien then left for New York City to support Paul (Andrew Kavovit) whose father James came back from the dead. Again.
I’ll be honest,I have mixed feelings about the teacher/Lien storyline. Not the acting-as always the acting is great. By 1989, the embittered Vietnam war vet trope had been done so many times. It was mocked in the movie Airplane. Of course, a cliche is used so many times it was true. I don’t know if this country ever got over Vietnam. We’ve put it behind us, that’s for sure. There are now people who think of it as a war that happened before they were born, like I used to think of World War II and Korea. I think Lee Childress, a poet from the Bay Area (he was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and died in 1997) put it best in these two poems:
The thousand yard stare
Is always there.
His crippled eyes
On mirrored skies
Drift, like falling flares.
Alone, inside, the crowd
Moves by
But he’s not really there.
His body hangs on bones of pain,
His tears are monsoon rain.
Will the answer be given to you.
You must look down his eyes,
Past the screams and your cries,
To a home that’s been empty for years.
For here in this place
Lives a country’s disgrace,
It’s black.
And there’s room for you too.
###
On Fulton Street today,
I felt it.
they are starting to let us come home.
Abandoned, alone, stranded.
Eleven years, iron men rusting in our tears.
Don’t start screaming in our ears.
You have found us.
We were never lost.
We’ve been watching.
We’ve been bleeding for your sins.
coming out
Is coming in.
Falling down
To fall again.
There is nothing here to win.
Yet understanding.
Copyright 1979, Lee Childress
Maybe that’s the final lesson of Vietnam.
There is nothing here to win.
Only understanding.
Tune in next week.
