The story concerns the unlikely attraction between Nellie Forbush, a naive Navy nurse from Little Rock, and Emile deBecque, a worldly French planter living on a Pacific Island who fall in love as well as Lt. Joe Cable 's tender and tragic romance with a Polynesian girl. Cable and de Becque go on a dangerous mission together behind Japanese lines, from which only deBecque returns. One of the musicals major themes is the folly of the racial prejudice, an issue that comes up when Emile tells Nellie that he had lived with a native woman who bore him two children.